Plan9

I installed 9front on an old Dell Inspiron laptop, but I can't seem to get it to boot. I checked, and it looks like the files to allow it to boot are present on the drive, the partition is marked as active, and secure boot is off. I've also tried in both legacy and uefi boot modes. Is there something that might have gone wrong somewhere, or is it most likely related to the hardware I'm trying to run it on? Any help is appreciated, and I'm happy to answer questions :)

Edit: I figured it out. My drive wasn't formatted as MBR, and the installer wasn't asking if I wanted to format it since it wasn't an empty drive, so I formatted it correctly before installing. I also chose cwfs instead of hjfs. These changes made it so I could boot

Hi! I have many questions which I will try to phrase in ways that that can be answered in yes/no format, in the hope that my post will be no burden. I did not see anything in the sidebar restricting such a post, and neither have I found answers online.

• I am currently focusing on 9front. There being approximately 15 Plan 9 derivatives, is this community appropriate for asking 9front questions?
• I read that Plan 9 is monolithic, but I found a lot of apocryphal evidence that it's actual quite much more of a microkernel in spirit. Is this at all true?
• Searching "plan 9 Rust" returns only results for r9. Is there any cross compiling, or has Rust be ported to 9front? To be clear, I have no interest in Rust itself, but there are some programs written in Rust I'd like to have.
• I hate having to use a mouse. I consequently have greatly disliked Acme every time I've used it. Should I give up on 9front?
• I want helix as my editor. This is really just rephrasing the previous two questions: is there any hope of me being able to get Helix running on 9front?
• I hate mice, and so want a tabbed window manager. I vastly prefer herbstluftwm, but honestly any keyboard-driven tabbed WM workflow would work. Plan 9 doesn't run X; I'm not sure it even has the concept of window managers. Should I just give up on 9front?
• I mainly program in Go. Both Russ Cox and Rob Pike, often mentioned in the 9front literature, were/are instrumental in the creation of Go. The last post I read that mentions a Plan9 port was from 2015. Will I be able to develop Go on 9front?
• I don't care about git, but 9front devs have to be using something for VCS. What is it - or what are the VCS options? Please don't tell me it's still cvs, or shudder rcs.

Am I thinking about this all wrong? Is 9 front really just turning your powerful workstation into a dumb terminal from which you connect to other computers running all of the other software you need to do development? Or is it shoehorning folks into a drastically constrained set of tools - ACME, Plan9 C, Rio - useful for developing Plan 9 tools and little else? Or is there a wonderful world of Plan9 diversity, with the ability to support diversity, accommodate people who can't or won't use pointing devices, running tools that can cross compile to a variety of target platforms?

So I'm kind of using 9front for the first time and I really like it. It's really quite a simple operating system. There has certainly been a learning curve coming from Linux and BSD, but I'm getting there. Just need to set up Mail, Faces and an IRC client next.

So far I've just edited the theme, set up a couple functions, customised my riostart, edited the winwatch source code to reduce the padding etc. Everything I've done is pretty much in the acme window.

I've connected to the 9p VPS through rcpu which I find much better than using draw term. Although I suppose I'll need to use draw term to complete challenge two, set up faces for neinbook.

I'm hoping to learn how to edit the main right click menu so I can add launch commands for acme and netsurf. I also would like to edit the new window command to enable -scroll in all new windows. Any tips are welcome and appreciated.

I'm just curious if it would be possible to port rbw to 9front?

Just a screenshot. Drawterm into a local VM, rcpu into 9p.sdf.org. Outertheme: sand.theme inner theme: nordy.theme applications: stats(custom colors), winwatch (custom colors), 9weather, tacme, theme patch by sigrid

It's starting today, I just found out. The stream begins in 1.5 hours. https://twitch.tv/sdfpubnix

Looks like it’s good to go in April next year.

nein plan

The one true white rabbit.

thedaemons.space log So I entered the #occ old computer challenge this year and used the 9front fork of plan9 to do all my computing. You can read about it here. I haven't actually finished the log, gotta add more artwork and screenshots :) But the words are there mostly..

Lemmy uses the packages olowe.co/lemmy (source), which provides a io/fs filesystem interface to a Lemmy instance, and 9fans.net/go/acme to interact with acme. What you get is an Acme Mail inspired program for Lemmy. As you can see, it's a work in progress!

But it's been fun so far. Sorry that this isn't running on Plan 9 (running on OpenBSD). I'm on the road at the moment and don't have a way to connect to a server right now!

Techno-Mage seeks help from a hermit.