How to get Minix-vmd 1.7.0

This directory and subdirectories contains Minix-vmd version 1.7.0, a two person project to make Minix more useful to them.

The Minix-vmd installation manual can be found in the the manual page usage(8) that can be obtained in various forms as listed below. The whole manual page set can also be read using a Web browser, the page to start with is of course usage(8).

Manual pages and other info: 

	man/		- Selected manual pages, troff -man form
	cat/		- Selected manual pages, flat ASCII text
	CAT.ZIP		- Cat/ packaged in a DOS ZIP file
	bugs		- List of bugs in 1.7.0
	fixes/		- Fixes to bugs in 1.7.0 (none as yet)
The manual page directories are subdivided by section, as explained in man(1). Usage(8) can be found as the original troff source in man/man8/usage.8, or as flat ASCII text in MS-DOS file format in cat/cat8/usage.8. On a UNIX system you could get the installation manual pages by uploading them as one compressed tar file under the name man.tar.gz and viewing them with the command: 
	man -M man usage
After unpacking the compressed tar file to yield the directory man. Note that the same files are present in the source file archive, so if you are going to upload SRC.TGZ anyway then you save bandwidth by extracting the man directory from it.

The next few files contain the Minix-vmd installation floppy images, the binary parts of the /usr file system, and the sources: 

	ROOT.MNX	- Installation ROOT floppy	(720 kb)
	USR.MNX		- Installation USR floppy	(720 kb)
	NETUSR.MNX	- Alternate USR with networking	(1.2 Mb)
	TINYROOT.MNX	- Extra for a 2 Mb machine	(480 kb)
	USR.TGZ		- Binaries in /usr		(6.8 Mb)
	SRC.TGZ		- Source files			(6.0 Mb)
One would normally use only ROOT, USR, USR.TGZ and SRC.TGZ to install Minix-vmd. The NETUSR image can be used in place of USR to fill the machine over a network to avoid juggling floppies. To install on a machine with only 2 Mb memory you need TINYROOT in addition to the ROOT image.

The two installation floppies ROOT and USR can be combined on a 1.44 Mb diskette. TINYROOT and USR can be combined on a 1.2 Mb or a 1.44 Mb diskette. The .TGZ files must be distributed over several floppies. Example for UNIX: 

	cat ROOT.MNX USR.MNX >/dev/floppy
	dd if=USR.TGZ of=/dev/floppy bs=1440k count=1 skip=0
	dd if=USR.TGZ of=/dev/floppy bs=1440k count=1 skip=1
	dd if=USR.TGZ of=/dev/floppy bs=1440k count=1 skip=2
	...
Increase the "skip" count until dd writes a diskette partially. /dev/floppy should be the name of the floppy device. You have to find out what your Operating System names it today. Under MS-DOS you can use the FDVOL command found in the ../dosutil directory to write the floppy images: 
	fdvol 1440 A: ROOT.MNX USR.MNX
	fdvol 720 A: ROOT.MNX	(if separate on 720 kb)
	fdvol 1440 A: USR.TGZ
	fdvol 1200 A: SRC.TGZ	(for example on 1.2 Mb)

Be careful when you install Minix-vmd, many of the commands are potentionally dangerous in a way that a simple typing mistake may destroy all other data on your system. So make backups first! 

						Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)