ST Mint: Opensource Unix for Atari ST

ST Mint is a FreeMiNT distribution which provides an opensource Unix environment for the 16/32 bits Atari line of computers. The target platform are Atari ST(E) and Mist FPGA board with at least 4 MB of RAM, 512MB SD Card drive, ST High Resolution.

ST Mint is distributed in the form of a ready to boot disk image, to use for instance with Lotharek's UltraSatan drive

Download: ACSI disk image

• unzip the SD card image, and write to it a SD card. The card has to be 512MB minimum, and all previous data on the SD card will be erased. How to write the SD card image depends on your platform:
  • Linux & Unix: follow this tutorial http://askubuntu.com/questions/179437/how-can-i-burn-a-raspberry-pi-image-to-sd-card-from-ubuntu or use dd
  • Windows: Download the Win32DiskImager program, and follow this tutorial: http://raspi.tv/2012/how-to-make-a-raspberry-pi-disk-image-to-sd-card-with-win32diskimager
  • OsX: follow this tutorial: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/23640

After inserting the media in your Ultrasatan device, your ST should boot into ST Mint. The boot sequence is quite long, and will start in the end the XaaES graphical environment with the TeraDesk desktop. When using a 4MB machine, you should have around 1MB of RAM free for applications.

Click on COMMAND.TOS, and 2048.APP and notice the two apps running simultaneously. Such a thing is not possible using the standard Atari TOS.

Click on the Desk menu =⇒ TosWin2 =⇒ File =⇒ Start shell and enjoy /bin/mksh, a Korn shell clone. Note that due to the very limited hardware of the ST compared to current standards, you can at most only run simple Unix command line tools.

After a starting Unix shell, you can play on the command line some music files, courtesy of my previous Live Dub bands. From the Unix shell:

cd /d/demodata
fplay *

Use the downloaded .img file as an emulated ACSI device, and just boot. If you use the Hatari emulator, it would be:

hatari --acsi st_mint-1.4.img

• Atari Hard Disk Driver 5 from http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/atari/diskutil/ahdi5.zoo
• FreeMiNT 1.19 build from 2022 snapshot
• 2048.APP from https://ptonthat.fr/two-o-forty-eight/
• COMMAND.TOS interpreter from http://download.minix3.org/previous-versions/Atari/
• mksh shell, with patch to run executables on FAT filesystem
• GNU Coreutils, crossed compiled by Vincent Riviere from http://vincent.riviere.free.fr/soft/m68k-atari-mint/archives/mint/
• Minix 3.1 grep and term

See the Roadmap on github. For General Questions, please use this thread on the Atari Forums. For Bug Reports, use the Contruction Kit Bug Tracker