MINIX in its new avatar: MINIX 3

remember the famous tussle between Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds that was later archived on various websites going by its popularity? their respective operating systems became the central points of discussion during that exchange of emails. Andrew Tanenbaum has always been recluctant to add any new feature to his operating system, MINIX, which would add unnecessary complexity to it from the student's point of view. He wanted MINIX to be used for educational purposes only - so kept it small and tidy. If Tanenbaum had allowed for major changes in MINIX according to the requests of innumerable MINIX fans, it just might have been in the shoes of gnu/linux today. But Tanenbaum achieved his goal with MINIX - a generation of students have gained the knowledge of designing operating systems and implementing them by looking at the code of MINIX and doing slight modifications to it. Tanenbaum's Operating Systems - Design and Implementation book acted as documentation for MINIX for a long period now. But lately, Tanenbaum has different plans for his extremely popular operating system in its 3rd version: MINIX 3.

In Tanenbaum's own words, "MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability." What more, it is available as a Live CD!! download the iso file, burn it on a cd-rom and boot into MINIX directly from the cd-rom - no installation to hard disk is needed. The best thing about the MINIX operating system is that its extremely well designed and it is the perfect example where academics meet the real world. Linux is a 'practical' OS, which means it works like a dream on a lot of architechtures with good stability and security; but the internal design of the kernel is not something to boast about - its less modular than it could have been. in the first version it was almost monolithic - and its moving towards more and more modular design since then. the design of MINIX has always been close to perfection and its also very stable and secure. But MINIX currently is only a kernel that supports only i386 architecture - lots of drivers and applications are yet to be created with support for multiple architectures. but don't compare it with gnu/linux, which is a complete operating system for desktops and servers etc. MINIX is supposed to be used on embedded systems, so it is better compared to linux kernel plus some additional programs.

the official minix mailing list comp.os.minix is buzzing with lots of activity - so that is the place to be at if you want more updated information. Download the Live CD from here. the website is here.