Okay, Minix doesnt crash.
Never has my Debian crashed either in two years of happy operation.

Sometimes, when X got stuck, I simply restart it,
and everything is fine again.

Will this situation be different if it happened in Minix?
means if X gets stuck, will it restart without affecting the other programs which depend on it?

Minix is still around being used?

It gives kernel designers something to argue about!

I tried it in VirtualBox and it worked OK, but I couldn't get X to work.

I think the idea behind Minix is the microkernel - so if one bit of the kernel crashes, you can just restart that bit, instead of having to restart the whole machine. I think X sits of top of the kernel in Minix in the same way as it does in Linux - so there's no advantage in running it on Minix vs. on Linux.

The argument is for system stability, not application stability. At least, that's my (limited) understanding of the different between monolithic kernels and microkernels.

I shall call it... "Mini X".

From a brief personal experience, a lot of code just plain doesn't compile on Minix, so for anything other than kernel hacking it's probably not worth trying. Maybe (like me) you're into looking at the operating system's innards, and then it'd probably be a decent idea to try running it in QEMU or something. But I really seriously doubt you want to run it on a machine for anything other than extremely trivial applications.

Actually Minix was originally written to teach operating design and remains mostly as an educational tool today (although some argue that it is better on embedded systems than linux). If you would like to learn about operating system design in general, minix isn't a bad place to start. With its smaller size compared to linux (I don't have any info as far a lines of code but the minix source takes up about 4.3mb on my machine compared to 248mb for the 2.6.24 linux kerel source) it's much easier to get to the bare bones of an os because that's basically what minix is, just the bare essentials of an os. As far as running minix, it's not really that useful, but given its academic roots, it's not really built to be a production os.

"What's great about Minix?"
Heretic! We shall send you to Andy Tanenbaum for re-education.

"Minix is still around being used?"
Yes, still small enough to be OK for the Operating Systems 101 classes. A number of people have told me that they have dropped Minix from their lectures and decided to talk about Linux instead - hardly surprising since decades ago lecturers discussed UNIX rather than Minix. In some countries lecturers weren't free to talk about UNIX and show the code in classes; in such cases Minix was the next best thing. Also, some like Tanenbaum believed UNIX source could be too confusing and it would be better to have a working operating system which was written explicitly for teaching purposes (code is easy to understand).

Some people are pushing Minix3 - I have a look at the website now and then for a good laugh: "It's infinitely better than Linux, even if it doesn't have any of the drivers which you will need for your hardware and it only builds for x86". I'm not saying it's a bad system - I'm just laughing at many of the claims. I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from working with Minix - maybe one day it may even be as good as Linux or one of the BSDs - oh, sorry - as BAD as one of those *NIXes.

System requirements?

With even just plain X installed those are actually very high...
It needs over 256MB ram (lowering the X.org bin with chmem) to get X running and 516MB to have twm run smoothly (without any huge applications).

I absolutely don't dislike it though, but it still needs a long way to become productive in the real world...

No offense, but can you provide some kind of proof? (official link on website, perhaps) Linux+Xorg+IceWM should work with 64mb of RAM, even KDE should be able to live with 128mb. So I doubt that system with goal to be an OS for low-cost computers, will require that much RAM just to run X.

See:
http://www.minixtips.com/2006/07/run...-on-minix.html

As far as I know, X11 wasn't even mentioned on their main page when I installed it.

Ok, thanks for the link. Although it is 2 years old, doesn't mention version of minix, I guess it'll do, since I won't be testing minix+X memory requirements anytime soon.

Using their last release on a system with 256MB, I can't even add a login manager without running out of memory ...