Tips and Package Ports for MINIX 3
I first encountered MINIX over 20 years ago (1987). Yup, that's right, in the first edition of Andy Tanenbaum's book. After previously having done development work on mainframe OS internals, it was a nice change of pace to have a complete operating system that one individual could get his hands around, and tinker with on a desktop PC.
MINIX 3 has come a long way from those early days. It has been largely rewritten. AST and Prentice Hall negotiated the release of the code under a flexible, BSD-style license, so it is fair game for open source developers. Yes, it has a long way to go, and no, it's not quite ready for GNOME or KDE. However....
There are numerous application packages available for it now, including the X Window system. It has the potential to be a useful desktop system, not just a tiny, CLI-only Unix-like system targeted at non-graphical embedded applications and minimal hardware that's difficult even to find these days.
My interest is in exploring how well it can scale to meet the demands of a modern desktop platform, with reasonably unbloated X applications - hence my first few choices of applications to port.
Ports that are complete or nearly so:
showmem - Read why you need this .
Rxvt - a lightweight replacement for xterm.
FVWM - my Favorite Virtual Window Manager.
Vim - with the gui option enabled - (not packaged yet)
Here are some things I'm working on for the future:
Xfm file manager -
Alternative libc implementations - small (uClibc, diet libc, trio) and large (glibc) -
(The glibc website says "The GNU C library is written to be easily portable to a variety
of machines and operating systems." heh-heh.)
OpenMotif -
NEdit - my favorite text editor. Requires Motif.