MiNT
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Developer | Eric Smith, various volunteers |
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Written in | C |
Working state | Current |
Source model | Open source |
Initial release | June 1993 |
Latest release | 1.18.0[1] / 17 March 2013 |
Repository | |
Marketing target | Personal computers |
Platforms | Free Software) |
Official website | freemint |
MiNT (MiNT is Now TOS) is a
History
Work on MiNT began in 1989, as the developer Eric Smith was trying to port the GNU library and related utilities on the Atari ST TOS. It soon became much easier to add a Unix-like layer to the TOS, than to patch all of the GNU software, and MiNT began as a TOS extension to help in porting.
MiNT was originally released by Eric Smith as "MiNT is Not TOS" (a
At the same time, Atari was looking to enhance the TOS with multitasking abilities. MiNT could fulfill the job, and Atari hired Eric Smith. MiNT was adopted as an official alternative kernel with the release of the
After Atari left the computer market, MiNT development continued as FreeMiNT, and became maintained by a team of volunteers. FreeMiNT development follows a classic open-source approach, with the source code hosted on a publicly browsable FreeMiNT Git repository on GitHub and development discussed in a public mailing list., which is maintained on SourceForge, after an earlier (2014) move from AtariForge, where it was maintained for almost 20 years.
MiNT software ecosystem
FreeMiNT provides only a kernel, so several distributions support MiNT, like VanillaMint, EasyMint, STMint, and BeeKey/BeePi.[2]
Although FreeMiNT can use the graphical user interface of the TOS (the
The default one is currently XaAES, which is developed as a FreeMiNT kernel module. The older N.AES also works, however the modern alternative is MyAES.
References
- ^ "FreeMiNT 1.18.0". 17 March 2013.
- ^ Riviere, Vincent (13 September 2018). "Atari ST - History of The OS".