The MiNT Distribution Kit (hereafter the MDK) is an attempt to make the installation of MiNT itself, combined with a fair number of utilities far easier. A secondary aim is to provide an ordered filesystem, with everything in its proper place. Since the vast majority of the utilities and programs have been lifted from the Un*x world, this implies a Un*x-like file organisation. Indeed, the un*x system is a particularly ordered affair, with all executables going in /bin or /usr/bin (for example), depending upon importance. The use of a Un*x file organisation is also beneficial in that a lot of people on the net will be familiar with that layout.
The MDK provides for the installation of all the Un*x'y programs that make Un*x an attractive operating system - programs such as mgr, Gcc 2.3.3, bison, sed, grep, fileutils, txtutils, shellutils; added to that is the ability to use a Un*x-like filesystem, with long filenames and case distinction eg: thisfile.tar.Z which is highly advised. On top of this is the ability to install the multi-user extension to MiNT that turns your ST(e)/TT into a multi-user multi-tasking machine.
Anyway, what the MDK boils down to is a pair of programs called SETUP and INSTALL which do all the hard work of getting a partition of your hard drive prepared for the MDK, and of installing the system itself onto the partition, and into C:/auto, and C:/mint. The MDK is organised into a set of subsets that contain related programs / documentation / etc. INSTALL will then let you pick and choose from the subsets on your disks. The updates to the system also come in the form of subsets, so you can use INSTALL to place them onto your partition as well.
What I ought to get out into the open straight away is that I lay claim to very little of this kit. The installation and setting up programs are mine (Oh don't I know it!) and a few of the subsets have been ported by me to MiNT, but the vast majority of the programs etc. that you will install have been coded / ported by others. Neither, actually, am I necessarily an expert on these programs. I am sufficiently familiar with most of them to be able to give advice, but bug-reports should go to the authors as well as me. Them so they can fix it, me so I can try to work around it.
Another point that ought to be made is that the kit will not work on some TOS's - notably TOS 1.0, and a few of the more exotic TOS's have problems too. The problem with TOS 1.0 is due to the Pexec() call being very buggy, which is used extensively in the kit. There are no guarantees whatsoever if you use this kit, you do so at your own risk, I will not be held liable for any damage / loss / nuclear strikes / etc. ( I think this is silly, you're all perfectly nice and reasonable people, aren't you ?)
2. Requirements.
The MDK has some (particularly ?) extreme requirements... The following are necessary:
õ A free partition on your hard drive of at least 9Mb which has been formatted to
a sector size of 512 bytes. 1024-byte sectors might work, but no guarantees. For
most of us, any partition less than 16Mb will be fine, but >16Mb, you'll need to
have HD software that handles this, or alter the drive with a disk editor. I am told
that the ICD software definitely does let you have large 512-byte partitions.
õ At least 1Mb free on C:/ and an auto folder on that disk. I assume that C: is your
boot partition, if it isn't, then you'll have to compensate by hand-copying all the
stuff the MDK puts into C:/auto onto your boot partition. Note that only about 200k
of space is eventually used on C:. but some temporary workspace is needed.
õ At least 2Mb of memory. At least, you might be able to get away with 1Mb, but I've
not tried it, and the kit itself is fairly memory-intensive. You really ought to have
2Mb to get anything out of MiNT anyway, and 4Mb is much nicer. Gcc needs
4Mb to do anything useful
3. What is where.
There are 9 disks in the base installation, labelled (informatively!) as disk1, disk2, ... disk9.zoo. Disk1 is the install disk, with the other 8 being data disks from which you load subsets. A quick rundown of what is on the 8 disks follows...
Disk2: Fileutils: Eric Smiths port of some of the GNU file utilities. At least 1 version of the
GNU file utils is mandatory.
Bash: The GNU Bourne-Again SHell. (A clone of sh, the bourne shell). A nice
version of sh, with extensive online help. I don't recommend sh for those
without some experience of Un*x though.
Tcsh: A clone of csh with lots of additions. The recommended shell if you've
enough memory.
Disk3: bin1: A collection of binaries I've made over some time. Mandatory, IMHO.
Disk4: gcc222b: The Gcc 2.2.2 binaries. This subset contains part of the GCC C compiler.
gcc222i: The MiNT-aware include files for gcc 2.2.2
Disk5: gcc222l: The libraries for gcc 2.2.2
docs: Miscellaneous documentation. Includes manual pages, readme files for
programs etc.
Disk6: futil2: A more up-to-date version of the GNU file utils. Recommended over the
subset on disk2.
rg10: Allows the running of GEM programs from a command-line screen. For those who don't wish to use TOSWIN.(More about TOSWIN later).
tpipe: A program similar to tee in bin1 that lets you split Un*x pipes into 2.
sed: The GNU sed package. Allows the application of editing commands to a file.
(sed stands for Stream EDitor).
Disk7: mnt95utl: MiNT utilities v0.95. Provides programs such as 'ps' to get a list of running
processes etc. Again, almost mandatory IMHO.
akpbin: Andrew Pratts utilities. Similar to the GNU ones, but use \ rather than / as a dir
separator. I prefer /, but its your choice...
cpx: This is a .cpx file for showing what processes are running. You nee
xcontrol.acc to make any use of this.
ksh: Another shell, the Korn shell. More friendly than sh, less friendly than tcsh.
Takes less memory than tcsh, more than sh.
man3: A manual formatting package that uses nroff to format Un*x-style manual
pages. You need tmac.an and more.ttp from the bin1 subset to use this.
elvis: A vi-clone. You'll either love it or hate it. Vi isn't the friendliest editor
around, but it is very powerful. Almost as powerful as mainframe emacs.
jove: Jonathon's Own Version of Emacs. The nicest editor for Un*x IMHO.
Disk8: ash: A SH clone. Another MiNT-aware shell you may prefer over the default sh.
init: The multi-user extension to MiNT. You must install this if you want multi-
user MiNT.
Disk9: mgr: The Bellcore Windows Manager. A windowing system developed for early
Sun workstations. Also available for the pd Un*x clone Linux. Now more or
less superseded by TOSWIN which is installed as standard. Doesn't allow
GEM programs to be run, unlike TOSWIN.
4. Additions to the system.
The upgrade subsets are detailed below. Those marked as `shareable' share the memory they use for program space when you invoke more than one copy of them running at the same time. This can be highly useful for shells, for example.
All of these should be considered to be upgrades, and not as subsets in their own right. In general they will depend on older stuff being already in place. You will find a file called 0readme in the `Updates' and `Shareable' directories which details the chronological order in which the subsets were released.
The following are upgrades:
gcc231 Gcc version 2.3.1 binaries.
incObj25 The MiNT includes and libraries patchlevel 25.
compress The `compress' Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression utility.
