Plan 9 on Rasberry Pi
.

In the early 90s some unix hackers built a next-gen operating system, Plan 9
from Bell Labs. It's esoteric, but clever, internally consistent,
well-documented, and useful for seeing unixy ideas pushed to the limit. The
development group went in to build an operating system called Inferno that's
used for embedded development work, often driven by Plan 9 workstations.

Because drivers are a hassle, most people who run it use an emulated version
that sits on top of unix. I've wanted to run it on native hardware for many
years. I'd had several attempts, all unsuccessful.

Recently I read that you could get Plan 9 to run on the Rasberry Pi computer:

http://bendyworks.com/geekville/lab_projects/2012/11/getting-plan-9-running-on-the-raspberry-pi

I've followed this, and did a few things my own way, and succeeded. It was
easy.

Ingredients

* Rasberry Pi. Get a perspex case while you're ordering. On amazon, this costs about GBP 45.

* Micro USB cable (like that plugs into your kindle). Either from the power, or a USB to micro USB. This wwill be for powering the Rasberry Pi.

* SD Card, at least a couple of GB.

* A monitor that takes HDMI, and a HDMI cable.

* Some kind of unix workstation, for preparing the SD card.

* Keyboard

* Three button mouse. You really need this. The UI is weird and just needs three buttons.

* Network cable

The instructions from the link above were for a mac.

I had a different unix, so needed to find an alternative to diskutil. I did
this by running tail on the system log when I plugged in the SD card. This
tells you the device name. Then you use dd to write the image to that device.
Something to emphasise: you write to the SD card device, not to a partition on
it.

OK, then you put the SD card into the Rasberry Pi, switch everything on. Bam.

To shutdown you run 'fshalt', and then when that's done just disconnect the
power.

I haven't looked into how networking works yet. General goal at the moment is
to get inferno running on my main workstation, and then use the Plan 9 system
to connect to that.

[I haven't stopped developing roguelikes. I had a month off recently and
ploughed on with my designs but haven't yet assembled thoughts here.]