Re: [9front] 9front on the Allwinner A64

[adventures in9 <adventuresin9@gmail.com>]

If you just want rio on a handheld, that has been done.  You can dig
around the old plan9 code for stuff for the compaq ipaq.  There is
bitsy/keyboard for on screen keyboard.

The trickier part is going to be rethinking everything for what is
effectively a "1 button mouse" style of input.  And that apps run more
as full screen in virtual desktops than as windows that change
position.  Or maybe use a tiling window manager?

On Sun, Nov 27, 2022 at 11:58 PM sirjofri
<sirjofri+ml-9front@sirjofri.de> wrote:
>
>
> 28.11.2022 01:27:59 adventures in9 <adventuresin9@gmail.com>:
>
> > Looks like I have some extra reading to do tonight.
> > The Pine64 folks were kind enough to post the datasheet for the A64
> > https://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/pine64/Allwinner_A64_User_Manual_V1.0.pdf
>
> Yes, and they also have the schematics for their boards you'll definitely find useful. I skimmed through the A64 manual (and obviously skipped the irrelevant pages for now), it's big, but well structured.
>
> Btw there's also a lowlevel community specifically for pine devs on their discord (which is also available through matrix and maybe even irc, idk). There's a handful of nice and helpful people there. They also would be happy about a Plan 9 on pinephone, though they probably wouldn't know what to do with it.
>
> My long-term goal is to create a basis for a full Plan 9 phone, that means, building a few basic touch-friendly apps, like a launcher and stuff like that. It will really be a challenge since I want to try capturing the Plan 9 concepts there, for example, it should be easily possible to plumb things, snarf-and-paste, and I'd like to develop a touch-friendly text interface. Obviously there's a long way until I can really run software like that on the pinephone, but due to compatibility I should be able to develop those apps fully on an amd64, run with mouse, and it should work on a pinephone automatically (after recompile).
>
> sirjofri
>