package install

package install

[William Gunnells]

I feel like I’m doing things wrong. What’s the best way to install packages? Where should I put them. LOL

I have just been downloading packages into user directory and compile from there. Silly i think. 

Re: [9front] package install

[Amavect]

Will,

It's all manual, using 'mk install'.
I keep a /usr/glenda/inst directory for my admin login.
All repos I clone go there.

Thanks,
Amavect

Re: [9front] package install

[Eli Cohen]

probably worth mentioning, understanding bind(1) it becomes more clear
how plan 9 works and it doesn't matter as much where things are on
disk

On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 6:41 PM Amavect <amavect@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Will,
>
> It's all manual, using 'mk install'.
> I keep a /usr/glenda/inst directory for my admin login.
> All repos I clone go there.
>
> Thanks,
> Amavect

Re: [9front] package install

[William Gunnells]

little confused. How about an example

I’m logged in as glenda. I guess it would be 
9fs 9front 
mkdir /usr/glenda/inst
cp /n/extra/links* /usr/glenda/inst
tar xvzf links*.tgz
cd links_version/
mk install 
or am I all wrong. 
I do get errors
initializer is not constant: plan9_driver
pcc: cpp: 8c5510: error

maybe I should get mail working on this first?



> On Jul 17, 2020, at 6:40 PM, Amavect <amavect@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Will,
> 
> It's all manual, using 'mk install'.
> I keep a /usr/glenda/inst directory for my admin login.
> All repos I clone go there.
> 
> Thanks,
> Amavect

Re: [9front] package install

[Amavect]

Will,

You're doing it right.
That program's build is broken.
Fixing is left as an exercise for the reader.

Here's some self promotion.
Download ori's 9-native git implementation per the readme:
https://github.com/oridb/git9
and clone my repo:
git/clone https://git.sr.ht/~amavect/makeu

Thanks,
Amavect

Re: [9front] package install

[William Gunnells]

oh great! I was just sitting here and thinking. What do I do? What do I do and not be a slave to a browser. 
What programs to plan9 have. That list was huge kind of. But then I was wondering. What and why rio.amber, rio.green rio.tron, rio.webshit. what am I missing here. 

Oh and can I compile as a user do I just need /sys group?

What is the best mail program while I’m trying to download git9?

> On Jul 17, 2020, at 7:03 PM, Amavect <amavect@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Will,
> 
> You're doing it right.
> That program's build is broken.
> Fixing is left as an exercise for the reader.
> 
> Here's some self promotion.
> Download ori's 9-native git implementation per the readme:
> https://github.com/oridb/git9
> and clone my repo:
> git/clone https://git.sr.ht/~amavect/makeu
> 
> Thanks,
> Amavect

Re: [9front] package install

[William Gunnells]

rc (het): can’t open: ‘/mnt/we/clone’ does not exist
can’t create it either


> On Jul 17, 2020, at 7:17 PM, William Gunnells <gunnells@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> oh great! I was just sitting here and thinking. What do I do? What do I do and not be a slave to a browser. 
> What programs to plan9 have. That list was huge kind of. But then I was wondering. What and why rio.amber, rio.green rio.tron, rio.webshit. what am I missing here. 
> 
> Oh and can I compile as a user do I just need /sys group?
> 
> What is the best mail program while I’m trying to download git9?
> 
>> On Jul 17, 2020, at 7:03 PM, Amavect <amavect@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Will,
>> 
>> You're doing it right.
>> That program's build is broken.
>> Fixing is left as an exercise for the reader.
>> 
>> Here's some self promotion.
>> Download ori's 9-native git implementation per the readme:
>> https://github.com/oridb/git9
>> and clone my repo:
>> git/clone https://git.sr.ht/~amavect/makeu
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Amavect
> 

Re: [9front] package install

[William Gunnells]

omg I have run webfs? :-)

> On Jul 17, 2020, at 7:27 PM, William Gunnells <gunnells@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> rc (het): can’t open: ‘/mnt/we/clone’ does not exist
> can’t create it either
> 
> 
>> On Jul 17, 2020, at 7:17 PM, William Gunnells <gunnells@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> oh great! I was just sitting here and thinking. What do I do? What do I do and not be a slave to a browser. 
>> What programs to plan9 have. That list was huge kind of. But then I was wondering. What and why rio.amber, rio.green rio.tron, rio.webshit. what am I missing here. 
>> 
>> Oh and can I compile as a user do I just need /sys group?
>> 
>> What is the best mail program while I’m trying to download git9?
>> 
>>> On Jul 17, 2020, at 7:03 PM, Amavect <amavect@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Will,
>>> 
>>> You're doing it right.
>>> That program's build is broken.
>>> Fixing is left as an exercise for the reader.
>>> 
>>> Here's some self promotion.
>>> Download ori's 9-native git implementation per the readme:
>>> https://github.com/oridb/git9
>>> and clone my repo:
>>> git/clone https://git.sr.ht/~amavect/makeu
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Amavect
>> 
> 

Re: [9front] package install

[ori]

> rc (het): can’t open: ‘/mnt/we/clone’ does not exist
> can’t create it either


that's provided by webfs(1). I'm not sure how you
configured your system, but normally $home/lib/profile
will start it in your namespace. If not, you can start
it manually.

(Remember, rio has per-window namespaces, so starting
it in one window starts it just for that window.)

Re: [9front] package install

[Ethan Gardener]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2020, at 3:17 AM, William Gunnells wrote:
> 
> But then I was 
> wondering. What and why rio.amber, rio.green rio.tron, rio.webshit. 
> what am I missing here. 

Nothing much, those are just personal projects put online. (But I am wondering about the web one. <strikethrough>Did someone port Active Desktop to Plan 9?</strikethrough>)

> Oh and can I compile as a user do I just need /sys group?

User glenda should be able to install, otherwise you need to be in sys. Actually, run this to get the exact names:
    ls -ld /bin/rc
(because I think it's possible to change the hostowner name in installation.) 

To see what groups you're in:
    cat /adm/users
and see fs(8) or hjfs(8) to change it.

Re: [9front] package install

[ori]

> little confused. How about an example
> 
> I’m logged in as glenda. I guess it would be 
> 9fs 9front 
> mkdir /usr/glenda/inst
> cp /n/extra/links* /usr/glenda/inst
> tar xvzf links*.tgz
> cd links_version/
> mk install 
> or am I all wrong. 
> I do get errors
> initializer is not constant: plan9_driver
> pcc: cpp: 8c5510: error
> 
> maybe I should get mail working on this first?

Hm. That's probably a cast that our compilers
should be folding. 

Re: [9front] package install

[ori]

> little confused. How about an example
> 
> I’m logged in as glenda. I guess it would be 
> 9fs 9front 
> mkdir /usr/glenda/inst
> cp /n/extra/links* /usr/glenda/inst
> tar xvzf links*.tgz
> cd links_version/
> mk install 
> or am I all wrong. 
> I do get errors
> initializer is not constant: plan9_driver
> pcc: cpp: 8c5510: error
> 
> maybe I should get mail working on this first?
>

FWIW, this change fixes the build:

--- plan9.c.orig	Fri Jul 17 19:27:00 2020
+++ plan9.c	Sat Jul 18 12:36:54 2020
@@ -913,7 +913,11 @@
 	return sz.x;
 }
 
-extern long (*color_pass_rgb)(int);
+long
+plan9_color_pass_rgb(int c){
+	extern long (*color_pass_rgb)(int);
+	return color_pass_rgb(c);
+}
 
 Gfxdrvr plan9_driver={
 	(uchar *)"plan9",
@@ -930,7 +934,7 @@
 	plan9_unregister_bitmap,
 	plan9_draw_bitmap,
 	plan9_draw_bitmaps,
-	color_pass_rgb,
+	plan9_color_pass_rgb,
 	plan9_fill_area,
 	plan9_draw_hline,
 	plan9_draw_vline,

Re: [9front] package install

[William Gunnells]

Wow thanks. 

I feel like i’m cheating. Sure I got this thing up and running. But I have no idea how to run it. Let me rephrase. While I love my MacBook and it's a requirement for work at apple. I’m sick of linux and docker and amazon linux AMI’s and All the different flavors of linux that are broken, not sure how to express that right. It seems like I waste a lot of time doing the same thing? I don’t know. I stopped gaming also and erased windows (the perfect gaming platform) and installed or tried to install Ubuntu. That whole experience brought back horrible memories and went down the various Debian flavors with no such luck. Then I installed OpenBSD and was blown away. Brought back so many memories. I had it installed on a Toshiba Libretto back in the day and had to spend a lot of time in UKC for the Orinoco wifi drivers. 

This whole experience was super refreshing and I vowed not install linux on any of my own personal stuff. OpenBSD was very clean and simple. The package management system was a delight. But it got me thinking. Because I remember. I had an interest in Plan9. I installed it a few times but never really did anything significant perhaps my children and marriage got in the way. 


I thought for sure plan9 was dead. I sent mail to somebody named Colombier a few years ago. Not even sure if that person is around. I started asking around if plan9 was still alive and they responded with 9legacy. The documentation was the same and just as horrible as before. Perhaps it was just me and the documentation was fine. I just didn’t understand it. I would get it up and running then say now what. Why am I slave to a browser. Ed seemed fine, not a fan of sam, acme was strangely hopeful. But then I wasn’t doing anything really.


I gave up and watched Tron and Tron Legacy. Who knows why? That was where my brain was at the time. Remembering the past, remembering that things could be different. Why follow the crowd. These new young programmers suck anyways. Not saying I'm a great programmer by any means. But I noticed that they only know some small little slice of what they are doing. They can code an app but know next to nothing about networking, automation, data pipeline, dev ops etc...

So here I am again. Hopeful and determined not to let this go for some silly reason. My kids are grown up and I’m happily divorced. I just can’t let the MC (movie reference tron) take over for some reason.

Can I use acme as my new IDE for my day job programming some sort of automation tool that I have to do anyways its in 9ports. Most of my work ends up in pie compute or AWS. I don’t use browser for any of that work. This should be a cake walk. 

Most of the Unix tools are the same. Find is gone or replaced with some sort of cumbersome du with different flags. But awk is here. rc is strange as apposed to bash. But then I feel silly. Why did I restrict myself. I spend most of my time writing python because its the best tool for automating AWS resources, troposphere, for generating cloud formation templates, or just using boto3 to get move change some AWS object. I did do a couple of tasks in c# a few months ago for image manipulations. Python was simply too slow for the task. 

Plan9 was all about C. Just C and i noticed Go. So as you can imagine by this short novella I’m writing my brain is buzzing. 

I feel like I need to write better documentation. Not to burst the bubble of the author for FQA which so far is the best I have seen. But maybe plan9 for dummies such as myself who let kids take over my life and now I’m wanting to immerse myself in matrix again. 

What to do after you installed CPU/Auth + FS and make a successful Drawterm session. Do you split-up the FS or keep those 3 things together. If you need another CPU for speed just add it. Should I gut my mac mini and install plan9 on it. That would be a pain in butt,  also a learning experience if I can get it done. What’s the benefits of splitting them up. Honestly I don’t see any at this point. It seems like if you have FS on some other server it needs to have a fast connection. Perhaps authentication since you only need to do that once and briefly. 

Then I though why have it installed at home. My business cable connection is slower than AWS. Can this be installed on AWS? How difficult would it be to build an AMI. I guess in the progress of building the AMI I would have to setup auth/keyfs and all of that stuff including making SSH v2 work with AWS keygen. So it's a lot of services to think about. But really that’s the same for everything else. Or would it be cheaper to host this on rat shack or something similar. 


In chapter 2 William shares his favorite plan9 productivity tool. 

Regards-



> On Jul 18, 2020, at 12:39 PM, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> 
>> little confused. How about an example
>> 
>> I’m logged in as glenda. I guess it would be 
>> 9fs 9front 
>> mkdir /usr/glenda/inst
>> cp /n/extra/links* /usr/glenda/inst
>> tar xvzf links*.tgz
>> cd links_version/
>> mk install 
>> or am I all wrong. 
>> I do get errors
>> initializer is not constant: plan9_driver
>> pcc: cpp: 8c5510: error
>> 
>> maybe I should get mail working on this first?
>> 
> 
> FWIW, this change fixes the build:
> 
> --- plan9.c.orig	Fri Jul 17 19:27:00 2020
> +++ plan9.c	Sat Jul 18 12:36:54 2020
> @@ -913,7 +913,11 @@
> 	return sz.x;
> }
> 
> -extern long (*color_pass_rgb)(int);
> +long
> +plan9_color_pass_rgb(int c){
> +	extern long (*color_pass_rgb)(int);
> +	return color_pass_rgb(c);
> +}
> 
> Gfxdrvr plan9_driver={
> 	(uchar *)"plan9",
> @@ -930,7 +934,7 @@
> 	plan9_unregister_bitmap,
> 	plan9_draw_bitmap,
> 	plan9_draw_bitmaps,
> -	color_pass_rgb,
> +	plan9_color_pass_rgb,
> 	plan9_fill_area,
> 	plan9_draw_hline,
> 	plan9_draw_vline,

Re: [9front] package install

[hiro]

wow, that's a very long life story you're sharing here. very
unexpected. but easy to read!

about the first stuff and combining plan9 stuff to do stuff at $dayjob:
definitely consider using rc, you'll learn very fast that it's in many
ways superior to bourne shell, not just in terms of features, also in
readability, expressiveness of the syntax.

and if you really get to a point where you need to run some python:
just put some `ssh shit-server python3 bla.py` into your script, don't
shy to use ssh. don't shy to use remote command execution, combine all
your OS's in whatever way is most pragmatic to you to get that shitty
job done as fast as possible :D
yes, we have a really well working ssh client at this point. one of
the many special 9front additions.

> What to do after you installed CPU/Auth + FS and make a successful Drawterm
> session. Do you split-up the FS or keep those 3 things together. If you need
> another CPU for speed just add it.

that depends what you want to do with this.

personally i was convinced i want to collaborate with others online,
while traveling around with my laptop roaming from wifi to wifi, often
with long offline periods far away from civilization.
this obviously goes against the canonical plan9 setup:

one central office where you meet the whole team on workdays and
dial-up terminals for the rare occasion (back then probably a
privilege and esp. a huge technical novelty) you have to do some work
from home. networks were more stable, had very low latency, were
always point to point and direct routing, and highly bandwidth
constrained. home computers would have likely been harder to setup,
maintain, and keeping redundent disks with enough storage would have
been extremely costly and perhaps impossible to sync the server stuff
to it with the limited bandwidth. i.e. the network was more stable,
reliable, responsive and useful than a home computer infrastructure.

this all has changed now: networks are extremely high bandwidth, have
shitty routing with very high latency, are extremely unstable,
overloaded, intermittently unavailable, or even non-existent (on the
go). we kinda demand more from our networks but we really get less
now.
so we need offline stuff to work instead. everything has to be cached
(mirrored) locally.
that's now how one central fileserver setup in plan9 works.
the code to fix this is non-existent.

i always dreamed we could make some very nice modern distributed
fileserver for this reason, something that i can share with the whole
9front team without any slowdowns (would require very intelligent
locking/cache invalidation heuristics). from a computer science pov
this is fascinating, from a feature pov it's definitely what i want to
have.

now do i really need it? corona tells me no. i stopped using laptops
in cafes. i stopped hanging out for >5 hours in trains. i stopped
playing around with mobile internet access, bec. i only use the
internet at home now.
perhaps i wanted too much, i don't know :D
i really don't feel like i need it and i feel like i shouldn't ask for it.

the only one thing that i would lack now is the collaborative aspect
and a reliability fix.
if networks were as reliable and had low enough latency as they were
during dialup times where stuff wasn't overcomissioned and you had
guaranteed service levels even for end-users (e.g. to make sure they
can call emergency services in an emergency), then i'd just drawterm
into a shared server.
that's not very viable bec. we live too far apart, and the latencies
really hurt if you go once around the world (due to geography or
shitty routing). and sometimes it stops working, that's annoying. so
i'd still like a distributed filesystem tbh. i just can't argue for it
as strongly as i used to...

> Should I gut my mac mini and install
no

> plan9 on it. That would be a pain in butt,  also a learning experience if I
> can get it done.

there's a good list of already well supported hardware in the fqa!
if you want to port to a new platform, i'd wait a bit more, it doesn't
seem there's anything interesting out there right now. and mac mini
doesn't look like something that has any future tbh :)
if you're lucky it just works anyway out of the box, and then it
wouldn't even be a learning experience.

> What’s the benefits of splitting them up. Honestly I don’t
> see any at this point.

Generally, if you can afford to run every process on a separate PC
that's ultimate isolation. And isolation is useful in many ways: be it
stability. of course we have long ago virtualised a certain level of
isolation with stuff like virtual memory, which helps with the most
common form of instability at the time...
But there's always more. You could do it for security reasons. For
scaling reasons (one PC might just not be fast enough. might explain
it historically in our case).
But even if there's less valid reasons today, you can probably still
find scenarios that benefit from the modularization that provided this
possibility in the first place.

> It seems like if you have FS on some other server it
> needs to have a fast connection.

Yes. Having only one FS is a huge reduction of complexity if you boot
many systems (imagine 10 employees with terminals being able to share
one filesystem). The dumber the terminals are the less you have to
administer them. Instead you administer ONE system (the one on the
central file server).

> Perhaps authentication since you only need
> to do that once and briefly.

Not sure what you mean. Generally I see new possibilities for
authentication in this age: I'd like to change the canonical model and
instead have a way to have multiple auth servers. For example I'd like
a mobile auth server to carry WITH ME at all times (like a hardware
security dongle).
I'd like an auth server that I can leave somewhere in the cloud, share
with friends, but that doesn't grant access to ALL MY SERVERS.
Again, that work has not been done. Everything is still built as if
one single corporation with N employees will run it.

> Then I though why have it installed at home. My business cable connection is
> slower than AWS. Can this be installed on AWS? How difficult would it be to
> build an AMI. I guess in the progress of building the AMI I would have to
> setup auth/keyfs and all of that stuff including making SSH v2 work with AWS
> keygen. So it's a lot of services to think about. But really that’s the same
> for everything else. Or would it be cheaper to host this on rat shack or
> something similar.

Some of us are hosting 9front on ovh, ramnode or vultr. It generally
works well in kvm hypervisor, and even vmware. I heard AWS mentioned
by I doubt it's any use, generally AWS seemed just hyped while
actually providing bad service for more money than ramnode or vultr.
Same for google's and microsoft's cloud offers.
Just avoid everything based on openstack also. Go for very simple
kvm-based cloud offers with local dedicated chunks of real SSD disks
(just no hipster distributed filesystems - yes i know i argue the
opposite above, but that's bec. i want something better than that for
us and believe it's possible bec. of our superior and cleaner
architecture)

Hope this helps a bit.

Re: [9front] package install

[ori]

> I feel like I need to write better documentation. Not to burst the bubble of the author for FQA which so far is the best I have seen. But maybe plan9 for dummies such as myself who let kids take over my life and now I’m wanting to immerse myself in matrix again. 


Please do -- there's room for some "theory of" documentation
that lives between the fqa and the manpages, IMO something like
the papers in /sys/doc/comp.ps.

As far as the FQA -- like most documentation, there's room for
improvement. Feel free to send bug reports (or, even better,
patches. Code is at  https://code.9front.org/hg/fqa.9front.org/