Need a new machine

I recently posted to 9fans that I think I would like to get a new dedicated plan 9 box.

Here's my wish list:

• Small footprint
• Low power consumption
• Connection to a large amount of storage, perhaps a 1TB disk external if I can configure it as such.
• Good Plan 9 support
• Low cost

I'm finding people are migrating towards dual core Intel Atom boards. This seems like a reasonable start. SATA disks would be nice, and Solid State Disk (SSD) would be even better on the SATA interfaces. Sound support is really not needed, as I'm never in my office, and there's plenty of good USB sound devices out there it seems, like these Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Devices. So adding that later isn't going to be very difficult.

I was kind of disappointed recently to find my old trusty AMD box's CMOS battery was dead, and that I had to do a lot of interesting memory searching to remember some of the configuration I had in the BIOS to even get FreeBSD running again. Then when I tried to load a recent Plan 9 (new 9load based) it wouldn't even find anything to boot from but bios0 and fd0.

This machine's floppy drive is shot, and bios0 is the first hard disk in the machine, so that's not going to work when I'm trying to boot/install from a CD....

The key is I've got to get a low-cost machine... I just don't have a ton of money to throw around these days.

In the meantime I've been doing well with VMWare Fusion 2.x on Mac OS X to get a terminal server running. But I don't like using that for long term stuff.

One day, I might see what it would take to get Plan 9 ported to what seems like will be inevitable quad core ARM servers. Then perhaps I'll take a swing at a port. Plan 9 seems like a great OS for a platform such as that. Might be easier to get Inferno going though depending on the hardware.

Fun Distraction

As you can tell I like Plan 9. I recently have been trying to catch up with the latest developments in that OS. There's been a new USB driver, new 9load bootloader (which probably ought to be replaced with just the main kernel, and that is currently a summer of code project for google), and linuxemu.

That last one is really interesting. Apparently Russ Cox, and cinap_lenrek have each taken a swipe at making Plan 9 emulate Linux system calls. This is pretty cool in that we can now run a lot of linux programs directly on plan 9, and, in fact, are able to even run Debian complete with apt-get inside a little sandbox.

On top of that fgb actually ported an X11 server to APE (the POSIX compatibility layer for Plan 9) to use libdraw as a graphics backend. (it's called "equis"). Put that together with linuxemu and you can run Mozilla, Firefox, Opera etc, right in Plan 9.

I got some help getting it up and running from cinap, and after getting font files I was missing, I've got Mozilla up in Plan 9. I told him I was reasonably impressed with the speed, though he informed me that each Linux system call ends up being 4 on plan 9. I'm not sure what can really be done about that at the moment, but this instantly gives plan 9 users a capability they didn't have before - reasonable web browser access.

Now I wonder if when Google's Chrome OS comes out if we'll be able to use that and not need X at all....

Not quite dead

http://code.google.com/p/9ph/ is where I've stored what I've got so far for my 9p in Haskell implementation. It's incredibly larval, if not fetal at this point and doesn't do much.

In fact, I'm not even convinced I like what I've written at all so far, but it is true, that I can negotiate the TVersion/RVersion client-connect requests of a 9p2000 client to a 9p2000 server.

I've been having a very busy summer, full of family fun, and various work projects. I've been having to spend any of my extra time that does crop up on work related work as there's always more to do...

I'm still hopeful for this project, plus the new capabilities of cross compiling Haskell code from the JHC compiler to the iPhone (it can use a gcc backend that is the native iPhone compiler). If JHC would support more of GHC's capabiliteis, I'd be in business to do some interesting 9p related projects from the iPhone to varying Plan 9 or Inferno or any 9p2000 service.

It's rather exciting really. Especially when you consider how I'd really like to have a litghtweight IRC filesystem client (uses 9p2000) to my Inferno box, running on a Linksys router. Two lightweight systems running a distributed application with a sane protocol in between == beauty.

... I'll get there one day.