[gentoo-soc] Plan 9 From Gentoo: Weekly Progress Report #10

Hi, all.

Plan 9 From Gentoo is a 2011 GSoC project to overlay a Plan 9 inspired userspace on top of a Linux base system.

Project page: http://soc.dev.gentoo.org/~rps/plan9/
LiveCD image: http://soc.dev.gentoo.org/~rps/plan9-download/plan9-from-gentoo-x86-minimal.iso

Most of Monday I spent on responding to email correspondences and writing last week's progress report. I sent emails to two people who expressed interest in trying out Plan 9 From Gentoo about the "beta" release. I also sent an email to Greg k-h about the possibility of getting the Glendix patches upstreamed. He responded by saying that, although he does like to help newbies, he thought that most of what we had been trying to accomplish in kernel could be accomplished in userspace. I then sent an email to Anant asking him if this was indeed the case.

On Tuesday, I worked on fleshing out the Plan 9 From Gentoo project page. The biggest addition were screenshots, so that folks can get a feel for Plan 9 From Gentoo without actually downloading it. I know when I'm looking at alternative OSes, I'm always frustrated if no screenshots are provided. Plan 9 From Gentoo will not make the same mistake! The project page is not finished yet. Donnie suggested I add some kind of hook to get people interested in downloading Plan 9 From Gentoo. I intend to finish the project page either sometime today or tomorrow.

On Wednesday, I got tired of waiting for Anant to email me back, so I got on IRC and bugged him. He agreed with Greg k-h that what Glendix does could be accomplished in userspace. We agreed that porting Glendix's functionality to userspace will be the direction that I will take for the remainder of GSoC. We also agreed that I should take over as maintainer of the Plan 9 overlay. Right now, the overlay is not an official Gentoo project. It would be cool, I think, to see it become an official Gentoo project in the future, along with Plan 9 From Gentoo.

Thursday and Friday I spent working on 'nine', the userspace port of Glendix. I set up a project page on GitHub (https://github.com/robertseaton/nine) and wrote the code to parse any command line arguments. The rest of the time I spent researching the wine sources and kernel documentation, since I have never implemented an alternative binary format loader before. I have a good idea of the next steps that I need to take, moving forward, and I plan to work on this more today and the rest of the week.

For the upcoming week, I intend to work on and ideally finish Plan 9 From Gentoo's project page. The rest of the week, I will be working on nine, the port of Glendix's functionality to userspace. I also may spend more time looking into getting Plan 9 From Gentoo added to the gentoo-alt page.

Cheers,
rps