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Other Web Browsers for Bell Labs' Plan 9?
SeanIBaby asks: "I was wondering if anyone used Plan 9, and Inferno/Charon for a web browser. Are there any other web browsers for Plan 9, or do you have to code your own? I've noticed that Inferno's company sells Plan 9 boxed sets for $150US. I guess this is because they include the Inferno/Charon binaries with the image, even though they let you download Inferno for free from their website.
Plan 9 is free from Bell Labs."
If you cut your question off at "If anyone out there is using Plan 9?", the answer would be a resounding "Nope!". From what I've read, Plan 9 seems like a good idea, but from my experience, it seems like an idea people like to talk about a lot more than they like to implement.
Plan 9? Bunnies in spacesuits (one might say designed for OUTER space..) called Glenda???
I'm beginning to see a theme here...
The Original: In English:People are often struck by lightning. Sometimes even when it isn't raining. Heck, it could even happen to me tomorrow. But it's still safe to assume that it won't.
I first downloaded the vmdisk that they had available. My version is 4.26 (I think, not at my desk) and it complained about the bios settings being corrupt and resetting to default. long and short, it wouldn't hang at booting the kernel. I d/led the 65 meg ISO and tried to do it from scratch. After a couple of hours, it was finally installed and ready to reboot. Hung in the same damn place.
Now I'm all for hacking and learning and playing with operating systems, but QNX installed a heck of a lot easier.
I realize this doesn't help you too much, but I saw that a lot of people where getting flamebait mods for saying that Plan9 wasn't used by anyone. I can honestly say I don't know anyone that uses it, but I know several people that have talked about it.
Have you tried compiling Mozilla under it? It compiles under just about any other *Nix OS
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
There are quite a few users of plan9 nine.
Okay it is probably not more than 100 regular, everyday plan9 is my desktop users but it certainly isn't "nope". But "from my experience" is a really stupid extrapolation.
It certainly is a surprise to see this question on Ask Slashdot when it would be much easier to ask it in comp.os.plan9
All the assumptions in the question are totally wrong.
The VitaNuova Box Sets contain a set or printed manuals. It has nothing to do with inferno being included. Newsflash - Inferno is a free download too !
"Why can I buy OS Z when I can download it for free" can be said of many of the Free OS's.
I think the whole Thread is a giant troll!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
OpenBSD wants the compilers.
FreeBSD wants the namespaces.
Everybody wants the plumber only they don't know it yet.
GNU/Hurd would love to have a working microkernel OS.
Wake me up when grep, sed & awk and the rest of the bunch work on Unicode!
Then there are the ports - Wily, 9wm, 9menu
Gawk's extensions are lifted from the plan9 way.
The "next big thing" grid computing is old hat to us.
Don't worry, we'll be waiting for you.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
plan9 is less forgiving with hardware
Since the downturn at Lucent no-one is being paid full time to work on plan9 and many in Bell Labs have been made redundant.
Getting a set of hardware together is a barrier to entry but if you look at the supported hardware list you may notice that much of the equipment is old and therefore cheap to get second hand and is often the sort of stuff people will just ditch, S3 Virge's and that kind of thing.
I can honestly say I don't know anyone that uses it
Yes, we are a small minority but growing steadily. We have 13 people in our little irc channel.
But we don't mind, more users would be nice but world domination isn't on the to-do list.
It is a specialised OS with some interesting ideas, many of which are being backported to the stinking corpse that is unix.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
i -- a browser attempt by Howard Trickey done sometime around 1996. you can view slightly less complex pages without crashing with probability of around 50%. i know of at least one masochist that uses it regularly.
:)
charon -- the browser packaged with VitaNuova's Inferno operating system which runs native atop Plan 9 (among other OS's). this is your best bet if you want to stick to using Plan 9 only.
Everything else the runs under UNIX/Windows (see Opera lurking in the background?). you only need to have a machine to run VNC on.
links -- two people have started a port of this graphical browser to Plan 9, one may succeed, who knows
as for mozilla, there is a slight problem with porting it to Plan 9 -- the browser sources are twice the size of the entire Plan 9 operating system (including the PostScript viewer).
BeOS would be great if it could get out into the OS world. It would make a great compainon for Linux. Linux on the server and workstations and BeOS on home systems and many desktops.
News break... Unix is not the ultimite OS. It is very good and has evolved over the years but in someways it is holding back Computer Science much like Windows is. Very few people are willing to work on anything in OpenSource that is not Linux/BSD/Unix based. I do not blame them. Linux has a lot of tools and apps now. I can use Linux at home for surfing, irc, email, and even writing code. It is good enough. It is actually pretty good.
What I would love to see is something like openMosix. It would be very handy if all the computers at my office where a big CPU pool that tasks could use as they needed. To upgrade just hang some more boxes on the network. An oop based kernel maybe? I would love to see a new OS that has new ideas. The problem is that even I would want it to run my old software.
Linux is a great peice of work. I just have to wonder if we might be missing somthing better.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.