Yes, that's right - who needs a GUI? who needs more than 640K? If you really want to impress in the office you need one of these - an 8088 laptop running Minix 2, show up those Thinkpad weilding morons with their thumbprint scans, I'm ditching my Vaio in favour of this beast of a computer - the minix laptop!

Fair enough, it won't give the latest Thinkpad much of a run for it's money, but I saw this Zenith Datasystems MiniSport HD on eBay and, well, frankly I felt sorry for it. It must've been the mutt's nuts at some point in its life - I mean, MS-DOS 3 In ROM, a whopping 20Mb HDD, 640x200 LCD, what's not to like? Well, MS-DOS 3 basically, so I refitted it with a proper OS - Minix. And it's now a serviceable machine, works well as an RS-232 terminal for some stuff I'm working on and the battery even still holds a charge, which is more that I can say for my four year old Vaio. It compiles C, albeit slowly, and Minix is great for playing with operating systems, so I say, don't run with the crowd and all their dual-core nonesense. Laugh in their faces as they struggle with the latest features of Word - we can have vi running in 124K...

Aint she a beauty? You know you want one...

Okay, I'm sure there was actually a reason for putting this here, oh, yes, that was it. The Zenith is basically an XT, and Minix assumes, reasonably enough, that only AT class machines have a 1.44Mb Floppy, so you need to alter a line in floppy.c to get the floppy working on the Zenith.

I used Minix 2.0.2, in the kernel, line 546 of floppy.c needs to be changed from

if (pc_at) out_byte(FDC_RATE, rate[d]);
to
out_byte(FDC_RATE, rate[d]);


For convenience, there is a kernel image of Minix 2.0.2 that works on the Zenith here

One other thing, when I became the proud owner of this mighty laptop, there was a boot password set that I didn't know. To get rid of it requires some EEPROM jumping, so you have to take the bottom off the laptop and short out the EEPROM as described in this article. This is basically what I did to get into the thing.

On mine the chip wasn't labelled as described, but was roughly in the same place, labelled U32 on the PCB. I shorted pin 3 to pin 5 and it did the trick, as per pic...