Decision made: Minix it is.
The install was reasonably straight forward:
Burn a CD.
Stick said CD in tray.
Boot computer.
Follow on screen prompts.
In about an hour or so I had a working Minix install.
Unfortunately, it was completely lacking in the realm of network connectivity as the NIC was not recognized. In fact, the fxp driver told me explicitly that my card wasn’t supported!
After first determining that my NIC was an Intel PRO/100 with hardware revision 82557C (by setting VERBOSE to 1 in /usr/src/drivers/fxp/fxp.h), I then took a look at the source for the fxp driver located in /usr/src/drivers/fxp/fxp.c and noticed the following:
case FXP_REV_82557A: str= "82557A"; /* 0x01 */
fp->fxp_type= FT_82557;
break;
case FXP_REV_82557B: str= "82557B"; break; /* 0x02 */
case FXP_REV_82557C: str= "82557C"; break; /* 0x03 */
Looks to me like revisions B and C are explicitly not supported while A is. I figured I’d take a risk and modified the code thusly:
case FXP_REV_82557C: str="82557C"; /* 0x03 */
fp->fxp_type= FT_82557;
break;
Upon performing a make clean && make && make install and rebooting I had a network connection and all was well.
Now on to the actual task at hand: Making Minix green.