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ST Mint: A FreeMiNT distribution for the 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 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 use for instance with Lotharek's UltraSatan drive
Disk image
Download: ACSI diskimage
Writing the media
- 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.
Try out multitasking
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.
Try out a Unix Shell
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 standards, you can at most run simple Unix command line tools.
With an emulator
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
What's inside
- 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/
Bugs and limitations
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


