9front
======

I have installed the 9front [1] it  a QEMU virtual machine. It's a Plan
9 fork which is actively developed, you know.

I have a few  computers which seem to be fully  (or at least partially)
supported by the 9front  but I want to test it first.  It's a i386 port
of  the 9front  running on  a Linux  ppc64le. It's  still fast  enough.
It's  much faster  and much  more reliable  than use  of remote  9front
installation and the drawterm.

The Mothra  WWW browser can access  the 9front homepage and  a very few
other pages (my  home page [2] is  among them but my blog  [3] is not).
And it seems that there is no Gopher browser now.

But I have  not installed the 9front  to browse WWW, of  course. I have
wanted to know if  it makes sense (for me) to try it.  To use it I need
to port some of  my ANSI C stuff here. I also wish  to make at leas one
GUI application for the Plan 9. So  I have been messing around and have
trying to do some things. At the  moment I have a working Git (there is
a Git clone  for the Plan9 available!) and found  that the pcc compiler
works quite nicely (I have not started  to use the Plan 9's 8c/8l stuff
as my code is  still ANSI C). There is some  sort of Unix compatibility
layer in /bin/ape. The ape/make is not  a GNU Make so I have found that
I have to modify  some of my Makefiles a bit.  Fortunately, I don't use
any GNU-only C extensions so both  the ape/cc and pcc compile my source
codes happily.

I have been using  the ACME editor for work. I like the  way in which I
can add new commands to the "menu bar". Too bad that there is no syntax
highlighting.

It seems that 9port might be a nice free-time project for holidays...


References:

[1] http://9front.org
[2] http://jirka.sdf.org
[3] http://jirka.1-2-8.net