LowEndBox - Cheap VPS, Hosting and Dedicated Server Deals

Use Arc Forum Or Anarki To Make Your Own Hacker News!

Back in March @Not_Oles invited people from Low End Box to join a study group for MIT’s Operating System Engineering course, which is available for free online.

Just recently, a group of fifteen actually got started studying Xv6. The Xv6 study group now has a website and an informal mailing list. Something else that might be helpful to the study group is a discussion forum.

Here on the Low End, mention of the word “forum” immediately brings to mind our Low End Talk community’s green themed Vanilla. But, as great as Vanilla is, there are additional choices for forum software. And, for the Xv6 study group, it seemed an especially good idea to look at Arc Forum.

Arc Forum is an especially good fit for our Xv6 study group members who came from Hacker News. Arc Forum is what Hacker News runs. Furthermore, Arc Forum was written by Paul Graham and Robert Morris. Paul Graham is the founder of Hacker News, and Robert Morris was teaching the 2021 Xv6 course at MIT from which came the the lecture videos we are using.

Arc Forum Versions

According to the dates in the tar file, the original Arc Forum software seems last to have been released as version 3.2 on October 9, 2018. Version 3.2 still remains available at http://arclanguage.org/

The Arc language website explains that Arc is a version of Lisp. The Arc website also provides a working example of Arc forum dedicated to discussion of the Arc language.

Besides the original Arc Forum, there also is a community maintained version called Anarki.

Installing

I installed both versions. I wanted to take a close look at the differences between the original and the community versions.

To install the original Arc, I followed the arclanguage.org install instructions. There are additional instructions in the file arc3.2/how-to-run-news.

To install Anarki, I followed the README.markdown instructions.

Happily both versions worked out of the box! Both versions by default come up serving http on port 8080.

Arc Forum

Here’s a screenshot of the original Arc Forum default install.

Default Arc Forum install

Anarki

Here’s a screenshot of the Anarki community version default install.

Default Anarki Install

Archive

Here are links to archive.org showing the default installs of Arc Forum and Anarki:

Thanks to GTHost!

Special thanks to GTHost, whose servers we recently tested: Part I and Part II

@Not_Oles ran these Arc tests and also the tests for the recent Certbun article on a GTHost server.

GTHost has provided a promo code for 30% OFF for the 1st month on any GTHost server, valid till 30 Sep 2022. Promo Code: LET22-30

Additional References; Renewed Invitation To Join The Xv6 Study Group

What’s Next?

Looks like @Not_Oles needs to

With a bit more work and a little luck, maybe we can use Arc Forum or Anarki for the Xv6 study group.



Not_Oles

1 Comment

  1. Not_Oles:

    There also is laarc:

    https://github.com/laarc/laarc

    https://www.laarc.io/

    Friendly greetings!

    August 22, 2022 @ 6:10 pm | Reply

Leave a Reply

Some notes on commenting on LowEndBox:

  • Do not use LowEndBox for support issues. Go to your hosting provider and issue a ticket there. Coming here saying "my VPS is down, what do I do?!" will only have your comments removed.
  • Akismet is used for spam detection. Some comments may be held temporarily for manual approval.
  • Use <pre>...</pre> to quote the output from your terminal/console, or consider using a pastebin service.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *