Brave New World

17/11/2016

Update: Finally figured out the layout after digging a bit more into the sources, it’s a QWERTY-UK (see devices/rpi2/uspi/include/uspios.h). Looks like I’ll have to modify the bundled USPI library to include a QWERTY-US layout before I can make any progress on keyboard remapping in Lisp…

I believe I’ve found an even greater time sink than writing Lisp interpreters for fun. Long time ago, I’ve read an encouraging blog post on the future of the LispM, not expecting to find an implementation of the ideas presented therein. Turns out I was wrong about that. Meet Interim OS!

In case you’re wondering why you should possibly care:

• Small and readable codebase (most of the code is device drivers for the Raspberry Pi)
• Simple to hack on
• Plan9-style APIs
• Minimal Lisp dialect
• Runs on your favorite desktop OS in hosted mode, that is, safely contained to a terminal with the ability to spawn graphical windows
• Runs on bare metal (Raspberry Pi 2)

Getting it to run in hosted mode is simple enough, so I won’t explain it here. Booting on bare metal however is a different story, so here we go:

$ git clone https://github.com/mntmn/interim
$ cp interim/docs/interim-0.1.0-rpi2.tgz ./
$ bsdtar -xf interim-0.1.0-rpi2.tgz # cry me a river
% mkdir /media/boot
% mount /dev/sdXN /media/boot
% cp release-rpi2/* /media/boot/
% rm /media/boot/cmdline.txt
% umount /media/boot

• Plug in the SDHC card, a HDMI monitor and a USB keyboard
• Optionally: Plug in a network cable and/or a USB mouse
• Power up

You’ll be greeted by a “Welcome to Interim OS” and dropped into a promptless shell. If you’re unlucky, the chosen resolution may be unreadable, so feel free to retry this process a few times. The keyboard layout is hardcoded and somewhere between QWERTY-US and QWERTZ-DE, something I intend to fix soon. For basic usage instructions, type (bytes->str (load "/sd/hello.txt")) and hit the enter key. Happy hacking!