#Notes on Plan 9

#Introduction

Plan 9 is an operating system developed in Bell Labs in the mid 80s. The advantages, differences and rationale behind Plan 9 peculiarities is too long to write in this README (that is what the actual notes are for, anyway). The short description is: Plan 9 is like Unix, if everything good they told you about UNIX was actually true. The system takes a more radical approach in the original ideas and includes a couple of mind-blowing tools to the mix.

#Cloning in Plan 9

You probably know already how to clone this repository in your daily driver, and I am sure a quick search can help you otherwise. What you (or me in a couple months) may not know is how to clone it using Plan 9.

The first step is to download a git client. This will probably be easier via your distribution sources, in my case, using 9front's extra packages to install git9:

9fs 9front
tar -xvf /n/extra/git9.tgz
cd git9
mk all
mk install

It is not really necessary to clone this repo, but don't forget to create the $home/lib/git/config file:

[user]
	name=Diego Vicente
	email=mail@diego.codes

In order to clone the repository, you know should be able to run git/clone with this repo's URL. For my personal use, I needed to create a SSH key before, following the FQA instructions.

mkdir $home/lib/ssh
auth/rsagen -r 'service=ssh' >$home/lib/ssh/key
auth/rsa2ssh -2 $home/lib/ssh/key >$home/lib/ssh/key.pub
cat $home/lib/ssh/key > /mnt/factotum/ctl

The final step was to add the public key to my sr.ht account and to be a little bit more explicit than expected when cloning the repository:

# Notice the git+ssh prefix - missing it results in "bad uri" errors
git/clone git+ssh://git@git.sr.ht:~diego/plan9-notes

#Compiling

Using Plan 9, it is possible to transform the notes to more popular formats:

# Conver to HTML
cat notes/00_diary.ms | ms2html >diary.html
# Convert to PostScript
troff -ms notes/00_diary.ms >diary.ps

There are planes to include a brief build manifest to generate this files and have them available directly in the repository.