[antiRepublicrat]

Any idea if Minix installs on VMWare (player)?

Yes. Ready-made VMWare images are available at the site. Or you can download MINIX 3 and try it from a live CD. USB-bootable images are also available.

Tanenbaum has definitely gone the "small is good" approach he teaches. From a technical standpoint, it's genius, completely modular, true microkernel (less than 4,000 lines of code). It's probably the most robust and secure UNIX in the world. Even the worst-written video driver shouldn't be able to take down MINIX -- the crashed driver will automatically be restarted. Buffer overflows? MINIX only executes in read-only areas allocated for code.

All of that comes with some performance trade-offs, but you make your choices...

[rzeznikj at stout]

I was just curious--I'm putting the player on my Suse 10 partition. Different perspective, I suppose.

Wouldn't be bad experience-wise either.