On Saturday 28 Aug 2004 9:20 pm, Tom Brinkman wrote: > On Saturday 28 August 2004 02:41 pm, Charlie Mahan wrote: > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > Hash: SHA1 > > > > On Saturday 28 August 2004 13:23:01, Greg Meyer wrote: > > > I figure this one ought to keep the conversation going for a > > > while. > > > > > > I have been going through a Linux from Scratch build just for > > > the learning experience, and something has just dawned on me. > > > If a Linux system needs to be built from a host system, how > > > did the first linux system get built? > > > > > > In other words, how can I create something that needs itself > > > to be created? > > > > > > -- > > > /g > > > > On an i386 running minix as far as I remember. I'd have to dig > > for links to the history but for some reason that answer is > > stuck in my feable and fallible old brain. > > > > C. > > That's my recollection too Charlie. IIRC, Linus as much as > said so, and asked the minix author if it was Ok for him to > modify and distribute as OSS. Fortunately the answer was yes.
Careful, that's SCO territory. There is no Minix code in Linux and never was, so Linux needed no such permission, any more than you needed Linus' permission to write your email. It was, however, done that way. Read "Just For Fun" by Torvalds and Diamond for more information. Some time ago I did the first step of this process. I built a 32000 computer from scratch and hand assembled a simple operating system for it. (It didn't do much, just displayed a banner and had a couple of very simple commands.) That's as far as it went at the time. To go much further without driving myself crazy would have required an assembler to be written, probably on my BBC Micro in BASIC. The output from the assembler would be written to ROM, and after a fair amount of work there would be a BIOS available that will accept commands from a serial port and read and write disk sectors. Then things step up a gear. Instead of programming a ROM, the stuff you write gets sent to the BIOS and written to a disk, so the first thing you then write is a file system, then a shell, then an editor and finally an assembler. Now you can discard the other computer and use the simple operating system that you have to extend itself. It is possible to do all that work by hand, but it ties your brain in knots, and it hasn't been done that way since the fifties. Linus had it a bit easier, since he was working on a singe machine, he had the BIOS and the C compiler already, and the shell was available. But he had to implement a fair proportion of the POSIX system calls before they would run under his new OS. -- Richard Urwin
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