Installing plan9port in my Chromebook's Linux Container

Not_Oles · July 31

plan9port is a Unix/Linux user space implementation of Plan9 from Bell Labs, The Plan 9 operating system was the successor to Unix at Bell Labs, where Unix previously had been developed.

Today I had some fun installing plan9port on my Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook. I like the Duet 5 because of its brilliant 13 inch OLED touchscreen. Also, the Duet 5 is small, light, and inexpensive compared to other OLED laptops. The Duet 5 will run Android apps. And built-in to Chrome OS is the ability to run Linux containers. Today's plan9port install was inside one of the containers.

Here is a list of the commands I ran to install plan9port on my Duet 5. If I were doing the install again, I probably would install the four additional, required -dev packages prior to running /use/plan9/INSTALL. Today, I re-ran INSTALL four times following successive failures caused by missing header files.

 2042  cd /usr
 2048  sudo git clone https://github.com/9fans/plan9port plan9
 2050  cd plan9
 2052  sudo /usr/plan9/INSTALL
 2057  sudo apt-get install libx11-dev
 2068  sudo apt-get install libxt-dev
 2078  sudo apt-get install libfontconfig1-dev
 2090  sudo apt-get install libxext-dev
 * Add these to your profile environment.
        PLAN9=/usr/plan9 export PLAN9
        PATH=$PATH:$PLAN9/bin export PATH

Here are Plan 9's rc shell and the sam editor running after the successful install.

chronos@penguin:~$ cat /etc/debian_version 
12.6
chronos@penguin:~$ which rc
/usr/plan9/bin/rc
chronos@penguin:~$ rc
% man sam
  [ . . . ]
% sam -d
 -. 
q
%

Getting started with plan9port is easy. Please see the getting started tips on Github at Issue 97 in the plan9port repository.

Based on limited testing -- I fired it up once -- my Duet 5's plan9port graphical editor, Acme, seems to work too. For my use, I'm usually happy with the command line tools, but here is a good, brief introductory reference list for plan9port's Acme graphical editor.