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MiNT
And I
by Bohdan Milar
Some of you may remember my short introduction published in
MyAtari last year. Now in the anniversary issue I am glad to start a whole
series about the MiNT operating system. When I thought
about how to start, one of MyAtari's editors told me, "Start
with yourself". And I said, "That's not a bad idea".
Well, I am an Atari
user from the Czech Republic. My father bought our first Atari (800XL) in
June 1987. Then came 800XE and in 1993 a 1040STE. This was also the first
computer I used MiNT on. I saw it for the first time at an Atari party. Then
I asked my friend to help me with installation and he did. I succeeded, but
there were problems with the graphical environment. MiNT specialists helped
me to solve it at another Atari party.
Since that time I am able to
install and configure MiNT myself. I have been learning more and more of its
functions and functions of GNU utilities provided with it. In 1997 I
replaced my STE with a Falcon and later a TT came. All these machines run
MiNT.
The first installation software I ever used was KGMD. It was a good
choice in the 1990s, but it is obsolete now. Thanks to Frank Naumann, SpareMiNT was born.
It is a modern collection of MiNT and
hundreds of its utilities. But there was no installer for it. So I decided
to write one.
I started to write shell scripts in bash, which is
quite similar to DOS *.BAT files. But bash is much more comfortable and fully
compatible with Linux and other Unix environments. These days I am ready to
write a whole accounting system in it, working under MiNT and Linux without
any modification.
The final stage is my home Ethernet.
It is a standard network platform where all my Atari (MiNT) machines can
co-operate with the Linux ones and the TT provides routing to the internet
for whole network while connected via a modem.
Of course it took some time
to learn all the networking things, but it is nearly the same under MiNT as
under Linux/Unix systems.
In the next issues we will take a closer look at
how it all works, why there is no reason to be afraid of MiNT and even how
to install and configure it to work for you and your
Atari.
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