Idris OS for the Atari ST

This repo contains the 3.5" floppy disk images of the Whitesmiths Ltd (now defunct) Idris OS version 3.12 for the Atari ST.

The porting work was done by David M. Stanhope at Computer Tools (also defunct), in 1986. He also ported MIT's X Windows (X10 R4) to the ST. The work included ST specific device drivers as well as pseudo drivers to support networking (e.g. sockets, select).

Distribution Manifest

The distro includes the following:

1. Boot disk (boot.st)
2. OS Distro disks (dist?of2.st)
3. Compiler disks (compiler?of2.st)
4. The kernel build disk (kernbuild.st)
5. X10R4 disks (st_xwin10r4_?of4.st)
6. Tar file of compressed tars of open source or PD sofware ported to Idris (misc_*.st)

The docs directory contains the scanned PDFs of the Idris manuals, STX Windows and CTI Net guides.

Idris uses the UNIX v6 file system format. To examine contents of the images, on Linux, use the retro-fuse v6fs utility to mount the v6 fs on a diskette: Example:

v6fs -o ro -o fsoffset=1 dist2of2.st ~/mnt/dist2

The filesystem on the boot disk starts at block 18 (fsoffset=18),

v6fs -o ro -o fsoffset=18 boot.st ~/mnt/boot

The misc floppies are tar of compressed tar files:

dd if=misc_toys.tar.st skip=1 | tar -tv

Running on Hatari

Idris runs on the 520 ST and the 1040 ST, as well as the MegaST. To run X10R4 use the MegaST emulation with 4MB of memory.

To run the system on Hatari, set Drive A: from Floppy disks menu to the boot disk image, then select "Reset Machine" on the main menu and press OK. After the restart, at the device number: prompt, press 0 followed by enter. Then enter idrisk1a at the [cboot]: prompt and then press enter. If nothing is entered at these prompts, the input will timeout and default to booting idrisk1a from the hard drive (device number 1).

Once Idris is loaded, the shell is started and the # prompt will appear. Some Idris commands are included on the boot floppy to allow bootstrapping the system onto a hard drive.

Hard Disk Installation

Follow the instructions in the "Idris Installation Guide for the Atari ST" in docs. The last section of the guide includes instructions on how to install STX Windows after Idris has been installed.

Hatari ACSI hard disk emulation doesn't seem to agree with Idris's ACSI driver. A workaround patch has been created by Christian Zietz for Hatari 2.6.1.

Idris is known to work with real Atari ACSI disks such as the SH205. The show0 command is used to view and designate an Idris partition (type IDR). The BuildHard script is then used to create a filesystem on the IDR partition. The installation documentation describes the number of blocks that should be reserved for boot and swap, depending on the system memory, and the number of sectors that should be given to BuildHard to pass to mkfs command.

Using only the boot floppy, the other floppy images can be inspected by mounting them on Drive B. Set Drive B to point to an image (e.g. dist1of2.st), then mount the second floppy by:

# mount -r /dev/fd1 /y
# ls -l /y
...
# mount -u /y

The -r flag signifies read-only, and the -u flag is equivalent to umount.

Once BuildHard is able to run successfully, it will create the hard disk partition, create the basic file system hierarchy and copy a few commands and will prompt the user to reboot and select to boot from the hard disk (i.e. device number: 1). Once Idris can boot from the hard drive, the Install scrip will guide the user through the installation process.

Good Luck