Date: 2025-02-11

Replacing Plan 9 with Alpine Linux on Raspberry Pi 4

Due to public demand, I trashed Plan 9 on Raspberry Pi 4 and installed
Alpine Linux on it. I tried to put all three big BSD systems there,
but all were cancer to install it. It was just a headache and from not
booting, or booting into some 90' half graphic mode to booting into
some non-existent serial console while unable to do anything with it,
because keyboard somehow did not work in that "interrupt" time when
OpenBSD kernel wants to boot up ;/

The reason I wanted to install especially OpenBSD is easy-peasy smtpd,
httpd and mostly pf - packet filter. Linux firewall is practically the
way how to get sick. Tens of options, all are practically the same
just with different syntax, config and all are unmanageable by sane
human. I remember old jokes about Linux sound, those people probably
did not play with Linux firewall ;/

The installation was easy without any issues, like on RPi 5. Just boot
USB flash drive with Alpine, then ran regular "setup-alpine" and
install the system on the SD card.

One issue I had to figure out was a text editor. I am used to
regular vi editor, however Busybox vi is so limited that it does not
offer auto hard wrap a line at certain character in lenght. It does
not show the position of cursor too. There are plenty of newer editors
like vis, kakoune or similar, but those are not my cup of tea.
Luckily I found something called openvi - clone of OpenBSD vi editor.

Overall everything works well. This move makes things much easier as
ssh and vi like text editing is probably the most efficient and
ergonomic way to deal with text files. Well, of course sh, ssh and vi
are "standard" tools, so life is a bit simpler and easier.

Bonus: Finger activated. The board of heroes available over port 79.

Simplicity means to be just yourself, whosoever you are, in tremendous
acceptance, with no goal, with no ideal. All ideals are crap, scrap
all of them.