Two new important ports to MINIX3 have been released. First and foremost, the Equinox Desktop Environment: “Equinox Desktop Environment (shortly EDE) is small desktop environment, built to be simple and fast. It is based on modified FLTK library (called extended FLTK or just eFLTK). Comparing to other desktop environments, EDE is much faster and smaller in memory space (EDE’s window manager use less memory than xterm).” Secondly, ImageMagick can now be run on MINIX3.
Now Minix has a DE! Now all it needs is a Firefox port and it’s a usable desktop OS.
It looks as if it runs Mozilla – the lighter distros such as Puppy Linux tend to run this instead of Firefox as it has a smaller footprint RAMwise. Odd when FF started as a lighter weight Mozilla.
Looks too much like windows 95
Considering how lightweight MINIX is, it probably has similar system requirements too, unlike more “modern” DEs and OSs that require 100s of MBs of RAM and a 1GHz+ processor to run well.
Edited 2007-01-13 00:29
well.. not all modern environments requires hundreds of megabytes.
take kde for example, a fully booted linux box with even stuff like mailserver/mysql, kde session, konqueror, and konsole open takes ~100mb ram. thats quite fair.
Which distribution do you run? I can’t imagine that happens out of the box.
I’m usually already at ~100mb when I have nothing more than a very leightweight WM and an Xterm and hardly any services running. Not that it would matter much on my computer, but still, not using resources is always nice.
You’re right. Kernel 2.6 and latest glibc and xorg versions made many older PCs obsolete.
(Size vs. Speed optimization: Having bigger lookup tables makes your software run faster).
So, unless you use a specially tailored distribution or tune many small parts of the system, you can no longer run a recent linux desktop on 128MB.
DSL FAQ discusses these kernel issues:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ
i run gentoo personally, but i know one gets the same results using debian.
i would not think of that as a bad thing…
hell, im pondering installing FVWM with some win9x like layout. and then go overboard tweaking it to my insane way of using desktops
Well EDE has themes so if you do not like how it looks then that should be a simple fix.
Now if Minix was put under the GPL then I would at least be trying it! I might have to “cheat” and try it anyway.
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Welcome to the GNU world!
Edited 2007-01-13 15:44
Minix wont ever be under the GPL…it has been BSD for a a long time. It is a teaching tool, first and foremost. And what does an OS being under the GPL or not make any difference?
It isn’t meant as an Operating System to actually use, it is meant to demonstrate OS Technology to interested people (if you study computer science and take courses that deal with OSes you won’t be able to avoid contact with Minix).
It doesn’t have to be GPL for that task (not that it would harm either).
Yet, having an desktop for it will make it much more fun for those of us that [have to/want to] play with it.
Yes it is meant as an operating system to actually use. From minix3.org: MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability.
The *BSDs have done quite well as fully usable open-source OSes, so I see no reason why the BSD license would hinder Minix3 in that regard. Quite possibly the opposite.