Plan9 and Pine

Plan9 and Pine

[Chris McGee]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2003 bytes --]

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/

From what I can tell the hardware is well documented, inexpensive and well
enough designed. There is a vibrant community that is currently working on
porting different Linux flavours to the phone. Once things are stable the
pine store will begin selling branded versions of the phone with the OS
pre-installed and a portion of the profit going to the community to
continue their work.

Has anyone managed to port Plan 9 to these SBC's? Does anyone have an idea
of how much work this would involve considering there's already 64-bit arm
toolchain in place and raspberry pi working?

Thinking longer term, might it be interesting or useful to this community
to support some of this hardware, even if it was just the Allwinner SoC's,
representing two of the SBC's lines, the original laptop, tablet and phone?
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.

I have some more far-fetched thoughts. Please, be gentle. :)

Perhaps this is an opportunity for the Plan 9 community to think what it
would mean to run in a phone form factor. From my experience with the
different phone OSes, there's quite a bit of similarity (home screens,
grids of "apps"). Maybe this can be done in more of a Plan 9 style,
simpler, smaller, more composable and no teletypes (or X). If the community
comes up with something then we have a hardware line capable of running it.
If the system is compelling enough to outsiders and a partnership is
established with the pine group then that might be an avenue to fund
continuing improvements.

And then, what about the tablet?

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
Chris

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2320 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Stuart Morrow]

> then we have a hardware line capable of running it

There was never any reason why whoever wanted to do phone stuff
couldn't just run 9vx on those Atom phones from Lenovo.

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Kurt H Maier]

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

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[mail]

Hello

Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 04:20:19PM -0400, Chris McGee wrote:

> > 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
I've also come across https://github.com/sirnewton01/acme-phone

Pleasure

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[ori]

> Perhaps this is an opportunity for the Plan 9 community to think what it
> would mean to run in a phone form factor. From my experience with the
> different phone OSes, there's quite a bit of similarity (home screens,
> grids of "apps").

Fundamentally, there's nothing about the building blocks in plan 9
are set up to prevent this. You'd need to think hard about providing
a good interface to the touch screen, gestures, etc. Possibly an event
device that a windowing system could inject interesting events into as
it recognized gestures like pinch, scroll, etc. A soft keyboard. Stuff
like that. Deciding how to allow text selection and manipulation to work
in an ergonomic fashion when you can't even double click easily, let
alone chord the mouse.

And then the hard part: You'd need to patch every graphical program. For
many -- eg, rio, acme and sam -- I suspect that there's no saving them,
and phone capable alternatives will just have to be written.

So, a small amount of work on input, and then a ton of rewriting the
code that exists.

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

Don't forget 2ed ran on the ipaq (aka bitsy).

How much of the UI support survived the 2ed -> 3ed rewrites I don't
know.  But reading through the 2ed source might be enlightening.

--lyndon

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[andrey mirtchovski]

3rd ed ran on the bitsy, we had one at LANL:

https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/Installation_on_Ipaq/index.html

t'was ok.

On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 3:04 PM Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
>
> Don't forget 2ed ran on the ipaq (aka bitsy).
>
> How much of the UI support survived the 2ed -> 3ed rewrites I don't
> know.  But reading through the 2ed source might be enlightening.
>
> --lyndon
>
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tca918503d5b19459-M84e06c5124325f4f5953a196
> Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[hiro]

2nd edition had no draw(3), bit(3) is an incompatible protocol

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[andrey mirtchovski]

a lot of the games you find in the games folder were ported by me from
bitblt to draw. jmk fished them out from the 2nd ed.

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[ori]

> 3rd ed ran on the bitsy, we had one at LANL:
> 
> https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/Installation_on_Ipaq/index.html
> 
> t'was ok.

How was the UI's reliance on chording and middle/right button
usage dealt with? That's what I see as the biggest challenge
for working well on phones.

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[andrey mirtchovski]

unfortunately i don't remember anymore how many buttons were involved.
nobody cared to take videos. i mostly used it with the stylus..

On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 5:56 PM <ori@eigenstate.org> wrote:
>
> > 3rd ed ran on the bitsy, we had one at LANL:
> >
> > https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/Installation_on_Ipaq/index.html
> >
> > t'was ok.
>
> How was the UI's reliance on chording and middle/right button
> usage dealt with? That's what I see as the biggest challenge
> for working well on phones.
>

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Stuart Morrow]

re: Ori.  I understood OP to be talking about doing a new, phone-specific UI.

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Ethan Gardener]

this would be easy with a stylus on a resistive touchscreen and a few well-placed physical buttons.

on a progressive^Winaccurate touchscreen with no buttons, what changes would be required? strictly speaking, none at all: i've used plan 9 over vnc from my tablet with various interfaces. it's not strictly necessary to modify any of the programs, but... well, selecting text is the hard part. if i remember right, i always used kurt's trick: place brackets and double-click one of them. (for large selections, it's good even on a desktop) the vnc viewers i used had decent trackpad emulation. i prefer double-tapping on a touchscreen/pad to double-clicking a mouse, it's much less damaging to my joints. i suppose some might find it triggers the drag emulation, but i usually disabled drag because touchscreens are too inaccurate for drag to be useful in plan 9. besides, i always found it much easier to deliver a solid double-tap than the fiddly nonsense necessary to start drag emulation.

which vnc viewers were good? it's been a while, but one of the best ones had a bar at the bottom of the screen with buttons for right-mouse and control -- plan 9 interpretes control-b3 as b2. the rmb button modified the next tap. it was simple but quite effective. it reminds me of drawterm-ios, which if i understood right, (i never used it,) had 3 big buttons on-screen but off the drawing area. i've used a vnc viewer with onscreen buttons, but they were drawn on top of the display, leaving too little area visible. besides, i don't really want both hands on the screen. buttons which modify the next tap allow more flexibility in the way you hold the device, including the option to not hold it at all.

i found that one open-source vnc viewer for android to be awful. it got better over the years, but not better enough unless miracles have happened in the last year.

does anyone know what changes p9p has for apple multitouch trackpads? i recall one old-timer liking them much more than chording.

for some, all this may be moot; sl likes to use ed on his phone. i forget his full argument, but part of it is that phones are hard to type on, and so were teletypes. ;) i think poor/slow network was another part; he uses ed or sam -d with ssh and drawterm -G over mobile internet. i struggle with those editors specifically, but from other stuff i can confirm that keyboard-only use can be as good as anything else on a tablet. i think i'd like samterm on mobile.

...or you could plug a mouse into your phone. ;) i actually installed a game which told me "this is no good without a real mouse."

hmm... mouse cumbersome... so when are we getting a phone with a built-in trackpoint? ;) i had an idea for a tablet with 2 trackpoints; you'd use them both to pinch.

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Charles Forsyth]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1048 bytes --]

The ipaq/bitsy had no shortage of buttons round the case, several of which
were convenient when holding with one hand and using the stylus with the
other, so chording was possible.

On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 2:27 AM andrey mirtchovski <mirtchovski@gmail.com>
wrote:

> unfortunately i don't remember anymore how many buttons were involved.
> nobody cared to take videos. i mostly used it with the stylus..
>
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 5:56 PM <ori@eigenstate.org> wrote:
> > > 3rd ed ran on the bitsy, we had one at LANL:
> > >
> > > https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/Installation_on_Ipaq/index.html
> > >
> > > t'was ok.
> >
> > How was the UI's reliance on chording and middle/right button
> > usage dealt with? That's what I see as the biggest challenge
> > for working well on phones.
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink:
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tca918503d5b19459-Md81f505dd2badaef7d8f4856
> Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1818 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[ori]

> re: Ori.  I understood OP to be talking about doing a new, phone-specific UI.

Yes. I think it's doable. It just needs someone to do the doing.

From what I recall, there's even an android drawterm that can be used
to prototype it without first getting hardware support -- though I
can't vouch for how well it works.

https://bitbucket.org/echoline/drawterm-android/src/default/

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Chris McGee]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 94 bytes --]

Thanks everyone for the ideas, background and links to add to my research.

Cheers,
Chris

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 186 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Romano]

I am new to Plan9, but just as another data point, there was also drawterm-android2 in the Plan9-Archive on github. I tried this past weekend to get it up and running on an android emulator using Android Studio, but wasn't very familiar with Android Studio or the modifications necessary for drawterm.

I bought a Pine Phone, which is supposed to be shipped at the end of next month. My hope is to get drawterm compiled on it, and begin using it as my daily phone. I have a very old smartphone which I've used the Linux Deploy app to install debian. I compiled drawterm so that I can network my phone with my computers easily, but it's the non-graphical option provided by 9front's drawterm. Having graphical drawterm is proving more challenging.

On Sun, Apr 19, 2020, at 6:27 PM, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> > re: Ori.  I understood OP to be talking about doing a new, phone-specific UI.
> 
> Yes. I think it's doable. It just needs someone to do the doing.
> 
> From what I recall, there's even an android drawterm that can be used
> to prototype it without first getting hardware support -- though I
> can't vouch for how well it works.
> 
> https://bitbucket.org/echoline/drawterm-android/src/default/
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink: 
> https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tca918503d5b19459-M8efd7ebdafb714a46a718cbe
> Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
>

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Thaddeus Woskowiak]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 1:53 AM Romano <unobe@cpan.org> wrote:
>
> I am new to Plan9, but just as another data point, there was also drawterm-android2 in the Plan9-Archive on github. I tried this past weekend to get it up and running on an android emulator using Android Studio, but wasn't very familiar with Android Studio or the modifications necessary for drawterm.
>
> I bought a Pine Phone, which is supposed to be shipped at the end of next month. My hope is to get drawterm compiled on it, and begin using it as my daily phone. I have a very old smartphone which I've used the Linux Deploy app to install debian. I compiled drawterm so that I can network my phone with my computers easily, but it's the non-graphical option provided by 9front's drawterm. Having graphical drawterm is proving more challenging.
>
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2020, at 6:27 PM, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> > > re: Ori.  I understood OP to be talking about doing a new, phone-specific UI.
> >
> > Yes. I think it's doable. It just needs someone to do the doing.
> >
> > From what I recall, there's even an android drawterm that can be used
> > to prototype it without first getting hardware support -- though I
> > can't vouch for how well it works.
> >
> > https://bitbucket.org/echoline/drawterm-android/src/default/
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------
> 9fans: 9fans
> Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tca918503d5b19459-Mcbf48023e5fdc9e253466ead
> Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription

I have a pinephone as well and was able to build 9front drawterm
without issue on PostmarketOS. I ran it from both the menu and
terminal and was able to connect to my CPU server. BUT! KDE Plasma
uses a different input method meaning drawterm does not trigger the
onscreen keyboard. So you are unfortunately left with no keyboard
input :-( I thought of using a USB keyboard but there is no USB OTG
support as of yet so no devices can be plugged in (I tried for the
heck of it.) Unfortunately the last update borked the phone and input
is trashed completely so I have to fix it but too many projects as it
is.

Screenshot: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7twijiDwN8yTbagn8

side note: Watching software build on your mobile phone is liberating.

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and Pine

[Ethan Gardener]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020, at 7:46 PM, Thaddeus Woskowiak wrote:
> KDE Plasma
> uses a different input method meaning drawterm does not trigger the
> onscreen keyboard. 

You can use Plan 9's onscreen keyboard:
rio -k bitsy/keyboard

bitsy/keyboard has a scribble area which can be turned off with -n. See bitsy(1). You may have to recompile keyboard to change the font.