> One thing I hear a lot: installing Plan 9 is headache for many > people, particularly trying to trace down working docs to produce > working code: "... it's just a maze full of dead ends."
One of the reasons my videos exclusively demonstrate 9front is that getting a classic Plan9 system up and running is difficult. 9front documentation is more up to date and has fewer dead links. 9front has a bootable thumb drive image, so a basic demo of rio is very easy. My first video was walking through an install, and I did another recently by request. The only tricky part is the disk partitioning, as that is still a fairly old fashion interface, and sometimes the automatic option fails. So on the 9front end, the need for "I want to demo this for an hour" can mostly be done on the thumb drive image, and installing to actual disk is pretty painless too. > but I'd like to see this using Lola, not rio. I've lost more people > when I show them rio ... I'm on the fence about this. I love rio as a space to develop in. But I can also see it as lacking in terms of what people expect from a "desktop". And working with people trying to port 9front to the Pinephone, there is a need for alternatives. rio is a good demonstration of "the Plan 9 way", but I'm open to alternatives when need dictates it. > drawterm which *builds*. I continue to get reports of build problems > with drawterm. If there is a > devdraw dependency, put that in the repo too. I come across this everytime I build drawterm from source on Linux. However, I'm using an apt based Linux distro, and every time make errors on a dependency I can just google "(dependency name) apt" and quickly find out how to install the needed thing. I am a generally helpful guy, but if you are installing drawterm on Linux, and cannot handle googling for a dependency package, I'm sure you also have a Windows machine near buy and can just go download drawterm.exe > - have some way to show people they can "cpu" into the qemu instance, > and show off > the power of that model. > - There are too many fiddly bits to get right to bring up cpu and > other services. I do have videos walking through a full auth/fs setup and running cpu servers, and it is quite a bit of steps. A lot of people ask me for help after getting a basic terminal install on qemu or the like, and I usually recommend just turning it into a cpu server and accessing it via drawterm after that. It is a far better demonstration of how Plan9 works. As mentioned, one can just run a listener for cpu service on a terminal install. And in that case, it should be trivial to have a script one could grab to set a listener up in /cfg/$sysname/cpustart. Then all the instruction has to be is, "go grab the qcow image, run it, run 'hget (link to listener patch)', run the script, and now you have cpu service every time you start the VM". Big Picture; A lot of the quality of life work is being done on 9front. But 9front.org is not a couple clicks away on p9f.org I also get that 9front culture is not for everyone. I'm not exactly sure how to bridge that gap. All these forks were things that happened before my time. I'm just some guy who discovered they like "the Plan 9 way", tries to use it, and makes videos about it. As someone with no emotional investment in a particular fork, I think the Plan 9 Foundation should be about promoting Plan9 in the abstract. And that might mean a link on p9f.org to the 9front qcow image, and maybe getting some people to rewrite the 9front FQA to something that looks more like the FreeBSD Handbook, and have those docs on p9f.org, to keep the serious business aesthetic. It could be divided up if necessary. cat-v.org keeps man pages for several Plan9 based systems. Another thing might be to reach out to sdf.org ( https://sdf.org/plan9/ ). They host a bunch of Plan9/9front stuff, and run regular Plan9 boot camps, which is exactly just setting people up with an account to access a cpu server they host. If the need is for access to a 9legacy system, maybe they could host it. And at some point, p9f.org needs to stop being a museum to Bell Lab's old Plan9 web site. A bunch of the links are to 9p.io, and there are still Lucent logos and copyrights on some of the pages. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tbe8e5fda6ae62f5c-M25f7f53ca7ac443668df29cb Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
