Inferno is a distributed operating system developed by the same geniuses who invented UNIX, C, UTF-8, Plan-9 from Bell Labs/Lucent. It’s cutting edge research and I’m installing it to do, well, research. If things work out, I’ll be installing it on another machine, and will clean this up then. But for now on Ubuntu 11.04 (386):

I cloned the mercurial repository as well as downloaded the tar with fonts. I haven’t decided which path is smarter. I installed graphics libraries. I also ran most of this as root in /usr/lib (was that smart?):

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/inferno-os/
wget http://www.vitanuova.com/dist/4e/inferno-20100120.tgz
apt-get install libxext-dev libxpm-dev x11proto-xext-dev

Extracted/moved to /usr/lib/inferno (not sure that’s wise)
edited mkconfig, set ROOT to the path above, set OBJTYPE=386, etc
PATH=/usr/lib/inferno/Linux/386/bin:$PATH
And this was not anywhere reasonable (like INSTALL, the repo web site, nor vita nuova) except Ueber.net:
./makemk.sh && mk -s nuke mkdirs install

Very fast boot time!

$ /usr/lib/inferno/Linux/386/bin/emu -r/usr/lib/inferno -c0 -g1024x768
; wm/wm

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/downloads.html

http://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/inferno/getting-started.html