NAME
     intro - introduction to the deck and its manual

DESCRIPTION
     This is the manual for the FRST Computer: the whole of it, on the deck,
     readable with no network and no other machine in the room.  Every command
     the deck offers has a page here.  If you are looking for the short
     version instead, help(1) prints a screenful of the commands worth
     knowing.

     Man(1) reads a page.  With no argument it prints the index, which is
     every page in the manual with a line saying what it is for.  man -k
     searches those lines, which is the command to reach for when you know
     what you want to do but not what it is called.

SECTIONS
     The manual is divided the way Plan 9 divides it, with one borrowing from
     Unix.  A page is cited with its section in parentheses -- cat(1),
     aether(3) -- and the deck's own pager prints that in the top bar so you
     always know which manual you are in.

     1    Commands.  Everything you can type at the shell.

     3    Devices and protocols.  The files the deck itself serves and the
          rules for talking to them: aether(3) is the mesh as it appears under
          /net, factotum(3) the key that says who you are.

     6    Games and diversions.  The small games, the emulators, the demo.

     8    Maintenance.  The few commands that change the deck rather than use
          it.

     man name searches the sections in that order and prints the first page it
     finds.  Give a section first to be exact: man 3 aether finds the protocol
     rather than a command of the same name.

CONVENTIONS
     A SYNOPSIS is read the same way everywhere in this manual.  Text in bold
     is typed exactly as it stands; text in italic is replaced by something of
     yours.  Brackets mark what may be left out, and an ellipsis marks what
     may be repeated.  So

         cat file ...
         ls [-l] [path ...]

     means cat takes one or more files and ls takes an optional flag and any
     number of paths.

     Several commands share a page when they share an idea.  The page is named
     for the first of them and the rest are listed under it in the index;
     either name finds it.

THE MACHINE
     Three things are worth knowing before the rest of the manual makes sense.

     The shell is rc(1), after the Plan 9 shell of that name.  It is small, it
     quotes with single quotes only, and its control flow is if, for, while
     and fn.  Its page also documents the built-in commands, which is most of
     what the deck can do.

     Everything is a file.  The radio, the running threads, the network
     connections and the battery are all directories you can cat(1) and write
     to.  There is no separate interface for them; there is no interface at
     all beyond open, read and write.

     Those files are arranged in a namespace, and the namespace is yours to
     rearrange.  Bind(1) and mount(1) move things around in it, ns(1) prints
     what it currently looks like, and attune(1) attaches a remote machine's
     files to it as easily as a local disk.  A data crystal mounted this way
     is not a network service the deck knows about; it is a directory.

WHERE TO START
     By what you want to do.

     Getting your bearings
          help(1), man(1), ns(1), ps(1), uname(1)

     Files
          cat(1), cp(1), p(1), grep(1), stat(1), df(1)

     The namespace
          bind(1), dial(1), attune(1)

     Writing things down
          ed(1), sam(1), se(1), vi(1), sed(1), todo(1)

     The network
          ping(1), con(1), vt(1), ftp(1), nc(1), finger(1)

     Boards and gopherspace
          bbs(1), gopher(1), id(1), handle(1)

     The mesh
          chat(1), achat(1), who(1), aexport(1), aether(3)

     Looking at things
          img(1), slides(1), intro26(6)

     Diversions
          games(6), chess(6), frotz(6), woz(6), forth(1)

     Keeping the deck
          date(1), power(1), fsupgrade(8), reboot(8)

FILES
     /n/local/man
          The manual.

     /n/local/man/INDEX
          Every page and its summary; man -k searches this.

SOURCE
     docs/man in the FRST source tree.

SEE ALSO
     man(1), help(1), rc(1), bind(1), ns(1)

NOTES
     The manual is on the deck because a manual that is somewhere else is not
     a manual.  It will be here in a tent, on a train, and after the last
     server that knew about this machine has been switched off.

FRST Computer                                                         INTRO(1)
