Minix on the Lisa

[jamesdenton]

In the spirit of "all things on Lisa", I introduce to you a "port" of the Minix operating system for the Apple Lisa.



The repo https://github.com/arcanebyte/lisa-minix includes instructions for cross-compiling from macOS using gcc and also includes tooling to build out a ProFile image that's ready to go. Enjoy!

[bmwcyclist]

Wow!!!!

[AlexTheCat123]

Impressive; so many things are being ported to the Lisa that it's almost overwhelming!

One quick note: The docs mention that the size of the hard disk image must be "exactly 5,175,296 bytes (9728 blocks) or 10,350,592 bytes (19456 blocks): ESProFile sets its spare table from the file size and only knows those two." This isn't true; ESProFile will happily accept an image of any size you want, and will make a custom spare table to match. That's how the 50MB LOS compilation image works. So you can have an utterly massive Minix disk if you want!

[jamesdenton]

"You're absolutely right."

@AlexTheCat123 Agreed 100%, that is/was a bad assumption and I'll get that fixed.

[TorZidan]

Have not tried it, but this picked my interest:

"The make lisaem-* targets boot the images in LisaEm without anyone at the emulator, type commands and check the output."

I could not figure out how this works. Are you sending these commands over a serial port or somehow "typing them in LisaEm" (similar to the "paste host clipboard" menu item)?

Why is this important: if you are developing something for the Lisa using AI, it would be extremely useful to "tell" the AI how to launch LisaEm and how to compile and run and test your new app by moving the mouse, clicking, typing text, inspecting the Lisa screen, etc. This way the AI can run in a close loop, without your intervention, until it completes the task.

[jamesdenton]

@TorZidan There's a few mechanisms at play here and they require a patched LisaEm to make it work. I don't think I've pushed those patches yet. I added some test hooks that watch a file and push its contents through the COPS as if it were typed on the keyboard. There's also the automatic screenshot and mouse mover. The AI tools appreciate screenshots of errors (and it's hard to copy/paste out, anyway).

For Minix, specifically, the console also directs output thru the serial port, and using 'expect' we can wait for particular output and act on it. There should also be tests that dump to file and open the profile image after to compare.