In article <1992Oct23.031534.4907@cbnewse.cb.att.com> sph1@cbnewse.cb.att.com (stephen.p.hill) writes:
quoted text
>I am going to take a class that requires a little Minix 
>programming ( either this spring or in the fall ) and I was 
>wondering if anyone ever tried to run Minix ( an 8088 version, 
>of course, not the 386 version ) under Linux.  I realize that 
>the best solution would be to convince the teacher to use 
>Linux instead of Minix, but Linux does not come with a textbook..
>
>It would be pretty neat if I could run 4 or 5 instances of Minix 
>under Linux, but I haven't got a clue if this is possible.
>Anyone with the answer?

Well, this sounded like a fun thing to try, so I tried starting the
minix univeral boot version under the linux DOS-emu, in the hope that it
would work as it uses the BIOS for most things.  I'm afraid it doesn't. 
It actually gets as far as loading the kernel and printing out the minix
copyright message and asking for the keyboard type. 

But after giving the correct keyboard, minix starts to do something to
the DMA registers (I haven't looked at the source - but that's what the
dosemu debugging info would seem to indicate), which the linux
dos-emulator doesn't emulate at all.  So when minix starts looping
waiting for something to happen, it just sits there, and I killed it
from another VC. 

So, no, it's not possible with the current emulator, and it would
probably take a lot of work to get it working. Not impossible, but not a
trivial project either.

                Linus