Plan9 / Inferno
Mon Feb 16 18:57:00 CST 2009
I've had this craving for some light-weight alternative platform. Tonight I had a few nibbles of Inferno, the latest interpretation of Plan 9, which is what Dennis Richie and others went on to work with after UNIX. In short, all resources are accessed through a common file-like api. This makes everything available via scripts. On top of that, inferno runs on something like a VM so the programs are portable to all inferno installs. Individual Inferno machines are easily connected to facilitate distributed solutions.
I was trying to run Inferno hosted on a Linux workstation (Gentoo). I downloaded the component tar balls, but the emu binary just hung upon invocation, which hung the installer, as the installer runs on inferno. I finally did get emu running by checking out a subversion working copy, rebuilding Inferno on my workstation and running it that way. The next thing I ran into was many complaints about missing fonts. Charon, the browser, can't display all its buttons. I didn't know this for sure until I fired up the Windows version of Inferno, which does seem to work ok. I still haven't solved it. I did note, however, that someone has put together an overlay which will provide an Inferno ebuild for gentoo.
Now, I'm watching a Google tech talk. My baby girl seems to like this one. After that, I'll go catch up on what is happening in NetKernel land.