This file may be freely reproduced.

Here are some frequently asked questions about MiNT, with answers:


(1) Will MiNT work on my _______ (insert name of ST system)?

Yes. Whether or not you *want* it to work on your system is another
question. MiNT is of virtually no use if you only have 512K of RAM.
If you have 1 megabyte of RAM on no hard drive, MiNT is not very useful.
With pretty much any other configuration, MiNT has some uses. As with
any multitasking system, the more memory you have, the more processes
you can run (and hence, the better).

(2) What's the difference between MiNT and Gulam?

Gulam is a command line interpreter (CLI). MiNT is an operating
system kernel. That means that MiNT accepts commands from
programs, rather than directly from the user, and allows those
programs to launch other programs that run concurrently
(multitask) or to take advantage of other MiNT features like
pipes and shared memory. Gulam doesn't provide any extended
operating system features, but it does provide a nice user interface
to the existing operating system. It's quite possible to use gulam
as a CLI running under MiNT.

(3) Do I need to use a CLI to use MiNT? What CLIs work with MiNT?

No, you don't *need* a command line interface to use MiNT. But, since
MiNT can run only one GEM program at a time, you'll probably find one
useful! There are several good CLIs available for MiNT. The one that
comes with MiNT (mintshel) is moderately useful, albeit quite buggy;
it does have the advantage of being small. There are ports of several
Unix shells (such as tcsh, bash, and ksh) available from various FTP
servers.

(4) I can't do an "ls" or "dir" command in mintshel.ttp -- it always gives
    me "command exit code -33". What's wrong?

"Exit code -33" means "file not found". mintshel has very few built in
commands, and "ls" is not among them. So it looks along your PATH for
a program called "ls.ttp", "ls.prg", or "ls.tos". If none is found, you get
the error indicated. There are various file utilities available (for
example, the GNU file utilities, or Allan Pratt's utilities) which can
be used with mintshel; just put them in one of the directories specified
in the PATH environment variable. See the mintshel documentation for more
details.
(In a pinch, you can always "alias ls 'echo *'", but this produces a
less than desireable output.)

(5) When I try to run MGR, I get a message like "can't get a pty".
    What's wrong?

This message usually means that MGR can't run a shell. This could be
for a variety of reasons, but the most common is that there is no SHELL
environment variable, or it doesn't point to a valid shell. Make sure
you put the whole path in, e.g. setenv SHELL c:\bin\sh.ttp.

(6) XXXX.PRG (insert name of some program or other) doesn't work any more
    if I boot with MiNT. Why not?

There are several possible explanations. The most likely is that XXXX.PRG
does something illegal or questionable, like stealing certain system
vectors or accessing undocumented memory locations. In some cases, it's
just a conflict between MiNT and XXXX. Some of these conflicts can be fixed
by running XXXX *after* MiNT, instead of having it before MINT.PRG in the AUTO
folder.
