Plan 9 available

[9pi]

Another alternative operating system is now available for the Raspberry Pi: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9). There's an installable image (about 144MB compressed) at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/cont ... 9pi.img.gz – to try it, just gunzip to the start of a 2GB+ SD card and boot.

The image is configured for a stand-alone machine, starting up with an introductory desktop for user glenda, the Plan 9 mascot. If your pi is connected to a network with DHCP service, you will want to copy cmdline-demo-net.txt to cmdline.txt in the boot partition. This will enable networking, and use NTP to set the clock at boot time.

The SD image contains a snapshot of the complete Plan 9 distribution, including source code for everything (kernels for arm, x86, and powerpc; C libraries; and 500+ commands). The system is stable enough to maintain itself – to rebuild the kernel from source on the pi (depending on the speed of your SD card, it should take about a minute), just do:

Code: Select all

cd /sys/src/9/bcm; mk

[atvdude01]

i just tried this but my wireless mouse is not working.... the button work but the cursor wont move.... any help?

[9pi]

i just tried this but my wireless mouse is not working....

Do you know how your wireless mouse communicates with the Pi? If it's Bluetooth, then I'm sorry to say it won't work because Plan 9 has no official Bluetooth support yet. I have an experimental Bluetooth driver which works for some USB Bluetooth adapters but I haven't had time to test it on the Pi.

[atvdude01]

its a RF one i think... its not bluetooth for sure... its a logitech m310

[9pi]

its a RF one i think... its not bluetooth for sure... its a logitech m310

You could try asking in the usenet / google group comp.os.plan9 whether anyone has had experience with this type of mouse. The USB keyboard + mouse driver is the same on all Plan 9 platforms, so it's probably not specifically a Raspberry Pi issue.

[skywalker]

i just tried this but my wireless mouse is not working.... the button work but the cursor wont move.... any help?

Same for me.

However, please see the comment thread to this article:
http://bendyworks.com/geekville/lab_pro ... spberry-pi

The tips there (new kernel, additional startup argument) worked for me.

Hopefully we'll get an updated 'official' RasPi image soon. Obviously, it's nice for everyone (especially newcomers) not to have to go off hunting for remedies from the get go.

Anyway, I love that we're getting so many interesting OSes coming through on the Pi now. It's just so easy and convenient to try out 'new' things on the Pi. On a regular computer you typically have to be messing around with VMs and stuff, or worse - too big a cost for a casual look at something interesting. With multiple SD cards you can change the personality of your Pi with a quick swap and a few seconds of reboot. Cool!

[ukscone]

[moved from Other by mod. lets keep things neat & tidy. a place for everything and everything in it's place ]

[anotherbloke]

Are there any screenshots?

[Florent]

You can find a lot of screenshot on the net, here is a screenshot from the official website :

[alexeames]

Are there any screenshots?

Perhaps a video would suffice?
http://raspi.tv/2012/plan-9-operating-s ... ard-miller

[Florent]

Perhaps a video would suffice?
http://raspi.tv/2012/plan-9-operating-s ... ard-miller

or more videos ?
The first one is a tour of the acme text editor :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M
and the second one is another demonstration of Plan 9 from Bell Labs :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoGLU1l7LwY

[9pi]

Hopefully we'll get an updated 'official' RasPi image soon.

I've put up a new 9pi.img.gz with the updated mouse driver. I haven't made "kbargs=-b" the default, because most users won't need it; if you do, you will still have to edit your cmdline.txt.

[alexeames]

I've put up a new 9pi.img.gz with the updated mouse driver. I haven't made "kbargs=-b" the default, because most users won't need it; if you do, you will still have to edit your cmdline.txt.

Very tempted to try this

But remembering your comment about the three button mouse, would a normal cabled USB mouse with a clickable scroll wheel fit the bill? (Packard Bell IO-3UP)

[Florent]

You can use a mouse with a clickable scroll wheel as middle button and the scroll wheel can be used to scroll up and down a scroll bar too but you should avoid to do that because plan 9 make too much use of the middle button and if you push too much on the scroll wheel you may get repetitive strain injury to the finger you use to push the scroll wheel.

[alexeames]

Ok thanks. I'm not planning on buying a new mouse just to try Plan 9. Glad I'll be able to testdrive with one I have.

I'm not expecting to use it a lot, but curious enough to have a go.

[alexeames]

Got it up and running
Don't know what the heck I'm doing but it's fun

How do you shut down? I've tried exit, shutdown and a google search has got me nowhere. This is like being a new computer user all over again.

[Florent]

Yes, Plan 9 is fun and a delight to use

[alexeames]

Didn't know how to exit. After much piddling about I tried CTRL+ALT+DEL and it rebooted

Still need to find out how to shut down though

[Florent]

When you want to shut down you need to stop the file server first so that all unwritten data is flushed to disk. to do it you have to enter the command fshalt on a console window, If you don't do this the system may not keep the last changes you made. after that you can power off (pull the plug in the case of the Raspberry Pi) the computer.

[alexeames]

Excellent thanks

[Florent]

I think the next questions about this operating system shouldn't be posted on this topic but on a dedicated one.

[jrt_ms1995]

You can use a mouse with a clickable scroll wheel as middle button and the scroll wheel can be used to scroll up and down a scroll bar too but you should avoid to do that because plan 9 make too much use of the middle button and if you push too much on the scroll wheel you may get repetitive strain injury to the finger you use to push the scroll wheel.

I've tried Plan 9 (last week, not the latest version) with wired keyboard and wired mouse (HP 2-button, scroll wheel MSU0923). Booted very fast. No response at all, however, from this mouse. Couldn't do much with the keyboard since I didn't know how to switch windows with key strokes. Just wanted to report.

Thanks, and good luck, Glenda.

John

[Florent]

I've tried Plan 9 (last week, not the latest version) with wired keyboard and wired mouse (HP 2-button, scroll wheel MSU0923). Booted very fast. No response at all, however, from this mouse.

Does your mouse works with the 10th december version ?

Couldn't do much with the keyboard since I didn't know how to switch windows with key strokes.

In rio (the Plan 9 window manager) you can't switch windows using keyboard, most of the actions are done using the mouse because it was designed so that users can be efficient using a mouse.

[Florent]

You can use a mouse with a clickable scroll wheel as middle button and the scroll wheel can be used to scroll up and down a scroll bar too but you should avoid to do that because plan 9 make too much use of the middle button and if you push too much on the scroll wheel you may get repetitive strain injury to the finger you use to push the scroll wheel.

It's also possible to simulate the middle button by holding down shift key whilst pressing the right button.

[Rox64]

Richard, thanks for this port of Plan 9. I have heard a lot of good things about this interesting OS since a while. Although I'm not an expert Linux user (I can barely use CLI apps at all and I have zero knowledge of programming), I'm very open to learn about other free software OS, computing paradigms and ways of dealing with certain problems. Plan 9 sounds like an awesome project for awesome people, with a very clean design and code and a minimalist approach. I think this is what we need in these times of extremely bloated desktop managers, monster-sized binaries and tons of APIs and shared libraries which deviates from the "Unix way". Plus distributed computing with Plan 9 and Rpi sounds like a win-win situation for everybody!

As a future Raspberry Pi user (and maybe a Plan 9 user too!), I wonder what could be the best P9 distro for Rpi or a virtual machine like Qemu. 9front does not have a port for the Rpi yet, but from what I know it's focused on desktop users and bleeding edge features, thus not being as stable as stock P9. I think I could learn a lot more by using P9 and maybe porting by myself some funny stuff (like vanilla Doom/Chocolate Doom, tetris clones, roguelike games, music and video players and some suckless and development tools) rather than sticking with 9front (which already has these ports). What do you think?

Also, can you please explain to me the differences between the current versions and forks of Plan 9? From what I know, Plan 9 is still being developed at a very slow pace and between not so big cooperation between the developers and the community, thus someone created 9legacy as an "experimental" branch (much like Linux 2.5 was to 2.4, right?). Then there's 9atom, the first fork of P9 which added some stuff later incorporated to 9legacy and 9front and now adding experimental support for some hardware; 9front, the "desktop" and "bleeding edge" distro; and Nix, focused on distributed computing. Am I right? Is there another fork I haven't menctioned?

Yup, I'm interested on Plan 9 development and community's history too =)

And btw, since stock Plan 9 isn't dead and is still updated and rebuilded every day, what version did you use to build your Rpi port? 4th Edition as released in 2002? Current (and unstable) development version?

Thanks for everything.