[MiNT] EasyMint

["Brian J. Roland" <bjr@localink4.com>]

I recently installed this package on my Falcon CT2b.
It's great!  Mint really has made some giant strides over the past year or so.

The same day I installed this package, I grabbed tinyfugue 4.21 sources and
using the included and unaltered unixmake file in the archive, it compiled
straight away with only one supposed function costing complaint like:

"NO gethostbyname() but that's alrite.  (Domain names will not be resolved)".

In the end however...despite this one complaint during compiling, domain names
are resolved as they should be (I don't have to resort to ip numbers), and the
client seems as flawless as it would be on any other platform ;)  That was a
historic moment for me in that it's the FIRST time I've ever had a run of the
mill unix distribution compile under MiNT without extensive hacking due to
unsuppored calls or libraries.

I also greatly appreciate the rpm concept.  It's nice to be able to install
things where they belong and have been tested by the package maintainer ;)

Another interesting plus.  HD Driver 8 (wich does NOT claim to support the CT2
in turbo modes) crashes and burns on my CT2 when trying to access a SCSI drive
in all cases EXCEPT when this mint kernel is installed.  An odd but interesting
thing to learn ;)  I haven't run extensive tests on the reliability of this, but
so far it works very well (some quick tests reading and writing a 16meg audio
file to and from SCSI devices).  I just wonder why it works with the later MiNT
kernel installed, but doesn't work AT ALL on CT2 TOS or MagiC.

There are some minor problems I ran into while installing this on my Falcon, but
with some paitent tweaking, all went well.

Problem 1:
The EasyMint installer the first time it is run does some very brief things with
the filesystem (I assume making mint and aes folders and configs,etc) and then
it reboots the system into a minimal mint kernel with the built in GEM desktop.
At this point the user is supposed to restart easymint.prg.  The catch is, the
filenames are forced to lowercase and doubleclicking on ANY .prg, .app, tos,
etc, does nothing but try to 'display' the file.  I fiddled around with this for
some time trying to get GEM to recognize the lowercase files as launchable
without success.  Also tried useing the 'open' dialog in the drop down menu.

My fix to this problem was to have AES 4.1 loaded by adding this line to the end
of the c:/mint/mint.cnf file.
GEM=c:/path-to/germ.sys
This desktop had no problems with the lowercase filenames.

There might be an easier way?  At any rate...it's something to consider in any
future relases of the package.

Problem 2:
I installed the package to a 10gig IDE partition.  The first time it didn't
work, so I deleted everything in EasyMint's log folder, reinitalized the
partition, ran it from the top again, and it worked.  I'm not sure what went
wrong...but the second try went without a hitch.

Despite these minor glitches (either by my error, or oversights in the package)
it was truly EasyMint, and WELL worth the time to install.

One thing that still bugs me about MiNT is that there still is not very good VT
emulation.  tw52 and tw100 really do NOT handle split screen scrolling well at
all.  Fortunately alot of packages out there bind to the terminfo well enough to
'work'.  Sadly, it's about like working on a dumb terminal compared what a
proper VT100, VT102 or VT220 terminal can do.  It's very common for me to run a
program and the colors get all out of wack and never correct, or things just go
the WRONG place on screen.

The X6 GEM Xwin server does a very good job at scrolling 'portions' of the
screen...but as far as I know, there is not yet an xterm client for MiNT
supporting color.  Even on nonscrolling apps, there is a noteable difference.
Run lynx on a really nice VT102 terminal sometime, then run it under
toswin...compare for yourself which is less stressful to the eye and brain.

More kudos!!!
Excellent work on the MiNT team's part!
Because of this EasyMint installation, I've suddenly aquired a desire to use it
more, and a list has grown of software to purchase or register for my Falcon
(such as Thing, Kobld, BoxKite, NAES, etc...).

Sincerely,
Brian