From OLPC

Inferno Applications Screenshot

Inferno Games Screenshot

Inferno® is a distributed operating system, originally developed at Bell Labs, but now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova® as Free Software. Applications written in Inferno's concurrent programming language, Limbo, are compiled to its portable virtual machine code (Dis), to run anywhere on a network in the portable environment that Inferno provides. Unusually, that environment looks and acts like a complete operating system.

The use of a high-level language and virtual machine is sensible but mundane. The interesting thing is the system's representation of services and resources. They are represented in a file-like name hiearchy. Programs access them using only the file operations open, read/write, and close. The 'files' may of course represent stored data, but may also be devices, network and protocol interfaces, dynamic data sources, and services. The approach unifies and provides basic naming, structuring, and access control mechanisms for all system resources. A single file-service protocol (called Styx or 9P2000) makes all those resources available for import or export throughout the network in a uniform way, independent of location. An application simply attaches the resources it needs to its own per-process name hierarchy ('name space').

The system can be used to build portable client and server applications. It makes it straightforward to build lean applications that share all manner of resources over a network, without the cruft of much of the 'Grid' software one sees.

Inferno can run 'native' on various ARM, PowerPC, SPARC and x86 platforms but also 'hosted', under an existing operating system (including FreeBSD, Irix, Linux, MacOS X, Plan 9, and Solaris), again on various processor types.

(description copied from google code project)

Besides being a new runtime environment, Inferno offers a number of applications which should run out of the box:

multimedia (audio player, mpeg player, avi player)

games (tetris, reversi, lego mindstorms interface, etc.)

collaboration tools (email client, chat, shared whiteboard, etc.)

servers (web server, content addressable storage system, etc.)

tools (vt terminal, telnet, sgml editor, debuggers, etc.)

News

Third Release - Ericvh 10:54, 28 January 2008 (EST)

inferno-012808.xo - (~11MB) third release includes fonts optimized for the OLPC, includes a logon screen with account creation, and keeps writable data under $SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT/data. This release also includes an expanded menu which covers more internal applications. NOTE: upgrades do not appear to be working, so if you have a previous version, please uninstall and then reinstall Inferno.

Second Release - Ericvh 15:56, 21 January 2008 (EST)

inferno-012108.xo - (~11MB) second release, functional but not visually optimized for OLPC

Documentation Bundle (~2MB) - installs papers and reference in browser library

Status

second release available - smaller bundle

bundle installs correctly

interacts properly with window manager

functional, but UI is not optimized for OLPC environment (yet)

JIT currently disabled, so it runs slower than optimal but faster than most other sugar apps

IMPORTANT NOTE: if you are running under qemu, you will have to change geometry in InfernoActivity.sh to 1024x768 or you won't see the menubar

Links

Development

TODO

fontfs which dynamically converts truetype fonts to inferno-native fonts

metafs which provides proper permissions to underlying file system in order to better match OLPC security model

camera support

audio support

OLPC targeted window manager

Design

Activity Summary





URL from which to download the last .xo bundle that works with old releases http://opteron.9grid.us/olpc/inferno-012808.xo Activity version number: 3 The releases with which this version of the activity has been tested. Development status:



