MINIX 3 News

MINIX 3 - News

To follow MINIX 3 developments in detail, subscribe to the newsgroup: Google newsgroup.

3.1.5 is here! - 05 Nov 2009

3.1.5 is released! See the announcement thread for more information.

3.1.5 coming up - 02 Nov 2009

We're in the last stages of preparing a new official release, named 3.1.5.

See the announcement of the 3.1.5 public beta for more info.

3.1.4 - r4817 snapshot released - 28 Jul 2009

A new MINIX 3.1.4 snapshot (r4817) has been released. This snapshot fixes several issues related to running MINIX on virtualized hardware.

See the announcement thread for more info.

The ISO can be found on our download page.

MINIX3 GSOC students - 22 Apr 2009

Please see this post for the accepted students for MINIX3 2009 Google Summer of Code.

Congrats, and to students and mentors - let's make this highly awesome!

MINIX3 Wallpapers - 10 Apr 2009

Roman Ignatov submits some lovely minix3 desktop wallpapers done by his wife, Julia Ignatova!

Take a look here: minix3 wallpapers.

Enjoy, and thanks Julia!

3.1.4 - 4203 snapshot released - 26 Mar 2009

In preparation for the next official release, a snapshot of 4203 has been put up on the download page.

See the announcement thread for the 'release' announcement, and for further updates.

Please try it out and enjoy :)

GSoC application accepted - 18 Mar 2009

MINIX3 has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code. Are you interested in applying as a student? Check out the site.

Our ideas page is here.

Official GSOC application complete - 13 Mar 2009

Minix3 has officially applied to become a Google Summer of Code mentoring organisation. More news soon, see the timeline.

New RSS feed! - 10 Mar 2009

We have an RSS feed for these news items! Subscribe to our RSS feed at this location.

MINIX3 on Twitter - 06 Mar 2009

Minix has a twitter account! Follow me at @minix3!

Moving from newsgroup to google group - 17 Feb 2009

The old newsgroup was getting too much spam, unfortunately, so we moved to a new Google group:
http://groups.google.com/group/minix3
Please go there and sign in. You don't have to be signed in to read the group but you do have to be signed in to post, in order to stop spammers.

New students, and happy new year! - 01 Jan 2009

Four new students have joined the project as follows:

- Maurits Dijkstra is working on porting MINIX 3 to the ARM
- Anton Kuijsten is looking at tools to locate bugs
- Michael Krekola is working on real time
- Pambo Paschalides is working on improving documentation

01 Nov 2008

Andy Tanenbaum has received an Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euro from the European Research Council to work on a project entitled "Research on Really Reliable and Secure Systems Software." The grant means that work on further developing MINIX 3 will continue to have funding for at least five more years starting today. That is VERY good news. This means our programmers can continue working on MINIX3 and several Ph.D. students and postdocs can be funded to push the research forward. Nevertheless, contributions from users such as drivers, ports, updating and translating the Wiki, etc.are very, very welcome. We'd like to build a bigger community.

Currently there are four Ph.D. students doing research relating to MINIX 3:

- Raja Appuswamy is looking at advanced file systems
- Cristiano Giuffrida is looking at live updates
- Jorrit Herder is working on replacing failed components on the fly
- David van Moolenbroek is working on execution environments

Another Ph.D. student is scheduled to start March 1, but we are looking for a postdoc. If you are interested, please see this ad.

01 Aug 2008

A new programmer, Arun Thomas, has joined the project. He is working on porting the current version of X to MINIX 3 so we will support modern video cards.

08 Jul 2008

The newsgroup, comp.os.minix, is full of spam at the moment. As practically all spam originates from google groups at the moment, it is recommended that as a solution for the short term, people don't post from google groups, and readers filter posts from google groups out.

23 Apr 2008

Some interesting new ports: netpbm, psutils, groff, and gnupg.

08 Apr 2008

New ports: pce, mdf2iso, pstotext, catdoc, lesstif.

Two Minix wallpapers: minix1.jpg and minix2.jpg. Thanks to Roman Ignatov for these wallpapers.

27 Mar 2008

The Google Summer of Code project is now accepting applications to work on MINIX 3. Students can spend the summer working on MINIX 3 and get paid for it by Google. Here is the ideas page. If you are a student, check this out NOW.

20 Mar 2008

The MINIX 3 Website has now passed one million visitors since it went up at the end of 2005. For a research project, that is really quite a bit. Thanks for your interest and help.

14 Dec 2007

MPlayer 1.0 rc1 is available.

23 Jul 2007

LaTeX is available from the tetex distribution tetex-3.0.

02 Jul 2007

Added the port done of lpr for MINIX 2 to packages.

01 Jul 2007

Driver for Orinoco wireless network cards

A driver for wireless PCI cards with the Prism chipset from Intersil by Michael Valkering and Stevens LeBlond has been committed.

27 Jun 2007

From the website, SQLite is a small C library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine..

Also Apache has been updated with compiled-in php5 module.

08 Jun 2007

Incremental release of 3.1.3

A minor extra release of 3.1.3 was done, called 3.1.3a, correcting some flaws in 3.1.3. More information is in the release notes.

23 May 2007

New Ports

The following interesting new ports have been added recently.

Tcl/Tk.
PHP (working, with Apache as a separate CGI, but probably not final).
ATK.
libxml.
jikes.

17 Apr 2007

Snapshots

As of today we're building weekly snapshots of MINIX. See http://derelict.cs.vu.nl/. This interface will probably get a bit fancier.

13 Apr 2007

MINIX 3.1.3 Prerelease

An early preview of the next version has been released under version number 3.1.3, an interim release intended for developers who want to see the bleeding edge of MINIX and perhaps then track the current source. For more information, see the 3.1.3 release notes and the download page.

06 Mar 2007

New ports: Links, an advanced text-based www browser, and also Links-2, a version of links that displays webpages in an X window. Some screenshots of it in action:

As yet, they're only compiled for the 'current' version of minix, and they aren't in the 3.1.2a packman list yet.

19 Feb 2007

New port: A message transfer agent, Exim.

10 Jan 2007

New port: Equinox Desktop Environment (and supporting libraries).

08 Jan 2007

New port: ImageMagick (and supporting libraries).

27 Dec 2006

A number of new publications about MINIX 3 have been added to the DOCUMENTATION page

03 Nov 2006

Apache has been ported. You can see it on the software page, and retrieve it using packman.
The tracking 'current' page has been updated for subversion.
The 'current' version of minix (in the subversion repository) contains a preliminary version of the VFS code, and the system profiling code.

27 Oct 2006

A ready-to-run Minix 3.1.2a for VMware Player is available from the VMware page.

25 Oct 2006

Ingmar Alting has ported MINIX 3 to the PowerPC Platform. His Masters thesis is now available on the DOCUMENTATION page. We are integrating it into the main system.

06 Oct 2006

We've switched from CVS to Subversion for the MINIX source and ports repositories. There are fully fledged ports for the Subversion client and server for MINIX. The MINIX source project page can be found here: https://gforge.cs.vu.nl/projects/minix/ from where you can currently only browse the imported CVS repository.

This means that currently, the tracking 'current' page is out of date - it will be updated for an SVN version soon. Also the tools/release.sh script will be updated. Also, the CVS mirror to the derelict MINIX machine is obsolete. We may find another use for the derelict, but currently it's obsolete itself as well. Of course we'd like to keep a MINIX3 machine in production, we just need a new job for it..

Those of you that are subscribed to the minix-updates-l on which CVS commits are posted, will be moved to the SVN commits mailing list.

The main reason for this change is that to incorporate recent improvements to MINIX (specifically, VFS and the PPC port), some MINIX source hierarchy will have to be changed, which is a dreadful job under CVS and loses historical state. With SVN, we will maintain proper history.

25 Aug 2006

There is an article about MINIX 3 on OSnews.com today.

23 Aug 2006

Balasz Gerofi's masters thesis on a VFS for MINIX 3 is available now . When we have integrated the code, it will become a permanent part of the system.

20 Aug 2006

After the long summer break, more should be happening on the MINIX 3 front soon. One upcoming development is a very nice set of performance measuring tools. A Masters thesis describing the tools is now available now . The software itself will be available soon.

23 Jul 2006

We now have FLTK, the Fast Light Tool Kit, a nice little graphics package. You can get it using: easypack fltk-1.1.7

18 Jul 2006

A new version of X11R6 has been posted, which includes the gcc versions of the X libraries. They are installed in the /usr/X11R6-gcc/ root, i.e., in /usr/X11R6-gcc/lib.

14 Jul 2006

There is a guide for updating your MINIX system to 'current' with CVS (a 'source upgrade'): tracking 'current'.
A recent change to packman makes it aware of Minix versions, which is important for backwards compatability if something in the Minix ABI changes. (This only happens as a last resort though.) The new structure knows about Minix versions, architectures, and beta and nonbeta ports. The structure is backwards-compatible with the latest official release (3.1.2a).

To take advantage of this feature before the next release, you can do a source upgrade and obtain packages that have been recompiled to solve some problems due to ABI changes.
Recent new port highlights are ghostscript, ghostview, and libXaw3d. They're on the software page under the beta section, and available from packman and easypack.
The source snapshot has disappeared in favour of using CVS.

29 May 2006

The first public version of the g++ port is ready and available through packman (network package). g++ does require fixes that went into MINIX 3.1.2a. It is available now on the download page.

16 May 2006

Some new items that make it easier to participate in MINIX 3 development.

There is a public mailing list on which cvs commit messages are sent, so you can follow progress up-to-the-minute. You can subscribe here: http://mailman.few.vu.nl/mailman/listinfo/minix-updates-l.
There is a daily snapshot of the internal CVS available from the Source page.

07 May 2006

The first graphical program for MINIX 3, xv, is now available on the SOFTWARE page. This program can be used to view photos and other JPEG and similar files. This milestone (which depends on X), marks the start of transition from text-only to a more graphical user experience.

28 Apr 2006

Ivan Kelly has ported MINIX 3 to Xen. His report and the code are listed on the DOCUMENTATION page or here.

18 Apr 2006

MINIX 3.1.2 is available.

06 Apr 2006

A second public beta of MINIX 3.1.2, called 3.1.2-B3, is available. See the Experimental Versions page for the download and more information.

28 Mar 2006

A public beta of MINIX 3.1.2, called 3.1.2-B2, is available. See the Experimental Versions page for the download and more information.

15 Mar 2006

There hasn't been much news lately but we are hard at work on version 3.1.2. There is now some information on the Experimental Versions page. Among other features, it will have X Windows and much more.

07 Feb 2006

The setup manual is now available in HTML so it can be read in a Web browser (in addition to the PS and PDF versions). Anyone planning to translate it into another language using the Latin alphabet should copy this version and edit it, keeping the HTML markup.

02 Feb 2006

The FAQ is now available in the following languages: Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean , Russian, and Spanish. Some other documents have also been translated. They are all linked to the DOCUMENTATION page. Additional translations are definitely welcome. Please start with the original and edit it to preserve the HTML markup.

22 Jan 2006

German and Korean versions of the FAQ are now on the DOCUMENTATION page. Additional translations of the FAQ and setup guide are welcome. If you translate an HTML file, please copy and edit the English one to keep the appearance the same.

17 Jan 2006

The MINIX 3 FAQ and installation guide are now available in Italian on the DOCUMENTATION page. Translations to other languages are welcome.

11 Jan 2006

The MINIX book is now available. Amazon.com and other bookstores have it in stock. Here is a link to it at amazon.com.

18 Dec 2005

We reached another milestone today: the CD-ROM image containing MINIX 3 has now been downloaded 75,000 times.

09 Dec 2005

The GNU POSIX test suite is now available. To install and run it, type
easypack opts-1.5.1
opts

30 Nov 2005

Three new beta packages have been put on the SOFTWARE page: fb, less-3.8.5, and wget-1.5.3

19 Nov 2005

Openssl-0.9.8a is now available as a beta package for testing. Use easypack to get it or download it from the SOFTWARE page. There is also a program to rip files from the CD image there.

18 Nov 2005

The GNU gmake is now available for beta testing. It is on the SOFTWARE page and can be fetched and installed using easypack. With gmake and gcc now available, a large amount of software should be much easier to port.

16 Nov 2005

Some new beta packages are now available. Here is the current list.

dungeon-2.7.1 - text-based dungeon exploration game (224 KB)
pdksh-5.2.14 - a public domain korn shell (408 KB)
unzip-5.52 - tool for unzipping .zip archive files (880 KB)
zip-2.31 - tool for creating .zip archive files (680 KB)
gcc-gnu-bin-1 - binary package for gnu utilities, including gcc and gcc li/liaries (15952 KB)
prng 3.0.2 (264 KB)
diffutils 2.8.1 - utilities for diffs (736 KB)
rcs 5.7 - revision control system (requires diffutils) (240 KB)

Please test and report back to test@minix3.org

13 Nov 2005

We have now passed 50,000 downloads of the MINIX 3 CD-ROM image file. As of today, it has been downloaded over 52,000 times.

03 Nov 2005

The gcc package didn't contain the binaries, so it was not so useful if you didn't already have the gcc binaries. We made a gcc binary package on the SOFTWARE page under Beta packages near the bottom. Use easypack to get it.

Also, some small bugs in the ackpack packages were fixed today so if you are going to test it, please get the new one.

02 Nov 2005

There is a bug in easypack. A new one is on the SOFTWARE page. To install it under MINIX 3, log in as bin and type:

urlget http://www.minix3.org/download/easypack >/usr/bin/easypack

Check the mode to see if it is executable.

Four beta test packages are now available. After you have installed bunzip2 and the new easypack, you can get them all by typing:

easypack dungeon-2.7.1 pdksh-5.2.14 unzip-5.52 zip-2.31

The ACK compiler in the distribution is an elderly one not generated from the ackpack sources. We we would like people to go to /usr/src/commands/ackpack and type ./build to rebuild the compiler, then test it heavily and report back to test@minix3.org. Thanks.

30 Oct 2005

We have created several e-mail addresses for communicating with us:

bugs@minix3.org (for reporting bugs)
test@minix3.org (for sending us new software to test or reporting on existing beta software)
root@minix3.org (for everything else)

27 Oct 2005

We have had about 90,000 visitors and almost 30,000 downloads so far. Hopefully a substantial number of people are now checking this news page and the newsgroup: comp.os.minix regularly.

Where to from here? We are working on a number of things at the VU, including automatic recovery from driver failures, a simple virtual memory model, and X Windows. But we are definitely interested in getting help from other people. Some things that would be very useful are:

Ports of more software
Device drivers
Another windowing system as a lightweight alternative to X
Ports of MINIX 3 to other architectures
Volunteers to test new releases

We may try to set up some infrastructure for community development, but for the moment, use comp.os.minix for suggestions and discussion.

26 Oct 2005

If you are interested in seeing how much traffic there is to the Website, there is a little colored square on the bottom of the main page you can click on. Note that this link was installed yesterday, after the flash crowd of over 50,000 visits had already passed. Also, on the DOCUMENTATION page, there is a link to a different traffic analysis near the bottom of the page.

By accident, bunzip2 was left off the CD-ROM. Without it, easypack does not work. Sorry about that. The binary is now on www.minix3.org/software near the top of the page. Fetch it with urlget from www.minix3.org/download/bzip2.tar. The files bzip2 and bunzip2 are the same file, linked using both names. Sorry for the inconvenience.

25 Oct 2005

The launch yesterday was a great success. We have had over 50,000 visitors and over 12,000 downloads of the CD-ROM image in the past 24 hours. Due to popular demand, we have added a link on the main menu for the source code so you can inspect it using another operating system. It is also included on the CD image, of course.

We also added a sitemeter icon at the very bottom of the main page so you can observe the traffic. Furthermore, there is a Webalyzer display of the Apache logs available.

24 Oct 2005

Today is the big day--The official release of MINIX 3. The SOSP CD and download file represent a major milestone, but the system is far from finished and your help is needed (see the HOME page). Some of the larger commands sources have been omitted from the compressed downloadable CD image to keep it from being 130 MB, but they are all available using the SOFTWARE link above.

This page will be used for communicating major news items about MINIX 3, but for day-to-day discussions, use comp.os.minix.

Here is some news about developments that are in the pipeline:

A first cut at virtual memory is now being tested
The port of X Windows is coming along well.
A port of the current version of python is in the works (python 1.5.2 is installed now)
The GNU POSIX tools are being tested now
The gcc compiler is available, but not well tested under MINIX 3. It lives in /usr/gnu/bin along with the rest of the GNU tools. To enable gcc and these tools, type:
PATH=/usr/gnu/bin:$PATH
export PATH

23 Oct 2005

The CDs have been burned, the servers are provisioned and we are ready to go.

22 Oct 2005

Lots of last minute changes 2 days before the launch. It is a good thing we like living dangerously. All the reincarnation server related code has been updated, but not tested as thoroughly as we would have liked. Furthermore, perl and gcc have been installed.