I would recommend MINIX 3.4.0 release candidate 6 to be installed on bare metal instead of MINIX 3.1.0 (especially how the boat loader works with MINIX 3.1.0 [book edition]). I installed of course both of them on bare metal, and had a more pleasurable experience with MINIX 3.4.0 rc 6. The pkgin manager was very straight forward, even more responsive than NetBSD 9.1 (I think 9.1's repo is non-existent!). I used an Acer 3620 laptop with 80 gigs (memory I think is at least 1 gig if not 2 max of ram) with an Intel Celeron M as the processor (it's low-end but a work horse). It was going to be my dedicated MINIX laptop/workstation, but I have other designs meant for that laptop. I will buy another low-end obsolete laptop with the same if not similar specs as the Acer (might either buy one from eBay or use my HP Pavillion, which has a bit higher specs than the Acer, it uses a Celeron processor that is more i686 however) and use that for my MINIX experimentations. I guess you could call me the MINIX mad man of Maine :3 Of course my networking was done with the use of a Google router, hardwired to the ethernet. I cannot wait for the next releases, MINIX has opened me to more than just loving Linux, it made have a deep fascination with UNIX and drove me into a spiritual journey with all things UNIX-like and inspired me to design DRAX OS with Tiny Core Linux. I might look into developing an OS with Genode if it is not too hard to do. Especially since Genode uses microkernels, which is another philosphy that MINIX uses to power the OS that I had me fall in love with the idea of going beyond monolithic kernels.