Inferno Raspberry Pi image – beta release

http://lynxline.com/inferno-raspberry-pi-image-beta1/

by neverm0re • 12 years ago

95 28 12 years ago

lynxline.com

f2f• 12 years ago

Great news! This will finally bring Amoeba into the mainstream!

phaer• 12 years ago

2014, year of the Plan 9 desktop ;)

caseyf7• 12 years ago

Why would I want to run this on my Pi?

codezero2• 12 years ago

Why would you have a Pi instead of a MacBook Pro?

Rhetorical question is rhetorical.

insky• 12 years ago

Why is that a rhetorical question? It's a perfectly valid question.

mjl-• 12 years ago

fun to see. inferno is an impressive system.

be sure to click to the repository, it has an overview of the 26 steps (so far) to get to the point where it is now.

also congrats to the author for getting to this stage, with steady improvements.

SixSigma• 12 years ago

A compressed image of a bootable plan9 SD card for the Raspberry Pi is available from this link:

    http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/miller/9pi.img.gz

xkarga00• 12 years ago

Can someone explain the main differences between Plan 9 OS and Inferno? Why should I use one of them?

xiaq4• 12 years ago

plan 9 is the earlier effort of re-engineering Unix and runs on hardware. It was meant to replace Unix, but it never did.

With inferno they went the VM route (the dis VM) and built it so that it runs on myriad platforms, from Unix and ActiveX. It still runs on hardware though. The intension was that you can run a network of hosted and native inferno installations, making it easier to adopt. Unfortunately, inferno saw no widespread adoption either.

The underlying filesystem concept is basically the same (the latest version of 9p and Styx are identical), but the programming environment changed a lot (you write limbo to run on dis). Also the user space programs were rewritten and get overhauled a bit. The community never get divergent enough though; inferno people tend to identify themselves as part of the plan 9 community.

shimon_e• 12 years ago

With most of the inferno team working for Google; I wonder why android hasn't adopted any of inferno's technology.

xiaq4• 12 years ago

Answering the second question: you won't want to use it in production, but if you have ever been intrigued by one of those Unix philosophy preaches, you should definitely take a look at it. It takes the tool philosophy (build simple tools that are easy to combine) and filesystem metaphor much further, besides addressing some (albeit not all) long-standing Unix WTFs.

Plan 9 is not the most elegant design of OSes, but its simple ways of combing primitives are pretty amazing. Simplicity is underappreciated nowadays.

smorrow• 12 years ago

"you won't want to use it in production"

Would you mind saying why? It isn't unstable or anything, just unfamiliar, in that you can't write C programs on it. But people do use it in production.

ritonlajoie• 12 years ago

Hello i would like to try that in virtualbox since I don't have a RPI. How one would go to load an .img file in virtualbox ? Should I try to convert it to some .iso and boot with it ?

rm445• 12 years ago

Are you very specifically interested in running an ARM port targeted at the Raspberry Pi? If you just want to try Inferno or Plan 9 generally, try:

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/downloads.html

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/download.html

Narishma• 12 years ago

VirtualBox is for x86 CPUs only. It doesn't support ARM. You need something like qemu instead.

rcarmo• 12 years ago

Tried it, seems there's something wrong with the image: https://code.google.com/p/inferno-rpi/issues/detail?id=1 (gonna try a second SD card anyway)

I have high hopes for this, though, since Inferno is a lot of fun to tinker with.

Inferno Raspberry Pi image – beta release

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