Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 04:20:19PM -0400, Chris McGee wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I'm not sure how many on here are aware of the Pine SBC's. There are a few
> different variants of those. Now there are even pre-built laptops and a
> phone. There is a plan for a tablet too. https://www.pine64.org/

I have the Pinebook Pro and the Pinephone.  Both are fun toys of no real
value.  The Pinebook Pro is almost good, but like all touchpad-only
laptops, it has an absolutely unusable mouse builtin.  It's even worse
than other touchpads, and it's rare for me to be able to differentiate
them.  The phone lasts anywhere from forty minutes to five hours to a
charge cycle, depending on the phase of the moon.

The best feature they've got is the ability to output serial over the
headphone jack, with an appropriately-wired cable, which I also have.

> I wonder for example if it might spark some more interest for people to try
> Plan 9 if they knew that there is a source of inexpensive and standardized
> hardware and things work mostly out of the box.

There is already a source of inexpensive and standardized hardware.  If
people won't try Plan 9 on an x86 machine they can get for $50 on eBay, why
would they try it on a $200 laptop with a weird processor?  Regardless, I'm 
willing to run whatever tests might be helpful for people interested in doing 
this development work.  I have all the gear.

> Perhaps this is an opportunity for the Plan 9 community to think what it
> would mean to run in a phone form factor.

https://github.com/floren/hellaphone
and
https://github.com/bhgv/Inferno-OS-bhgv

may interest you.

khm