
Inferno on Android - qrush
http://9fans.net/archive/2011/09/308
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tommi
"Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs, but is now
developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_%28operating_system%29>

~~~
uriel
For more documentation and papers see: <http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/>

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andrewflnr
I like this. I'd like to see more of Plan 9 in general use. Since I started
reading about it I've thought it would be cool if a big company did for it
roughly what Apple did for Unix with OS X, preferably in a more open-source
manner.

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mycroftiv
This is great. I've been wanting my phone to be a node on my grid for a long
time. I'm glad some people got motivated and actually hacked it all together.
The dream of ubiquitous 9p/styx lives!

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jff
Here's a short video I threw together demonstrating the phone. It's pretty
spur of the moment, and the video quality is low, but you may be able to get
an idea of how it works: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF_-jQc53jw>

Also check out <https://bitbucket.org/floren/inferno/wiki/Home> for
screenshots.

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asolove
Thanks for posting the video! Do you have any knowledge of the technical
details? I only know a bit about inferno and am specifically wondering:

\- is there support for mounting a filesystem accessed via ad-hoc wireless
with another Android/Inferno device?

\- does the windowing system support multiplexing? (e.g. OS-level screen-
sharing with another device)

I should post this to the listserv but am too lazy at the moment.

~~~
jff
Sorry I'm late getting back on this. Since I did a lot of the low-level work
getting Inferno running, I suppose I have as much knowledge about it as anyone
;)

For your first question, that depends entirely on whether or not the Android
command-line tools allow you to set up an ad-hoc wireless network. If so, then
yes. If not, then no.

As to the second question... I have never tried it, but you should at least be
able to import /dev/draw from another device and do stuff with that.

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vegai
Why on earth didn't anyone seriously think about Inferno for mobile devices?
How much polish could've gone into Inferno given all the work on things like
Maemo, Meego and Android...

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4ad
Many people did, there are even some other early efforts, I am aware of some
efforts that never went public.

Thing is, even though many people thought about this, very few actually worked
on it. With open source talk/work ratio is around 50 (just made that number
up).

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autotelicum
Wow! Can it run acme? I'm wondering because "treats the touchscreen like a
one-button mouse" If so, how is the right and middle click used? Anyway
utterly cool stuff!

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jff
Hi, I worked on this project, so let me jump in on this. It can run acme, but
at this time we don't have a way to do right and middle clicks. I didn't make
it a priority, because the accuracy you can get in selecting text on these
capacitive screens is just not very good--I don't think Acme would be a very
pleasant experience. It worked fine on my old iPaq, but that had a resistive
screen and a stylus.

~~~
autotelicum
Indeed. I was just thinking I could try it on the device my neighbor has: A
very cheap android 2.2 tablet with a resistive screen and pen, no multitouch.
Never mind, it can hardly run android apps.

The [Octopus project](<http://lsub.org/ls/octopus.html>) has an interesting
take on gestures. When right-clicking, it pops up a circular menu where the
direction one goes in determines the action. See
<http://lockerz.com/s/139588614> That might be something for touch tablets.

I daily use AcmeSAC on Mac & Win7 with a trackpad (and MagicPrefs for three
finger middle click) and with a Wacom tablet and pen. Very nice for editing
without RSI problems.

~~~
jff
Well, if you can get accurate-enough touch events, you could always go into
emu/Android/screen.c and hack around with the pointer event handling code,
make it check the state of some of the physical buttons--thus, if you're
holding (say) the Home button when you click, it does a left click. Since you
have a pen, you should be able to hit the regular window control widgets to
minimize/close, rather than relying on our physical button shortcuts.

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tempire
This is fantastic. Inferno needs more public exposure.

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soapdog
Anyone has screenshots or photos? I want to see how it looks on a mobile
phone...

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uriel
I used to be a huge Inferno fan, but with Go around (Rob and Ken both worked
on Inferno, Rob was even responsible for the name), I wonder how relevant it
is this days.

Go has a much more vibrant community and development is blindly fast. Given
Go's dramatic memory efficiency advantages over Java I would hope Google will
push it on Andriod soon.

Go code can already run on Android, but building Android apps in Go is another
matter, but with Brad Fitzpatrick moving from the Android to the Go team
recently, I'm optimistic.

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drivebyacct2
I LOVE so much that #b2g and inferno are using the nice Linux Android base to
quickly bootstrap new mobile platforms. Get the benefit of a large existing
install base, choice of devices, etc.

I'll be interested to see if the other Plan9 inspired projects find a home in
a similar circumstance. There's a surprising number of tools being fostered by
Google and Googlers (in their 20% time) that harken back to P9.

~~~
p9idf
What are Google people working on besides Go that is Plan 9-ish?

