MiNTOS Distribution and Information Page.

MiNTOS is now at Release 1.4.1.

MiNTOS is a package of utilities which run under the MiNT operating system extension for the Atari ST, TT and Falcon ranges of computers to provide a multi-user environment.

The environment created by using these utilities with the addition of the GNU file utilities is a very close approximation to a classic BSD Unix system, closest to SunOS 4.1.x and 4.3BSD.

Many of the utilities contained within the package are, in fact, ports of the utilities distributed on the BSD Net-2 tape.

What you will need to use MiNTOS

MiNT version 1.04 or later, preferably 1.08 or above.
Minixfs 0.6 with a patchlevel greater than 8.
The GNU File utilities.
An Atari ST, TT or Falcon with 4MB RAM or greater. (It does run on my old 520STM with 2.5MB RAM but you can't run many things before you run out of memory.)
A hard disk with plenty of space free (about 4MB should be enough).
The GNU GZIP compression program.
The GNU TAR tape archive program.

What's new in Release 1.4.1?

This is a bug fix release.

What's new in Release 1.4?

Many bug fixes and a couple of new programs. The bug fixes include the trouncing of a glaring security bug in the Net-2 BSD login program.
The source distribution has a completely new Makefile set-up which makes building individual parts of the package easier, as well as making the build process tidier. (Linux-m68k hackers may recognise some similarity to their set-up here.)
The "/etc" directory is augmented to include sample MiNTnet config files. Also, the rc* files are now fully MiNTnet ready, though the names and places of the ip and rpc daemons follows SunOS convention rather than 4.4BSD's which is MiNTnet's way. (ie. daemons are found in /usr/etc and are named either in.xxx or rpc.xxx.)
The source distribution's libusers library has been merged with Kay Roemer's Portlib patchlevel 7 and has been augmented.
The source distribution comes with all the programs needed to build the package except for the C compiler, MiNT and Minixfs. The source to Ash, the Bourne Shell look-a-like has been removed as this is available elsewhere.
A version header is automatically generated during the building process which is displayed by init when it starts up and is written into the top of /etc/motd at boot time. (This will help me track versions for bug reports.)

How do I obtain it?

Click here to download the binary distribution (about 606K). This is a Gzip'ed tar archive which contains a full system directory tree and installation instructions below a directory called "mintos-1.4.1". The version of the MiNTlibs used was patchlevel 44.

This binary distribution was built using a version of the GNU C compiler built for the Falcon/TT (mfgcc258.zoo from atari.archive's Mint hierarchy). I used the -m68000 switch, so I hope it's generated correct 68000 code. I can't check this at the moment as my old 520STM is feeling poorly.

Click here to download the source distribution (about 437K). This is a GZip'ed tar archive containing the whole source tree below a directory called "mintos-1.4.1". You will need MiNTlibs patchlevel 41 or above and GCC 2.3.3 or above to build it.

The README file is here.

Or you can use anonymous ftp from ftp.earth.ox.ac.uk:/pub/mintos or your closest atari.archive.umich.edu mirror site below the Mint subdirectory.

Atari.archive and its mirrors.

Known Problems.

For some unknown reason the QUIT character is set to ^U rather than ^\ after you log in. I still haven't been able to track down how this is happening, I've put a hack in the sample [t]csh startup files in "/etc" to get around this.

What next?

Unfortunately I can no longer work on this package as my TT has died. So, it's up to the rest of the Atari community to take this on and carry on improving it. Sorry.

I'll still be able to support it as much as I can without being able to run it, however.

Stephen Usher Stephen.Usher@earth.ox.ac.uk

11th August, 1995.