mintnet frustrations

[Mark_G]

For some weeks, I'm working with mint (easymint) together with mintnet on my Falcon030. I've taken the mintnet from the easymint.

After all, I'm very disappointed from mintnet, I find it really terrible to work with. This shows my mood :

Some general remarks :
Booting the machine takes a while, setting up domain, fstab, mounting devices etc.. . It all takes all too long.

Even I don't find any information what and why the program is doing this. How I can cut in the start-up sequence. A falcon (orTT) is NOT a state of the art server, or designed for multi-profile login.

Second, smbclient takes too long to initialise. When you compare it with the smbclient stack for Magic, it's a difference between day and night.

Third, when I check the config files for the mintnet, they contains all scripts, no easy modification, for the hell why is it done? It couldn't be easier? It slow down the start-up sequence. An EASY mintnet stack was maybe too hard to do.

Further, the lack of information. I tried to install bnet for mint. It didn't work. No help at all. No reactions at posts. Nobody is using it? Even no reaction from the author. Is he dead?

And for mint, when I open a shell. It takes a while when I can start. With mupfel I didn't got all that delay.
I don't know what he's doing when I start the shell, even no documentation to find how I can cut in some scripts. It's not bash itself, but again some start-up scripts.

I don't understand the programmers. Mint has it to become a relatively quick multitasking OS, and without the mintnet it's rather good. But al that additional lag make it a dragon to work with. In my opinion that guy who made all those scripts hit the ball totally wrong.

You can add as many futures as you want but if becomes so slow as a lame duck, and nobody can/will use it.

When you program it only for that handful of guys who use a hades, milan or beefed up atari, rather a minority, you can definitely state it, so nobody of the majority of the remaining atari users are wasting their time with this. Or show them how to remove all that additionally ballast.

You see, I've a lot of frustrations, I was really hoping that all the software for this machine after all those years became mature. So it's absolutely not.

Mark

[Dal]

Ooooo interesting. I am also using Easymint on my Falcon 030 and wanted to look at the development package. Unfortunately, you need to go through the Net package first. Not so sure I want to cripple my system based on your findings.

Can I ask what you are using as an ethernet adaptor?

Cheers.
Dal.

[Mark_G]

I use the netusbee.

Works like a sharm.

Mark

[mikro]

mark: well, yes, you're certainly right about some things.

but keep in mind:

a) that mint net package is from '94, ported from BSD tcp/ip stack so there's certainly a lot of things to improve / bugfix
b) try to run some unix (windows ;-)) at 16 MHz with 16 MB RAM -- you'll get much much much worser results
c) freemint is quite easy to explore (in compare to linux or windows) -- you can find all startup scripts in /etc/rc.d and you can play with them as long as you want (there's maybe 30 startup operations in compare linux's hundreds of them)
d) it's free and open source -- you can always take a look into sources and find a bug / optimize / disable things you want.

[Mark_G]

Hello,

Mikro, Thanks for your µmint.
That's the way I want my mint configuration.
Easy and straight forward. Minor cfg files, and fast start up.

However, I use now Gemini + Mupfel as shell.
I’m very happy with Mupfel, but under Mint I’ve some strange issues.
When a program gives some text output (eq e2fsck), the output in Mupfel is scrambled. But under the console from toswin2, the output looks OK.

I checked a lot, but I couldn’t find the configuration.

Someone has some clues ?

Mark

[jfl]

However, I use now Gemini + Mupfel as shell.
I’m very happy with Mupfel, but under Mint I’ve some strange issues.
When a program gives some text output (eq e2fsck), the output in Mupfel is scrambled. But under the console from toswin2, the output looks OK.

The only explanation I may have is that Mupfel is extremely old, unmaintained, not standards compliant and that you can't expect much from such ancient software. If you like it, use it as much as you want, but don't expect it to behave correctly within a modern context.

[Mark_G]

Hello,

The strange thing is, in the past, and with an other Mint version, it was working.

Is there some good doc. how the consoles are configured ?

Regards,

Mark

[joska]

The strange thing is, in the past, and with an other Mint version, it was working.

I haven't used mupfel since 1994 or so, but IIRC it's a VT52-terminal. When you installed EasyMiNT, the terminal might be set to TW52 or TW100. Trying to output TW100 control codes on a VT52 terminal will be messy for sure Try a simple "setenv TERM vt52" in mupfel. If that fixes it, add this to your shell's start-up script. You can find it in /etc.

[joska]

For some weeks, I'm working with mint (easymint) together with mintnet on my Falcon030. I've taken the mintnet from the easymint.

Mark, you're mixing MiNTnet with the complete, unix-like environment that EasyMiNT has set up for you. You don't need any of this to use MiNT-net. You only need to put inet4.xdd and the relevant hardware driver (netusbee.xif or whatever it's called) in the MiNT-folder to install MiNTnet itself. All the other stuff (the unix-like folder structure, scripts, tools etc) just happens to be the utilities that are used to configure and use MiNT-net. You only need a few of these to set up MiNT-net. No scripts are needed. Just a couple of tools (ifconfig and route should be enough) and a few config files in u:/etc.

I used a simple setup like this for ages on my 030 Falcon. If all you want is a GEM desktop environment and some basic networking, I can help you with a small setup. PM me if this sounds interesting.

[wongck]

MintNet can be setup, using the normal Unix command - ifconfig & route.
inet.xdd and the driver fr the ethernet interface needs no configuration.
If you use CAB / HW with the overlay, you do not need to setup any protocols/services files or very minimal files.

I would not run daemons on the Falc even on a CT63, slowdown.

[jens]

You might have a look at CrippleMiNT (by maanke) or at KrapMiNT (by evl?).
Those are small distributions that work well on a plain Falcon without ext2 partition.
Just add GlueSTiK to support more internet apps, and off you go.