# Down the rabbit hole  9front

As time has passed and frustrations with the enormity and complexity
of software have grown. So too has the motivation to look for
alternatives.

Recently I purchased a tiny Dell 3040 in the hopes of running either
Plan9 or 9Legacy. Unfortunately the dell appears to be UEFI boot
only. There is mention of a legacy boot option, but I am unable to
find it even after downgrading the firmware to the earliest version
I can find, 1.2.0. I did get 9front to boot, but could not install
as the onboard MMC didn't appear as a usable device.

Not wanting to give up, I first tried 9Legacy on the Acer B202 I
still had laying around but it failed early in the boot process.
I then tried 9front, which I successfully managed to install with
both networking and sound devices appearing to be recognized.


## Installation

The usb stick install media is like a live CD. 

Once booted and inside rio, if you need to change the keymap then run: 
> % /bin/kbmap 

Right click to select the keymap, then press 'q' to quit. 

To begin installation: 
> % inst/start 

configfs - will ask you to choose a filesystem type, for my purposes
it was recommended gefs (good enough file system).

partdisk - you can delete and create a partition for your system.
Here I ran into a problem with the following stage 'prepdisk' which
is meant to divide the allocated partition. It failed repeatedly
until I left a couple of sectors at the beginning of the disk free
during this stage. So, I couldn't allocate from 0 - <disk_total>.

prepdisk - automatically divides the partition or you can manually
override. I just went with what it recommended.

mountfs - reams/formats the partitions and mounts them

configdist - choose the location of the install media

confignet - choose manual/auto (dhcp).

tzsetup - choose timezone (GMT)

bootsetup - install mbr and mark partition active (yes to both).

finish - reboot


## Post install

First thing I needed to do was make my keymap selection permanent.
To do this edit $home/lib/profile, depending on your level of bravery
your choices of editor are ed, sam or acme.

Be ware, there are different sections in profile which are run
depending if you are logging in from a local terminal or as a cpu.

I made the mistake of adding the line to set the keyboard at the
very top of the file and it really didn't like it when I connected
to it using drawterm from another computer. Make sure local changes
go under the terminal section.

To get a list of keymaps:
> % ls /sys/lib/kbmap

Add the following line to your profile under the terminal section:
	cp /sys/lib/kbmap/<your-keymap> /dev/kbmap


## ssh to other systems

> %  auth/rsagen -t 'service=ssh' >$home/lib/sshkey
> %  auth/rsa2ssh $home/lib/sshkey >$home/lib/sshkey.pub
> %  cat $home/lib/sshkey >/mnt/factotum/ctl

I then copied the public key to .ssh/authorized_keys on my remote
machine.

*WARNING* Do not try to ssh to a remote machine from an ordinary
9front terminal! It hung and crashed rio in my case.

For vt emulation there is a vt program which you must start before
trying to use ssh:
> % vt -xb

Then:
> % ssh user@remotehost

I will probably create a function in my profile to make this override
ssh with a single command.


## Summary

This is as much a reference for myself as it is maybe of some use
to someone else. My memory isn't great so having something to refer
to, should I have to do it again, is quite useful.

The current state of play is that I have a 9front system that I can
connect to using drawterm from my usual openbsd desktop and I can
connect from the 9front system to my vps.

Old habits die hard. It is evident, when it's not there, that I
use less a lot.  What is significant about the 9systems is not what
is included, but what has been removed.  

less/more is a good example of this, you don't need a pager if your
terminal window behaves as a pager. Terminal windows by default do
not scroll to the bottom like a unix terminal would, so man pages
etc appear to just be cat'd onto the screen. 

This small adjustment from using less to using cat and the screen
not scrolling is taking some getting used to, and this is just one
small illustration.  

Coming from linux/unix it is frustrating because while you know it
is different, it looks very familiar and even some of the same
programs exist, yet don't quite behave the same.  

If you do get stuck without less and it becomes too much there is
'p' which is a pager.  It is tempting to alias it, and a number of
other things, to more familiar names. But then you would be convincing
yourself more that it is what it is not.

Much of the above install and configuration information was gathered
from the 9front Wiki[1] and this excellent Plan 9 Desktop Guide[2].


## References

[1]( https://wiki.9front.org )
[2]( https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2019/plan9_desktop.html )