Bendyworks

More Unix than Unix

Do you like Unix? Do you really like Unix? Well, what if I told you there's a little-known operating system out there that's more Unix than even Unix is. Cool, right?

Well it is true! Plan 9 occupies an interesting niche in the open source operating system world. It is a full-fledged descendant of Unix, but not in the way that most systems out there are. It took the bones and beating heart of Unix and then built a brand-new cybernetic exoskeleton around it, with lasers, and heat vision... oh wait. You want to boot this bad-boy up, right? Well, okay, we'll do that. But what hardware shall we run it on? Hey, you got a Raspberry Pi? Well then, read on!

Installation

Installing Plan 9 on the raspberry pi couldn't be much easier. Thanks to Richard Miller of 9fans, there's a ready-to-go image for the Raspberry Pi. ...continue reading

tl;dr: If you are looking for a lightweight document preparation system in the style of LaTeX, try out troff which is probably already on your system.

Intro

Lurking deep in UNIX, even on your shiny new Mac, is the eldritch horror of troff. It waits, dead but dreaming, for when the stars are right to reëmerge from the unplumbed deeps of the icy dark waves...

Actually, troff is a typesetting program that you may not have even realized you had. And while troff is old, and perhaps obscure, it is surprisingly useful for making clean, simple documents. If you need something like LaTeX, but balk at the multi-gigabyte install, then troff is worth taking a look at. As an added benefit, you'll also understand that weird syntax behind man pages! ...continue reading