I, too, I have managed to bring up Linux without the need of Minux.  I
have a 40 MhZ AMD 386 with a 200 Meg clone.  A couple of notes:

N1) The Minix demo disk which you can get from plains.novak.edu only
works for 5.25" disks --- this isn't documented anywhere, but I spent a
lot of time trying to get it to boot on my 3.5" A drive.  It would print
the first message about "loading Minix system", but it would hang before
printing the menu.  I finally had to give up, recable my drives so that
my 5" drive was my A drive to get Minix to come up.

N2)  The numbering convestion for partition in Minix and Linux are
different!!!  The way I dealt with it is to use a disk editor to write a
message "This is the Linux parittion" in the first sector of the
partition, and then use "head -3 /dev/hd[014]" to find the right
partition number on both Minix and Linux.

N3)  I have MS-DOS 5.0, and the mtools worked just fine on my hard disk.
All of my partitions are less than 32 MEG, so I'm still using the FAT-16
filesystem.  It would be nice if Linux understood the DOS extended
partitions, though.  This would allow mtools could read my other DOS
partitions.  In addition, it would mean that I could use one of the DOS
extended partitions as Linux partitions, so I could avoid chewing up
the 4 primary partitions available on my 200 meg drive.

[ Note: whoever decided that IBM hard disks only needed 4 partitions
should be condemned to recabling machine room floors; CP/M on
Heath/Zenith machines had 8 partitions available, and much more friendly
tools to modify said table! ]

N4)  I have also experienced the panic which Patrick L. McGillan has
described.  I suspect DOS setting some cruft which isn't getting cleaned
up.  The panic happens happens right after the "Loading system" and
before the system has a chance to print the "Partition tables ok" message.

N5)  I have managed to build the Linux kernel under Linux, using the 16
bit binaries which Linus provided.  One little gotcha is that it is
necessary to rename the binaries provided in gccbin.tar.Z to the names
which the Makefile is expecting.  Other than that, though, things went
very smoothly.

N6) It wasn't obvious that the "em" program in utilbin.tar.Z was
actually MicroEmacs.  I was really happy once I found it, though!
Perhaps there should be a quick note mentioning this fact somewhere.  At
the moment, the programs which I seem to be missing the most are 1)
more, 2) gdb, and 3) fsck.  The first should be a lot easier to get
working than the last.  :-)

And now, for some questions:

Q1)  On nic.funet.fi, I found sources to shoelace, which seems to be a
way to boot Minix without needing a floppy boot disk.  Is anyone working
on something similar for Linux?  The other interesting thing about
shoelace is that it came with a file "shoefsck.c" which seems to contain
the necessary code filesystem checking for Minix.  However, there's no
copyright notice on that file, and no email address for the author,
either.  Does anyone know what the status of that code is?  I was
considering trying to use that code to make a fsck for Minix.

Q2)  Similarily, there are sources on nic.funet.fi for a fsck program for
Minix.  It looks like it was derived from the Minix fsck, but since it
is available for anonymous FTP with no notices saying "don't touch
this", I wonder if would be consider fair play to base a fsck for Linux
on the code, and either distribute the code or patches to the code with
a note that you can get the rest of the program from nic.funet.fi.

Q3) Linus, can you provide the configuration files for gcc and friends?
It would be interesting to see what's necessary to actually compile
one's own version of gcc/gas/etc.

Thanks to everyone on the list!  I don't think I would have managed to
get Linux up and running with out a lot of helpful hints which were
posted on the list --- and I've only been on the list for a couple of
days!

						- Ted