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Hi, all. |
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Project Glentoo is a GSoC 2011 project to combine a Plan 9 inspired |
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userspace on top of a Gentoo-base system. |
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My status report is also available at |
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http://www.rs.io/summer-status-report-week-5/ |
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Screenshot: http://www.rs.io/images/plan9fromgentoo_gui.png |
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After a fair amount of fighting with Catalyst, X11 integration is |
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complete. The screenshot probably explains Glentoo’s progress best. As |
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you can see, X is working. X starts on boot and runs the rio window |
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manager from Plan 9. One can then manipulate and create windows just |
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as you would on Plan 9. Along with rio, all the Plan 9 applications |
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from the plan9port package are available and can be used. |
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Getting X11 set up and running were the primary accomplishments on |
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this week. However, I also set up a Plan 9 virtual machine so that I |
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can compare Plan 9’s native behavior with the behavior of Glentoo. In |
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addition, I put in place the scripts to bring up X and rio when the |
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liveCD image is booted. |
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For the upcoming week, I intend to flesh things out so that more |
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applications are started on boot to help users get a feel for Glentoo. |
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I’m also going to work on things like adding a start up message and a |
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short “tutorial” on Plan 9’s different paradigms. Further, during the |
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upcoming week, I intend to work on figuring out what pieces of Plan 9 |
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still need to be ported to Glentoo to offer a satisfactory end user |
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experience. |
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I also intend to add the Firefox web browser to the liveCD image, |
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seeing as one of the plan9port applications (web) requires it. In |
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addition, I’m going to look into bundling Glentoo’s spec files and |
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Catalyst with Glentoo so that it will be self-hosting. That way users |
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will be able to boot up Glentoo and use it to generate customized |
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Glentoo images very easily. |
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In addition, I’m thinking that I may attempt to include the different |
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tools that encompass the Go language’s ecosystem. While Plan 9 may not |
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have support for Go, Go’s roots can be traced to Inferno — Plan 9’s |
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successor, and both Go and Plan 9 share a developer: Rob Pike. |
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Including Go seems like a natural evolution and might help foster |
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adoption of both Glentoo and Go. My thinking is that users interested |
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in trying out Go would be able to boot Glentoo and just start writing |
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programs instead of trying to set up a working dev environment on |
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their local machines. |
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I’m still waiting for Robin to get back to me, but I’ve also put in a |
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request for a project page. That’s another one of the things that I |
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intend to work on during the upcoming week. |
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I thought that it would take another week to get to this point, so now |
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I’m about a week ahead of schedule. By mid-term, I want to have a |
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fully fleshed out project page and a mostly feature complete Glentoo |
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image generated. That way I will be able to focus on adding features |
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to make Glentoo more compelling during the second half of GSoC. |
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Cheers, |
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rps |
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