About

This page is here to inform everybody about my current minix projects which will be (so far)

• porting the archlinux pacman package manager to minix (even their channel agrees the packman package management system they use sucks, but nobody had the time to port a saner package manager so far.) I chose pacman because it is lightweight and KISSy, and fits well into minix userland.
• put up a pacman repo for minix on one of my servers or university
• writing a networking-card-driver for my card

Implementation starts as soon as I get the slip network working between my linux box and my minix box. (writing code in 80x25 resolution is suboptimal.)

Progress!!!

I finally managed to get ethernet working with minix. When I say ethernet, I mean it. I found an old ethernet card with a rtl8139c chip in the trash which is supported by the minix rtl8139-driver.
Everything works as expected now, except that inet crashed when I tried to nmap the box and that hostaddr just hangs, so I have to press ^C on boot but everything else is fine. Now I can start developing real applications. No idea how much time I wasted to figure this out.

Special thanks to 20h, iggo and mrf00 who helped me with my senseless attempts to get slip working.
It's a hard thing and the source code looks bad, does not have many comments and weird variable names. plus they implement their own fprintf "to save a few bytes". If these few bytes are so important to them, they just could have used fputs or puts, because I haven't seen any place in the code where they give formatted output. Also, some cslip implementation would be nice because serial lines are really really slow but maybe I'm going to care about this at a later point. At the moment, I'm just happy.