few little helpers...

I am now using Plan 9 for some time as my main and only OS and so far i am still confident, that it will stay this way. For someone who has an text-centric job like me it is also a very good choice as an productivity tool. At least my boss stopped complaining that i hang around in reddit too much ;-)

In my initial setup i set the resolution in my plan9.ini to a fixed value of 1600x1200 pixels, which looked good, but was a bit to large to fit completely on the display of the R60 (so i sometimes "lost" console output during startup), also if i connected the Thinkpad to the dock it did not switch to the external monitor.

After a bit of research i set the plan9.ini back to the default value of:

%<----------------------------

monitor=vesa

vgasize=1024x768x16

%<----------------------------

... and created two new scripts in my personal ./bin/386 directory:

%<---------dock---------------

@{rfork n; aux/realemu; aux/vga -m cinema -l 1280x768x32}

%<----------------------------

and

%<---------undock-------------

@{rfork n; aux/realemu; aux/vga -m vesa -l 1280x1024x32}

%<----------------------------

The latter is also called in my ./bin/rc/riostart

Since back in the Bell Labs days Plan 9 is using a 'cached worm' file system. To put it simple: The filesystem creates periodic, unchangeable snapshots of itself. The nice thing about this is, that accidental deleting some important work does lose its horror this way, the not so nice (or, to put it better: 'Inconvenient') thing is, that this system normaly wants to do its snapshotting on a fixed time of the day. No problem for a server or workstation running 24/7, inconveniant for a laptop.

To circumvent this issue i have cobbled together a little shutdown script:

%<---------shutdown-----------

echo "Shutdown initiated..."

sleep 5;

echo dump >> /srv/hjfs.cmd;

sleep 5;

fshalt

%<----------------------------

The waiting periods are just an overcareful way to give the file system time to finish any writing actions.