New paper on using runit

papers/gui.mdwn

@@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
+Title: Making Unix a little more Plan9-like
+
+I'm not really interested in defending anything.
+I tried out plan9port and liked it,
+but I have to live in Unix land.
+Here's how I set that up.
+
+A Warning
+--------
+
+The suckless community,
+and some of the plan9 communities,
+are dominated by assholes.
+I hope that's strong enough wording to impress the severity.
+Don't go into IRC for help.
+Stay off the suckless email list.
+The software is great,
+the people who write it are well-spoken and well-reasoned,
+but for some reason the fandom is horrible to everyone.
+
+xterm
+-----
+
+9term has some really cool ideas.
+But Unix has a long history of using graphical terminals,
+and lots of stuff needs VT220 compatibility.
+xterm is a good compromise.
+
+You can make the xterm scroll bar (and all other Athena scrollbars) prettier
+with this in your X resources:
+
+	*Scrollbar.thickness: 10
+	*Scrollbar.thumb: None
+	*Scrollbar.foreground: gray80
+	*Scrollbar.background: gray50
+	*Scrollbar.borderWidth: 3
+	*ScrollBarBorder: 0
+
+This will swap the left and right mouse buttons,
+to work like acme and 9term:
+
+	*Scrollbar.translations: #override\
+		<Btn1Down>: StartScroll(Backward) \n\
+		<Btn3Down>: StartScroll(Forward) \n\
+		<BtnUp>: NotifyScroll(Proportional) EndScroll()
+
+A side note:
+if xrdb is never run and your root window doesn't have a
+`RESOURCE_MANAGER` property set,
+libXaw will read `$HOME/.Xdefaults`.
+This is supposedly deprecated,
+but Xaw is so ancient it will probably never be removed.
+
+
+9wm
+----
+
+I'm now maintaining the 9wm window manager.
+If you like rio you should give it a whirl,
+there are some differences you might prefer.
+http://woozle.org/neale/g.cgi/x11/9wm/
+
+

papers/index.mdwn

@@ -20,7 +20,8 @@ Computer Nerd Stuff
 
 * [The Setup](setup.html): the hardware and software I use
 * [Writing formal letters with roff](roff-letters.html)
-* [Runit on Arch Linux](arch-runit.html)
+* [Plan9 GUI stuff in Unix](gui.html): How to make your X11 stuff feel more like Plan9
+* [Runit as Init](arch-runit.html): My experience using runit as PID 1 for two years
 * [Reply-To Munging Still Considered Harmful](reply-to-still-harmful.html)
 * [Runnning PHP as a CGI](php-cgi.html) in anything other than Apache
 * [Converting .docx files to text using unzip and sed](docx.html)

papers/runit-as-init.mdwn

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+Title: My experiences using runit in Arch Linux
+
+In around 2012,
+after using busybox runit instead of sysvinit in my
+[Dirtbags Tiny Linux](https://woozle.org/neale/g.cgi/ctf/dbtl)
+distribution,
+I decided to try it out on my laptop, too.
+Here's how that went.
+
+Older Stuff
+===========
+
+My older paper on specifics of the conversion
+is still online: [Runit on Arch](arch-runit.html)
+
+Motivation
+==========
+
+I wanted to see if I could get a working system without having systemd
+installed at all.
+Not because I hate systemd,
+but because I love runit.
+I am acutely aware that a lot of people have strong opinions about systemd.
+Please: you don't need to share them with me.
+I don't care.
+
+Replacing init
+--------------
+
+First and most obvious was to get a getty running with my own
+`/sbin/init`.
+At the time,
+arch had just switched over to systemd,
+and had a recently-maintained systemv-init.
+Copying that,
+I was able to write a new init in Bourne shell.
+The resulting init did the following:
+
+* Mount and set up special filesystems (proc, sys, dev)
+* Set the system clock
+* Populate /dev (with `mdev -s`)
+* Load drivers (by reading `modalias` files in /sys)
+* Set the hostname
+* Bring up the loopback network interface
+* Set up cryptographic devices, if there are any
+* `fsck -A`
+* Remount / read-write
+* Mount everything else
+* Hand off to `runsvdir`
+
+Not bad, really.
+
+
+Setting up runit services
+-------------------------
+
+I won't go into this too much, it's well-documented elsewhere.
+At this point, I was able to get a getty going,
+but X11 wasn't recognizing the keyboard or mouse.
+
+
+Making X11 work
+---------------
+
+X11 at the time wanted `udev`,
+so I just ran that from init.
+But, a few months later,
+X was able to start with `udev`,
+so I took it out and figured out the keyboard and mouse problem.
+
+It had something to do with `evdev`;
+I think `udev` provided some sort of `evdev` help to X11,
+so I had to create some files in `/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d`
+to disable `AutoAddDevices`.
+Then the keyboard and mouse worked.
+
+I never looked into how to get evdev working again.
+
+
+Hot-plugging devices (like udev)
+--------------------------------
+
+For a while,
+you could echo something into a file under `/proc`
+and the kernel would run that for every uevent.
+You could set that program to `mdev` from busybox,
+and have a pretty well working system at that point.
+
+Newer kernels disabled support for this legacy interface.
+Now, you're supposed to monitor for Netlink events.
+But that's not too tough, it turns out.
+The kernel docs even have an example program to gather uevents.
+
+
+Wayland
+-------
+
+All you had to do was make a group with a certain name and add yourself to it.
+You also had to have write access to `/dev/dri/*` for the X11 stuff.
+Wayland was actually pretty low on crazy requirements.
+No consolekit or policykit or whatnottery needed.
+
+
+That's all?
+-----------
+
+Yup!
+
+
+Retrospective View
+==================
+
+After two years with this setup,
+I'm back to Ubuntu now,
+which means soon I'll have systemd.
+Looking back on it, here's how it went.
+
+
+It was blazing fast
+-------------------
+
+My new Ubuntu install boots a lot slower than my runit thing did.
+Maybe 2-3 times slower.
+Of course, it's doing way more.
+This is the cost of having a general-use distribution:
+you have to account for lots of cases,
+and need lots more support software.
+You can't rely on the machine owner to debug when,
+for instance,
+the console user doesn't have write access to the DRI device.
+
+
+It was easy (for me)
+--------------------
+
+Runit is really nice.
+I like it a lot.
+For old Unix beardos like me,
+having everything in Bourne shell is an attractive proposition.
+
+
+
+It required high wizardry
+-------------------------
+
+The head guy from the Archbang distribution tried to duplicate my work once,
+and failed to make everything work.
+We never did sort out what he needed to change.
+This was not something I'd recommend trying if you're not an expert
+and/or unwilling to debug a massively broken system for weeks.
+
+
+Stuff that never quite worked
+-----------------------------
+
+I had to set up a `dmix` device for ALSA,
+which usually worked,
+but sometimes things would get an exclusive lock on the sound hardware,
+which prevented other things from making sound.
+
+I could never get Chrome to get sound from the USB webcam I had to use at work.
+It would list it as a microphone source,
+and occasionally if I kept selecting every mic source over and over,
+it would start working.
+But it was never consistent,
+and I was never able to figure out why not.
+
+I never figured out how to get X11 to use evdev devices.
+
+
+Parting thoughts
+----------------
+
+Systemd fixes a lot of really ugly hacks.
+Things had become super kludgy,
+and systemd cleans it all up.
+I can't speak to systemd's architecture.
+It was annoying at times when stuff seemed to depend on systemd,
+but after looking into it,
+I was always able to find another way to do it.
+
+Bear in mind, I never tried to run Gnome or KDE.
+But I don't think people who want Gnome are going to want to futz around
+with writing run scripts for lid button events.
+
+The Linux kernel does not,
+to my mind,
+appear to be making any huge changes for systemd.
+Nothing I ran into here was out of reach for my project.
+
+Linux can still be used in a traditionally Unixy way.
+But you have got to bear in mind how un-Unixy things like X11 are.
+Wayland might be better, I don't know enough to say yet.
+
+My point is, Unix lost its roots decades ago with X11,
+or maybe even before with the Berkeley socket API,
+which didn't work from a shell script.
+I think it would be cool if somebody tried to make Linux
+look more like Plan9,
+and maybe the current backlash will kick that off.
+Runit is a way could do that.
+Please feel free to contact me :)
+