[gentoo-soc] Project Glentoo: Weekly Progress Report #5

[gentoo-soc] Project Glentoo: Weekly Progress Report #5

[Robert Seaton]

Hi, all.

Project Glentoo is a GSoC 2011 project to combine a Plan 9 inspired
userspace on top of a Gentoo-base system.

My status report is also available at
http://www.rs.io/summer-status-report-week-5/

Screenshot: http://www.rs.io/images/plan9fromgentoo_gui.png

After a fair amount of fighting with Catalyst, X11 integration is
complete. The screenshot probably explains Glentoo’s progress best. As
you can see, X is working. X starts on boot and runs the rio window
manager from Plan 9. One can then manipulate and create windows just
as you would on Plan 9. Along with rio, all the Plan 9 applications
from the plan9port package are available and can be used.

Getting X11 set up and running were the primary accomplishments on
this week. However, I also set up a Plan 9 virtual machine so that I
can compare Plan 9’s native behavior with the behavior of Glentoo. In
addition, I put in place the scripts to bring up X and rio when the
liveCD image is booted.

For the upcoming week, I intend to flesh things out so that more
applications are started on boot to help users get a feel for Glentoo.
I’m also going to work on things like adding a start up message and a
short “tutorial” on Plan 9’s different paradigms. Further, during the
upcoming week, I intend to work on figuring out what pieces of Plan 9
still need to be ported to Glentoo to offer a satisfactory end user
experience.

I also intend to add the Firefox web browser to the liveCD image,
seeing as one of the plan9port applications (web) requires it. In
addition, I’m going to look into bundling Glentoo’s spec files and
Catalyst with Glentoo so that it will be self-hosting. That way users
will be able to boot up Glentoo and use it to generate customized
Glentoo images very easily.

In addition, I’m thinking that I may attempt to include the different
tools that encompass the Go language’s ecosystem. While Plan 9 may not
have support for Go, Go’s roots can be traced to Inferno — Plan 9’s
successor, and both Go and Plan 9 share a developer: Rob Pike.
Including Go seems like a natural evolution and might help foster
adoption of both Glentoo and Go. My thinking is that users interested
in trying out Go would be able to boot Glentoo and just start writing
programs instead of trying to set up a working dev environment on
their local machines.

I’m still waiting for Robin to get back to me, but I’ve also put in a
request for a project page. That’s another one of the things that I
intend to work on during the upcoming week.

I thought that it would take another week to get to this point, so now
I’m about a week ahead of schedule. By mid-term, I want to have a
fully fleshed out project page and a mostly feature complete Glentoo
image generated. That way I will be able to focus on adding features
to make Glentoo more compelling during the second half of GSoC.

Cheers,
rps