Minix Hints

This page holds some useful techniques CS 314

Some commands, such as sleep, are Shell commands (1) as well as API commands (3).

% man -s 3 sleep

On some flavors of Unix, that is spelled

% man 3 sleep

Get a formated IBM floppy disk. Insert in minix machine, (drive fd0).

% fdwrite -a /dev/fd0 output < myWork.c

You now have a version of the file on a DOS disk. You can take this to any PC or Linix machine that can reach a printer.

Get a formated IBM floppy disk. Insert in minix machine, (drive fd0).

# mkfs	Create a Minix file system
# df /dev/fd0	Check the amount of inodes and memory on the floppy
# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt	Mount the floppy on the /mnt directory
% cd /usr/jdp/usr/src/kernel	Move to your workspace. YMMV
% make clean	Reduce size of directory
% cd ..	Move up
% backup kernel /mnt	Backup files onto floppy

Minix uses the oldest version in the /minix directory to boot from. You should have an old, stable version, and a new flakey version. If you have two flakey versions, you will need to get even more creative.

Boot from a floppy	You must have a working boot floppy
/dev/fd0c	Response when it asks for the device to mount as /usr Now login as root
# mount /dev/hd1a /mnt	Mount the boot sector of the hard drive on /mnt. YMMV
# cd /mnt/minix; ls -l	Look at the boot images on the hard drive
# rm 2.0.0.r6	Remove the oldest versiion. YMMV
# halt	Get ready to reboot
> boot hd1	Boot from the harddrive

You can get a listing of the running processes and send a SIGKILL (-9) to the process. It may be the case that the process owns the keyboard, so you cannot run ps, or is spewing so much output that you cannot read the result.

Change to the virtual conole and login under the same id. Run ps -ax, get the process ID, and send a kill -8
% kill -9 123

If you start a process in the background, you are given the PID and you are running in the shell, which makes the task a bit simpler.