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Inferno 4 Available for Download
Tarantolato writes "A new preliminary public release of the Inferno distributed operating system is now available for downloading from Vita Nuova's website. Inferno is meant to be a better Plan 9, which was meant to be a better Unix. It can run as a standalone OS, as an application on top of an existing one, or even as a browser plugin. Also, all of its major components are named after things related to hell."
I've briefly looked into trying out Inferno, but bear in mind it's not designed as a desktop system. Instead, the market it seems to be used in is the embedded market - so it'd be interesting to see how easy you can write server apps for application boxes with it.
However, it initially appears that Limbo is the only way to program for Inferno (prove me wrong please), which would be an obvious impediment to developer take-up.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Plan 9 had a license where you couldn't sue Lucent on an unrelated matter if you used it. They've now changed that (as of June 2003), and Stallman now considers it a "free software license incompatible with the GPL". From the GNU site:
Inferno's license seems to be the same as the new plan 9 one. (But I haven't looked in depth).
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
I thought a better unix was linux!
/gui/window/...etc. Also, the network protocol is entirely file-based. Your desktop system (or smartphone, or brower plugin) sees the server or another client as part of the same filesystem that its own resources sit in.
Linux is better mostly because it's free. It does not fix some of the imperfections in the core design (for good reasons; that would break Posix compatibility). According the Inferno Design Principles, Inferno takes Unix ideas and applies them more consistently. For instance: everything is a file. In Inferno, what you're typing in a text editor window can be queried in something like
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
You're not too far off the track. It is a network
operating system that lends itself to clustering
applications, and Vita Nuova has a few big clients
looking at exactly this.
Plus the Vita Nuova people are very approachable.
(Their office is virtually within sight of mine).
One of the great advantages is that just about
everything looks like a file so it is very easy
to create namespaced collections of device-type
files that might be resident on your machine, or
just as easily resident on a collection of
disparate machines. It makes prototyping GRID
applications very much easier.
Personally I am very keen on looking more at
Inferno for GRID computing just as soon as I have
more time to spend on it. It's not a solution to
all ills, but it has definite advantages, and
seems to be very robust and has a small footprint.
I've seen it running happily on a fairly old
PDA being used to seamlessly integrate a whole
series of remote devices.
Aaron Turner, University of York