The MNT Pocket Reform has arrived! No time to work on native 9front install yet; howbeit, it is easily possible to run drawterm to connect to the Plan9 world, or install plan9port…

Documentation

• Pocket Reform Essentials • Pocket Reform Handbook

Notes

Drawterm, Fonts, and Development Tools

Let’s install ed, drawterm, fonts, and git:

% sudo apt install ed drawterm git fonts-firacode

Next up are some build essentials to compile plan9port:

% sudo apt install gcc libx11-dev libxt-dev libxext-dev libfontconfig1-dev

Plan9Port

Checkout and build plan9port into /usr/local/plan9:

% sudo mkdir /usr/local/plan9 ; sudo chown $USER /usr/local/plan9
% git clone https://github.com/9fans/plan9port /usr/local/plan9
% cd /usr/local/plan9
% ./INSTALL

Append the following to your ~/.profile:

PLAN9=/usr/local/plan9
export PLAN9
PATH="$PATH:$PLAN9/bin" 

Add launchers for acme, 9term, and sam to simplify invocation:

9term

% cat bin/9term.sh
#!/bin/sh
cd $HOME
/usr/local/plan9/bin/9.rc 9term  -f /mnt/font/FiraCode-Regular/12a/font  rc -l

acme

To enable multiple acme instances two scripts are used, the first script 9acme.rc maintains a separate namespace for each acme instance:

% cat bin/9acme.rc
#!/usr/bin/env rc
flag e+
NAMESPACE=`{namespace}^-^'acme'^-$pid
mkdir -p `{namespace}
acme $*
rm -rf `{namespace}

The second scripts 9acme.sh invokes 9acme.rc with additional options:

% cat bin/9acme.sh
#!/bin/sh
cd $HOME
/usr/local/plan9/bin/9.rc 9acme.rc  -f /mnt/font/FiraCode-Regular/12a/font -c2 -a

Finally, let’s create a launcher for sam:

% cat bin/9sam.sh
#!/bin/sh
cd $HOME
/usr/local/plan9/bin/9.rc sam -a

Linux Kernel Installation

An apt get upgrade incantation combined with an apt get build-essential pulled in a newer kernel. The kernel was not compatible with the Wifi firmware blob. To resolve the issue I wanted to revert to the previously used kernel; that can be accomplished via the flash-kernel command:

% sudo flash-kernel --force 6.7.12-reform2-arm64
...
% sudo reboot