FQA 1 - Introduction to 9front

Plan9front (or 9front) is a fork of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system. The project was started to remedy a perceived lack of devoted development resources inside Bell Labs,[citation needed] and has accumulated various fixes and improvements.

This FQA specifically covers only the most recent release of 9front.

1.1.1 - Cirno

At some point, Cirno became associated with 9front. Details are sketchy.

Pro

• girl

• has magical powers

• associated with 9

• upsets kfx

• she is known to be the strongest

Alternatives

Read: FQA 3.2 - Selecting Hardware

• /shr, global mountpoint device shr(3)

• /mnt is provided by mntgen(4)

• #A, audio drivers for sb16, intel hd audio and ac97 (both playback and recording supported!) audio(3)

• New BIOS based boot loader 9boot(8) featuring a console and support for FAT/ISO/PXE and being small (<8K)

• New EFI based boot loader efi

• Made kernel compliant to multiboot specification so it can be booted by qemu or grub directly.

• Interruptable kernel qlocks (eqlock)

• Defered clunks (closeproc) for cached mounts

• New rc based boot(8) allows breaking into a shell at any time

• Default file system is an improved cwfs(4) (cwfs64x)

• New screen fonts: dejavu, germgoth, vga

• No central replica; source updates are done with hg(1) (Mercurial)

• Keyboard events with /dev/kbd. Read: kbdfs(8) and rio(4)

• /lib/rob and other new corpuses, suitable as fodder for fortune(1) and other rhetorical programs

• New listen(8) -p maxprocs option

• Always available network aan(8) support in cpu(1)

• MSI (message signalled interrupts), avoids problems with broken MP tables. Read: icanhasmsi(8)

• Legacy free ACPI support (aml interpreter libaml, mp interrupt routing, scram)

• Added rio(1) -b option (black window backgrounds) and look menu option

• USB CD-ROM boot/install

• USB drive boot

• Improved USB mouse support

• Support for USB ptp cameras

• Stable-across-machines USB device names

• VGA initialization done by interpreting the VESA BIOS with realemu(8), working VESA screen blanking.

• /dev/kbd and clipboard charset support for vnc(1)

• New webfs(4) with HTTP1.1 and Keep-Alive support.

• Qemu/KVM virtio block device and ethernet drivers. Read: FQA 4.5.1.3 - Virtio

• Mouse wheel and chording support in sam(1)

• Elliptic curve cryptography ec(2)

• Working interrupt key (Del) in console

• Wifi support with wpa/wpa2

• SSE support

• System-wide support for internationalized domain names

• Unicode support in vt(1)

• pc64, kernel for amd64

• Numerous ciphers added and improvements made to libsec

• New dpi9k authentication protocol

• alarm(1) — timeouts in rc scripts

• audio(1) — mp3, ogg, flac, µlaw, wav

• bullshit(1) — print out a stream of bullshit

• cifsd(8) — CIFS/SMB server

• cryptsetup(8) — prepare an AES-encrypted partition to be used with the fs(3) device

• derp(1) — find changes between directories

• feminize(1) — replace sexist remarks

• fplot(1)

• New games: doom, glendy, mandel, mines, mole, packet

• hg(1) and hgfs(4) (Mercurial)

• hget(1) — rewritten in rc, now uses webfs

• hpost(1) — extract and post HTML forms

• hold(1) — simple text editor

• icanhasmsi(8) — print MSI configuration

• ipserv(8) — proxy servers socksd and hproxy

• memory(1) — check memory usage

• mothra(1) — Tom Duff’s web browser, now uses webfs

• netaudit(8) — network configuration checker

• newt(1) — Usenet client

• nietzsche(1) — print out Nietzsche quote

• nintendo(1) — Nintendo emulators: gb, gba, nes, snes

• page(1) — zoom and enhance!

• paint(1) — drawing program

• play(1) — audio player

• pstree(1) — print tree-like map of current processes and sub-processes

• ptrap(4) — plumber(4) filter

• rc-httpd(8) — HTTP server

• rcpu(1) — replacement for legacy cpu(1) client, uses dp9ik

• resize(1) — fast but low quality image resampler

• rotate(1) — rotate or mirror a picture

• scram(8) — ACPI and APM shutdown

• sega(1) — Sega Megadrive/Genesis emulator: md

• ssam(1) — stream interface to sam

• sysinfo(1) — print hardware report

• sysupdate(1) — update the local hg repository

• theo(1) — print out insults from Theo de Raadt

• tput(1) — measure read throughput

• troll(1) — automated trolling

• tap(1) — follow the pipes of a process

• tif(1) — tiff decoder

• tojpg(1) — jpeg encoder

• totif(1) — tiff encoder

• torrent(1) — bittorrent client

• AC97 — /sys/src/9/pc/audioac97.c

• HDA — /sys/src/9/pc/audiohda.c

• SB 16/ESS — /sys/src/9/pc/audiosb16.c

Ethernet

• ADMtek Pegasus — /sys/src/cmd/nusb/ether/aue.c

• Broadcom BCM57xx — /sys/src/9/pc/etherbcm.c

• Realtek RTL8150 — /sys/src/cmd/nusb/ether/url.c

Wifi

• Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 (iwl-6005)

• Intel Centrino Ultimate-N (iwl-6000)

• Intel Centrino Wireless-N 100

• Intel WiFi Link 1000/4965/5100/5300/5350 AGN

• Intel PRO Wireless 3945ABG (wpi-3945abg)

• Ralink RT2860/RT3090

Tablets

• Wacom WACF004, WACF008

/sys/src/cmd/aux/wacom.c, /sys/src/cmd/aux/tablet.c

Video

• AMD Geode LX driver

/sys/src/cmd/aux/vga/geode.c /sys/src/9/pc/vgageode.c

• Intel G45 and Ivy Bridge driver

/sys/src/cmd/aux/vga/igfx.c /sys/src/9/pc/vgaigfx.c

SD Card

• Ricoh — /sys/src/9/pc/pmmc.c

Read: FQA 3.2 - Known Working Hardware for a list of complete machines known to work.

Read: FQA 0.2.4 - What is the deal with Plan 9’s weird license?

When this fails, donations that help pay for the hosting of 9front.org and cat-v.org (including fqa.9front.org, the document you are reading right now) can be made at: http://patreon.com/stanleylieber.

9front is maintained by an East German intelligence officer who never sleeps but instead logs periods of inactivity staring straight into the soulless eyes of games/catclock. Occasional contributions are made by a diverse team of malcontents that is spread somewhat thinly across many different timezones and Internet providers. Most of them have dayjobs and in fact are not concerned with your demands. (Subsidized or not).

The 9front team makes new releases on a regular, but unscheduled, basis. More information on the development cycle can be found on the 9front mailing list.

• acid — Programmable symbolic debugger.

• acme — Text editor, window system, mail client and more.

• ape — ANSI/POSIX environment.

• cwfs64x — Cached-worm file server based on the original Ken’s fs.

• doom — Science fiction horror-themed first-person shooter video game by id Software.

• gs — Aladdin Ghostscript (PostScript and PDF language interpreter).

• hjfs — A new, experimental fs.

• mercurial — Distributed source control management tool.

• mk — Tool for describing and maintaining dependencies between files.

• mothra — Web browser by Tom Duff.

• newt — NNTP client.

• nintendo — Nintendo Game Boy, NES, SNES and GBA emulators.

• paint — Drawing program.

• page — FAX, image, graphic, PostScript, PDF, epub, cbz viewer.

• play — Flac, ogg, mp3, sun, wav player.

• plumber — Mechanism for inter-process communication.

• python 2.5.1 — Interpreted programming language. (needed for mercurial)

• rc — Shell by Tom Duff.

• rc-httpd — Web server written in rc.

• rio — Rectangle multiplexer/window system.

• sam — Text editor.

• sega — Megadrive/Genesis emulator.

• torrent — BitTorrent client.

• troff — Text processor/typesetter.

• upas — A simpler approach to network mail.

Read: FQA 1.3 - Why might I want to use 9front?

1.11 - Fine, where can I get 9front?

If you simply cannot be dissuaded from trying 9front for yourself, obtain installation media from the mirrors mentioned in the following section.

http://9front.org/iso/

http://r-36.net/9front/

http://thefront.felloff.net/usr/cinap_lenrek/9front.torrent

https://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front (official)

Good luck, you may need it.