MiNTOS Release 1.4 now available.

[Stephen Usher <Stephen.Usher@earth.ox.ac.uk>]

MiNTOS is now at Release 1.4!

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?

	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?

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

Note: 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.

Known Problems.

	It seems that the BSD getty doesn't like Carriage-Returns in
		/etc/gettytab, it fails to read it properly. The fix is to
		make sure that all lines in gettytab are terminated by a
		single Line-Feed character and not the 1970's hangover from
		CP/M of CR-LF. I would suggest that you make sure that ALL
		configuration files use the Unix standard of LF as the
		end-of-line marker.

	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?

Well, I hope to incorporate more of MiNT-net and re-add the networking code to
syslog now MiNT-net supports TCP as well as UDP packets.  I'm also going to
replace last and finger with the Berkeley ones.  Oh, I'm also going to fix
some more bugs! (init itself needs some looking at.)

When will I get the next version out? I don't know. I'm pretty loaded up at
work so don't get much spare time to work on MiNTOS. Suffice it to say that
I'll announce it on the MiNT mailing list, on the comp.sys.atari.st
newsgroup and on my World Wide Web page
(http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~steve/mintos.html) as soon as a new version is
available.

Stephen Usher

-- 
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Computer Systems Administrator, Dept. of Earth Sciences, Oxford University.
E-Mail: steve@uk.ac.ox.earth (JANET) steve@earth.ox.ac.uk (Internet).
Tel:- Oxford (0865) 282110 (UK) or +44 865 282110 (International).