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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I've begun flagging all the "I RAN A PROGRAM ON THE RPI" posts, but this is an exception. Though I'd still go VM: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/installing_plan_9_on_q...

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this is an exception

Why? This isn't even "how I got X to run on RasPi" - it's "I ran the image that someone else created". Period. That's it. Um, wow.

If you're not on the 9fans mailing list there's a pretty good chance you would have missed this. Hats off to Chris for catching this and taking the time to try it out. I had a lot of fun toying around with acme earlier today as a result.

The link to the image was posted here nine days ago[1], it wasn't missed. These sorts of 'Execute a few basic commands to do something on the RPi' posts are becoming a bit ridiculous and fluffy.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4812749

I probably should avoid responding to this, but here goes: If you don't like it, submit something you do like and let people vote it up or down. Don't like the community? Go elsewhere. Friends of mine are always talking about how the quality of comments has gown downhill on Hacker News, and your comment is proof. Please stop turning everything fun into a referendum on karma.

The original posting was a bare announcement in comp.os.plan9 for people who were already familiar with Plan 9. The newer article adds references to some introductory Plan 9 documentation which would be very helpful to someone new to the OS.

Because I would have simply assumed that an obscure OS would lack driver support.

Maybe, but a small and simple OS makes it easier to write new drivers when needed.

An advantage of going native rather than VM, especially with an OS as small and simple as Plan 9, is that you can have complete control and understanding of what's running on your machine - no mystery processes you didn't start, no little webservers opening ports behind your back...

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