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2025-10-04 12:05:49 UTC

Nina Kalinina on Nostr: Reading about early Linux, I saw a mention of Linux being originally developed on ...

Reading about early Linux, I saw a mention of Linux being originally developed on MINIX with GCC. If you played with early MINIX, you probably know that it doesn't support i386 well, and so I was not quite sure how it would have worked with GCC.

Most likely it wasn't regular MINIX, but minix-vmd, a version of MINIX 1.7 for i386 with patches and contrib. The release from mid-90s comes with XFree86 port and a graphical web browser called Chimera.

Everything is linked statically, which is a big problem for X11 programs. Everything is quite slow, buggy and experimental, too. But it is a fun little system!

The installation is relatively straight-forward; make sure to read manpages for install (this one covers partitioning and /usr) and boot (this one explains how to set up networking). You need TCP/IP working to start X11, because there are no local sockets.

I've struggled to make it work in 86box because DNS resolver refused to work with 86box'es one (so I pointed /etc/resolv.conf to 192.168.1.1). Aaand...