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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.

Useful links

 

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MyAtari magazine - Feature #4, April 2004

 
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