Minix 3 Terror

Then end of the school term is over, new term started, still not a lot of time for anything. Luckily I managed to push through a new project which is something I really like, so this term will be a whole lot of fun hopefully. Stress is mostly gone too, still don't know all my grades but the lowest grade I received so far was an 8, so it can't get much worse anymore.

The new project is going to be writing some USB drivers for a Sweex Webcam I've got laying around, for the Mac platform (nevermind that it's already supported by macam) and for the Minix platform. Which is, I found out this weekend, hell. It doesn't support *anything* yet, and I really mean *nothing*. I had to cut a hole in my barebone case to fit a second network card (realtek chip based) just to get some network running. I got some graphics too, X runs, but no window manager (unless you want to call TWM a window manager, in which case I declare you a very, very weird person). Also very annoying is that the filesystem doesn't have drivers yet for anything else but minix partitions. It didn't even see my FAT32 home directory, which is simply put idiotic.

Note the 'new' low profile network card on the right fiddled in (just barely...)

And there's NO USB support at all. Shit. Means I've got to write the entire USB subsystem first. Still, I like the idea of writing this stuff since I already found the 'first' linux implementation of those drivers and it doesn't look all that complicated (famous last words, heh). Plus minix's driver subsystem is fairly pretty implemented so that shouldn't be too hard either. I just wish there where more drivers implemented in the first place. I guess not that many people are interested in writing stuff for an operating system which isn't used that much. Oh well, I'm still going to give it a shot. It's going to be a long school term...

[: wacco :]

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