ST Mint: A FreeMiNT distribution for the Atari ST

ST Mint is a FreeMiNT distribution which provides is an opensource Unix kernel for the 16/32 bits Atari line of computers. The target platform are Atari ST(E) and TTs, and Mist FGPA boards with at least 4 MB of RAM, 128MB SD Card drive, ST High Resolution.

St Mint is distributed in the form of a ready to boot diskimage, to be written to a SD card.

Download: ACSI diskimage

• unzip the SD card image, and write to it a SD card. The card has to be 128MB 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: http://www.embeddedarm.com/support/faqs.php?item=10

After inserting the media in your Ultrasatan device, your ST should boot into ST Mint. After booting a 4MB machine, you should have around 1MB of RAM free for applications.

After a rather slow boot sequence, you should land on the desktop. 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 list =⇒ 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 standarts, you can at most run simple Unix command line tools.

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-1.2.img

• AHDI hard disk driver from http://www.atarimuseum.de/downloads/treiber/ahdi6061.zip for ACSI disk
• FreeMiNT 1.19, travis build 4d21842c
• 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/

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