What
Is A MiNT Distribution?
by Bohdan Milar
Before we start
to install our MiNT operating system we should
ask a few questions. First is which other software
we want to install together with MiNT. Or better
how "heavy" should our system be. I mentioned several
possibilities last time. They were:
- Light system
with no GNU.
- Light GNU system.
- Full GNU system.
In the first
case the installation is very simple
and you can have the whole system (kernel,
modules, AES, desktop) on one floppy disk. The
other possibilities are not so simple,
but first I have to explain what GNU means.
Last time I used the name Unix which
was not correct. GNU is better. Unix is a name
of a commercial system, but GNU
(acronym of GNU is Not Unix)
is a fully free replacement of Unix functionality.
And GNU is exactly what is used in MiNT these
days.
GNU utilities
in MiNT are mostly command line programs.
They can offer you many useful functions
known from other GNU systems (Linux, BSD...).
From copying files, through configuring
the system, viewing text to writing e-mails
and browsing the web. You can
even use some GNU utilities to make an FTP or
(believe it or not) a web server from your
Atari machine!
After you decide
to have the whole GNU system you will need many
programs. And by many I mean hundreds.
Besides each program has its own configuration files,
documentation and other stuff
which means the system will contain of thousands
of files. Of course each file has
its very specific place otherwise the program would
not run. But don't panic! There
is a way to do it easily.
Every program
(or group of related programs) is delivered
by its author with all the documentation and
configuration files in one package file. A
self-contained
collection of such package
files is called a distribution. You may know
this from Linux. There are many Linux
distributions: Fedora Core, Mandrake, SuSE,
Debian, Gentoo, Slax... It's nearly
the same in the MiNT world.
Now it's just
up to you to select the distribution which corresponds
to your needs in the best way.
Well, you are right. You first have to know
which distributions are available for
MiNT and what are their characteristics. These
days you can choose one of these three
complex MiNT distributions:
- KGMD
- Debian GNU/MiNT
- SpareMiNT
Knarf's
German MiNT Distribution was a good
one (I also started with it on my Atari 1040STE),
but it is a bit obsolete now (released in 1995).
It was compiled for 68000 procesors
so also runs on Atari ST computers. The program
packages were tar.gz, so a normal Unix
compression with no special functions. These
days packages (and their control
programs) maintain a database of installed packages
and
can get new packages directly
from the internet.
KGMD is available
on several FTP servers to download (let me mention
one: ftp://ftp.phil.uni-sb.de/pub/atari/mint/KGMD-1.0/)
and has its own installer. There is also an alternative
installer in English called KEMD (see ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/atari/mint/KGMD/kemd_r2.zip).
KEMD was later modified by Jan Krupka from JaySoft
to handle Ext2 partitions. You can get this
version from http://www.volny.cz/milarb/data/jayext2i.lzh
Debian
GNU/MiNT is (was) a MiNT version of
popular GNU distribution. It is the most up-to-date
distribution running on 68000s, nevertheless
its development stopped in 2000. Debian
uses its very powerful packaging system DEB.
The still available home page of the
project is http://debian-mint.nocrew.org/
- I
haven't tried this distribution
yet.
SpareMiNT
is my choice. It is up-to-date, there are new
programs or at least new versions
of some already present every month. Frank Naumann,
the current maintainer of
the FreeMiNT kernel, is the guy behind SpareMiNT.
But many others help to keep the project
alive. For that matter anyone interested can
help. The home page of the project
is simply http://sparemint.atariforge.net/
SpareMiNT uses
a well known RPM packaging system. It is the
same one you may know from Red Hat
(now Fedora Core), Mandrake or SuSE Linux distributions.
Now there are about 400 RPM
packages in the SpareMiNT repository, but no
installer for them. Of course the RPM
utility for handling the packages is there,
but not a program which can prepare the
disk, lets you choose packages you want and
does all the work for you.
Two independent
projects offering a SpareMiNT installer were
launched. One of them is mine and I call
it Olomouc SpareMiNT Distribution (OSMD). It's
text based, inspired by KGMD. You can find it on
my web site. The second one is EasyMiNT. It has a
GEM interface with several languages.
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