The shell and software

Ixolo feels like a small BSD system. The shell, the commands and most libraries come from NetBSD; the kernel, servers and drivers underneath are MINIX’s. This page covers what you get after logging in, and what you can and cannot install today.

The shell

/bin/sh is NetBSD’s sh (an Almquist shell). It is the login shell of root and the default for new users.

It has job control since PR #404, once the kernel and process manager gained sessions, process groups and terminal foreground groups. Interactive shells put each pipeline in its own process group, so the usual keys and commands work:

sleep 100          # press Ctrl-Z
jobs               # [1] + Stopped  sleep 100
bg %1              # let it run in the background
fg                 # bring it back; Ctrl-C ends it

Two more shells are in base and listed in /etc/shells:

Shell	Path	Notes
sh	`/bin/sh`	Default. POSIX shell with job control and command-line editing (`set -o emacs` or `set -o vi`).
ksh	`/bin/ksh`	NetBSD’s public-domain Korn shell.
csh	`/bin/csh`	The BSD C shell.

Change a user’s shell with chsh (or usermod -s /bin/ksh alice). There is no bash or zsh in base.

The userland

The commands are NetBSD’s. Most arrived with upstream MINIX’s resync with NetBSD in 2015; several have since been updated from NetBSD 10 or NetBSD-current. NetBSD’s manual pages describe them closely. Manual pages ship on the ISO and in the installed system: man ls, apropos socket.

A few things are MINIX’s own and have no NetBSD equivalent:

Command	What it does
`minix-service`	Start, stop, restart and update system services (servers and drivers) through RS. See Services.
`setup`, `netconf`	The installer and the network configuration tool.
`mined`	A small full-screen editor from classic MINIX.
`free`	Total, used and free physical memory, and the buffer cache.

service (without minix-) is NetBSD’s, and runs the rc.d scripts: service sshd start.

What ships in base

Everything below is built from the source tree and installed with the system (the minix-base set). Versions are from docs/THIRD_PARTY.md and the vendored sources.

Area	Software
Editors and terminal	`vi` (nvi), `ed`, `mined`, `less` 668, `tmux` 3.6a
Network	OpenSSH 10.6, dhcpcd 10.3.1, BIND 9.20.24 tools (`dig`, `host`, `nslookup`; `named` off by default), `ftp` (with HTTPS), `telnet`, `tcpdump` 4.99.6
Security	OpenSSL 3.5.7 LTS, Mozilla CA certificates with `certctl`, Heimdal 7.8 (Kerberos)
Data and scripting	`sqlite3` 3.53.3, Lua 5.4.8, `awk`, `sed`, `make` (BSD make)
Archives	`tar`, `pax`, `cpio`, `gzip`, `bzip2` 1.0.8, `xz` 5.8.3, `unzip`, libarchive 3.8.8
Libraries	zlib 1.3.1, expat 2.8.2, libevent 2.1.13, `libpthread`; libuv 1.52.1 as a static library in `minix-comp`
Time	tz 2026a

Not in base: Perl, Python, git, curl, a debugger (no gdb or lldb), and X11 (removed from the tree).

The compiler

The toolchain is LLVM/clang 22 with ld.lld; GCC and GNU binutils are gone. Whether you have a compiler inside the system depends on how it was installed:

The ISO and a system installed from it with setup have no compiler: the ISO carries the minix-base, minix-man and minix-tests sets, not minix-comp.
A disk image built from source with releasetools/amd64_hdimage.sh includes minix-comp: headers, libraries and, if the build did not use -V MKLLVMCMDS=no, the native clang/cc. Building that native compiler adds hours to the build, which is why the CI skips it.

Packages

Upstream MINIX 3 distributed binary packages built from its fork of pkgsrc, installed with pkgin. Ixolo has no amd64 package repository yet. The upstream packages are for i386 and an older ABI; they do not run here.

What exists today:

pkg_add, pkg_info, pkg_delete and pkg_create (NetBSD’s pkg_install) are in base. They install, list and remove binary package files you already have, but there is no repository to fetch them from.
pkgin itself is not in base. The helper scripts pkgin_cd, pkgin_all and pkgin_sets are inherited from upstream and expect a package collection that does not exist for amd64.
/usr/Makefile still points at upstream’s pkgsrc repository on git.minix3.org. It is upstream’s and does not apply to Ixolo.

So, to get software that is not in base today:

Add it to the source tree and build it with the system, the way everything in base is built (NetBSD-style reachover Makefiles). See Building from source and Contributing.
Compile it inside the system with the native clang, on an image that has it (see above). Simple programs with a plain Makefile or configure script are the best candidates; anything that needs Linux interfaces will need porting.

A pkgsrc port for amd64, with a binary repository, is on the roadmap. It does not exist yet, and there is no date for it.