February, 2005 Edition Copyright Arnold Kochman. Other copyrights also apply, in particular the Minix license.
This is a CD containing several Minix distributions, and supporting materials. Minix is an operating system developed for educational purposes. To the user, Minix looks like Unix, but on the inside it is built with a modern modular micro kernel architecture. Unix and Linux have a lot of complexity under the surface, due to historical reasons. They have maintained many disciplines in the interest of continuity and compatibility.
Minix is unburdened by most of this baggage, and therefore easier for learners to contend with. However, Minix is not just a toy, it is a useful operating system. Minix is open source. The Minix license changed in April 2000, and applies retroactively to all previous Minix distributions, even though they still carry the old, more restrictive license within. Minix is distributed persuant to the Minix license.
Minix can be run under an emulator (Bochs, Qemu) or a virtualizer (VMWare, Virtual PC) on many platforms: Sun SPARC; Unix; Linux; Microsoft Windows, and MacIntosh OS.