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Due to some, ah... legacy requirements, I find myself needing to create and access minuxfs partitions from a modern distribution (specifically Fedora 15). Unfortunately, there appears to be no documentation available to help me accomplish this task and I am operating almost completely in the dark.

Should it be possible to create and access minuxfs partitions from Fedora 15?

If it is possible, what steps do I need to take to allow the following: 1) Creation of minux file system partitions (e.g. mkfs.minix /dev/whatever or mkfs -T minix /dev/whatever) 2) Mounting of those partitions (e.g. mount -t minix /dev/whatever)

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To mount a minix filesystem, you'll need to load the minix driver with modprobe minix. mkfs.minix is a part of util-linux, but Fedora deletes it before creating their package, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=248293. You can download the source code from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/ and compile it yourself.

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This answer got me closest to what I needed to do. The specific steps that were necessary in my case (or at least the ones that worked for me) were: 1) Rebuild the kernel (using the information from fedoraproject.org/wiki/Building_a_custom_kernel). 2) Download and build util-linux. 3) Set SELinux to permissive mode (without which I couldn't create certain folders necessary on the media after mounting it). – Richard J Foster Sep 2 '11 at 17:43
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You will need minix kernel driver and minixfs user space tools. You have to check if the minix kernel driver is still included in your kernel. There is also a FUSE based implementation: http://code.google.com/p/fuse-minix/

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For anyone coming along later who, like me, thought the FUSE implementation had value, the project appears to have been moved or abandoned. The SVN repository at code.google.com is empty and there is no indication of the new location. – Richard J Foster Sep 2 '11 at 12:00

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