Driving Plan 9

Has to be asked... by writermike · 2006-07-23 01:20 · Score: 5, Funny

Were Plans 1-8 "not entirely successful?"

"You see! You see! Your stupid minds! STUPID! STUPID!"

--
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.

Re:Has to be asked... by Mike+Savior · 2006-07-23 01:41 · Score: 2, Funny

If they had used letters, I wonder how many times the developers would have purposely bombed the project just so they could get away with calling it "Preparation H"...

--
space is pretty cool.
Re:Has to be asked... by pedalman · 2006-07-23 04:33 · Score: 2, Funny

Were Plans 1-8 "not entirely successful?
It could be worse. I still wonder about the poor bastards who were in the clinical trials for Preparations A-G.

--
Friends don't let friends line-dance.

Surely... by isecore · 2006-07-23 01:20 · Score: 2, Funny

... Ed Wood must be proud :)

--
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.

Plan 9 ISO Mirrors by ettlz · 2006-07-23 01:26 · Score: 5, Informative

Before y'all go pulling down the ISO to try it out, the mirrors are listed at http://netlib.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mirrors/ind ex.html .

Now YOU look stupid. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-07-23 01:26 · Score: 4, Informative

Plan 9 is a reference to the Ed Wood movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space, often regarded as the worst movie of all time. Aliens raise the dead to finally prove to humans that they exist (because that's certainly the most obvious, effective way to do it).

Re:Now YOU look stupid. by Anonymous Coward · 2006-07-23 02:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

Considering that the "Your stupid minds! STUPID! STUPID!" line is a quote from the movie, I suspect the OP knew that.
Re:Now YOU look stupid. by andreMA · 2006-07-23 02:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Actually I took the "not entirely successful" to be a reference to the TOS episode The Ultimate Computer, where (when discussing the M-5) Kirk asks Daystrom (the inventor) about M-1 through M-4. Daystrom responds that they were "not entirely successful"
I thought it was funny, playing one of the cheesier TOS episodes against the extremely cheesy Plan 9 From Outer Space
Re:Now YOU look stupid. by gkhan1 · 2006-07-23 05:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

Ahh, but you are mistaken in your praise of Plan 9, most of us Ed Wood aficionados knows that that isn't his masterpiece, indeed it is trivial in comparison to the behemoth of Glen or Glenda (also known on sensational posters as "I Changed My Sex!"), wherein Wood himself stars as transvestite and Bela Lugosi is an insane rambling doctor.
All jokes aside, Bela Lugosi really deserved better than Ed Wood. It's a shame to see this man who scared the living daylights out of so many people with his Dracula and really made a mark on movie history be reduced to lap-dog in the hands of a complete hack. I guess Wood helped him make another mark on movie history.

OS good, but all the desktop wallpapers... by jpellino · 2006-07-23 01:27 · Score: 3, Funny

... are cheesy 10 ft tall silver curtains.

--
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."

Plan 9 is cool by Anonymous Coward · 2006-07-23 01:28 · Score: 5, Informative

I've never used it, but Plan 9 offers a radically different archival storage system called Venti.

Basically it never deletes old blocks of data from the server. Blocks are write-once, identified by a really large hash (collisions are so improbable that the possibility can be totally ignored). This allows you to copy lots of redundant data to the server (such as periodic backups) without worrying about the storage space. If the blocks were ever copied there before and they have not changed, they won't take up any space!

Re:Plan 9 is cool by ciroknight · 2006-07-23 02:42 · Score: 4, Informative

Both are available today, and I can assure you Plan 9's Venti was first, and furthermore ZFS isn't really anything like it. Venti does data compression by removal of redundant data by (basically) writing a block, and then checksumming the block and using that sum to refer to the block in the future, so that if the software tries to write an identical block, it simply ignores the request. With an appropriate block size set, it can save lots and lots of space, however, it's very impractical as a day-to-day filesystem due to the datasets most people work with day-to-day (most of us work with lots of non-redundant data such as code files, video files, image files, etc.), though it would be a neat experiment to see what could be done with a modernized version of it.

Lots of things like this were/are revolutionary about Plan 9, simply because they were given the ability to do it. Some of them are great ideas (like Venti in conjunction with a database server, if the database server was tailored to the file system and didn't do stupid things...), and some of them could still use a great deal of work. Either way, I welcome our Plan 9 overlords from Outer Space.

--
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Re:Plan 9 is cool by inKubus · 2006-07-23 05:53 · Score: 3, Informative

The whole OS is mainly designed to run across multiple computers on a network. It abstracts everything into a file, way more than unix. It's designed for large scale environments and not single user stuff.

Also, there is a PDF detailing the Fossil archival server and Venti FS.

It's totally cool.

--
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Re:Plan 9 is cool by hey! · 2006-07-23 06:37 · Score: 2, Funny

No, but the CDs are roasted way too dark. Of course some say that Americans are just too parochial to appreciate properly carmelized bits, but of course if it's so much better that way, why does their port of mkisofs have the --with-mocha and --with-vanilla-syrup options?

--
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.

The notion of good research by DrSkwid · 2006-07-23 01:30 · Score: 4, Funny

man page != implementation

http://cm.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/emacs

NAME
emacs - editor macros

SYNOPSIS
emacs [ options ]

DESCRIPTION
This page intentionally left blank.

SOURCE
MIT

SEE ALSO
sam(1), vi(1)

BUGS
Yes.
Copyright © 2006 Lucent Technologies. All rights reserved.

and vi(1) isn't what you might think either

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

Oh, slashdot by Zouden · 2006-07-23 01:31 · Score: 4, Insightful

I have downloaded and ran Plan 9 before. In fact the Plan 9 live cd sits here on my desk. Its not an operating system for noobs however

What is this, digg?

--
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"

Zzzzzzz..... by countach · 2006-07-23 01:39 · Score: 4, Interesting

The "everything is a file" metaphor of Unix was revolutionary at the time, and Plan 9 taking it a little further really does little to advance the state of the art.

What was good about the "everything is a file" metaphor was not the "file" part, but the "everything is a...." part.

What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system. It would be something like a Lisp OS but with an object database type file system. I think some have existed in academia, but I've never looked into them.

Re:Zzzzzzz..... by ems2 · 2006-07-23 01:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

"We have persistent objects, they're called files." -- Ken Thompson

--
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Re:Zzzzzzz..... by Bobjects · 2006-07-23 02:43 · Score: 2, Informative

What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system.

Smalltalk-80 fits that description pretty well. See:
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81 /design_principles_behind_smalltalk.html

Smalltalk-80's modern descendent is Squeak:
http://www.squeak.org/
Re:Zzzzzzz..... by ratatask · 2006-07-23 03:46 · Score: 5, Informative

>The "everything is a file" metaphor of Unix was revolutionary at the time, and Plan 9 taking it a little further really does little to advance the state of the art.

Sorry, this is where you're wrong.
Make the socket interface a filesystem, and all you do is mount a fileserver over that, to create
a socks proxy/http proxy/whatever. All apps get the capability of
doing networking over a proxy, transparently - no need for using libs or
prelinking hacks that usually don't work.

Have the ability to easily create fileservers in userspace, and create an mail
filesystem that can handle imap/pop/local mboxes etc. Mail clients doesn't need
to reimplement your favorite mail protocol in yet another broken and incompatible
way, or adhere to 4 different libraries with 4 different concepts. Just read/write files and
have the one fileserver do the job.

Sharing files AND resources becomes easy too. Want to play sound on another computer ? import hostname:/dev/audio /dev

Having all resources being files, you get a standard way of access control (add ACLs if you really need to), couple it with private
namespaces, and you don't need the umpten hacks like freebsd jails, chroots, selinux, systrace, etc. Just use chmod/chown and set up a filesystem namespace only containing the resources (resources in this case is anything you request from the OS - networking interface, audio device, screen display, authentication privileges, or most other of the 400 syscalls or ioctls you might want to restrict access to in a read/change on traditional unixes.

The review is not so great by ems2 · 2006-07-23 01:59 · Score: 5, Informative

The review is not so great in terms of accuracy i.e. there is no emacs (check out acme, sam, ed, and smacme instead) and the 640x480 resolution is nonsense. 9fans certainly isn't so grateful about this review.

Check out the Plan 9 documentation if you are interested in understanding Plan 9.

--
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

Re:The review is not so great by andrewzx1 · 2006-07-23 03:34 · Score: 3, Interesting

Hi Ems2, I am the author of the referenced Plan 9 article and I can safely say that 640X480x8 was the default window size that came up.This is fact and not opinion.I think I mentioned that it was easily changed to a higher resolution, either by Rio or by simply typing 800x600x8. I now see that there is a version of emacs available. I referenced an out-of-date posting on the 9fans list (I think). Thanks for the correction. Emacs is a great asset. You will see that I too provided plenty of references to the Plan 9 documentation for people to investigate.
Re:The review is not so great by ems2 · 2006-07-23 04:24 · Score: 2, Informative

You are wrong. You are asked what resolution you want. 640x480x8 is just the first option on the list.

--
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Re:The review is not so great by JoshRoss · 2006-07-23 05:17 · Score: 2, Funny

640x480 should be good enough for anyone.

I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user by DrSkwid · 2006-07-23 02:00 · Score: 5, Informative

"Plan 9 from Bell Labs" is the proper name of the OS.

Plan 9 is now community driven, albiet from a small community, mostly the same people that have been there all along.

It has USB sound support and AC97 support is a new one on me.

I use it still because the user environment is the best one I have encountered for text editing and interecting with the shell. Most users use VNC to get to their X11/Windows desktops where their web browser lives.

Building a web browser from scratch is one of those never ending tasks that frankly, just isn't worth your while. That said there is Mothra - no tables, no css, no frames etc. that Tom Duff (yes that Tom Duff) wrote many moons ago and one of the community is beavering away at his project Abaco and has moderate success.

One of the main tenets to Plan 9 is "everything is a file" and the system is built around the notion of a distributed name space in the shape of a directory tree rather than being a reflection of the disk contents. The canonical example of this is ftps where the remote ftp site is presented as a directory tree at /n/ftp

Name spaces are process independent so you can build them per process which feels a bit like chrooting.

Exporting a name space is part of the deal, this presents many gifts that were not deliberately shoe-horned in such as remote step debugging across architectures, sending sound to a remote soundcard, importing a remote machine's network stack instead of using a gateway (including non-plan9 machines via ssh), importing remote filesystems (including non plan 9 machines). All this is facilitated by the 9p protocol.

As a micro/macro kernel hybrid all this is achieved in just 37 syscalls which is a source of amusement and a feeling of superiority when compared to Linux' 300+ (so many they are not even enumerated any more).

Linux is derided in the mailing list ("For amateurs, by amateurs") as well as the failings of the other braindead OSes we have to deal with ("If only they did it like us").

Linus has stopped by in 9fans to whine on about stuff and was seen off, Theo wanted our compilers when he didn't want the license (as imposed by Lucent lawyers) but since they have been dual licensed we've not seen him around.

Inferno isn't plan 9, it's another product built on similar principles that was sold off by Lucent.

Lucent's management of Plan 9 in hindsight could have prevented adoption when it was crucial - it was $300 per copy prior to v. 3 and once a free download had a "copies of all modifications must be sent to Lucent" clause and other annoying restrictions in it. These have been lifted now but they boat could already have sailed.

The notion of distributed computing has gained ground in recent times and Plan 9 could have been at the forefront with distributed computing being built in from the start.

All that said, Plan 9 was never intended as anything more than an experiment and some ideas have slowly crept into other products (or possibly independently invented) - notably Windows XP presenting their stuff as files/folders, ftpfs in Linux, single sign-on.

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user by ttfkam · 2006-07-23 04:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

There's no point calling a turd a diamond to save the feelings of the person who shitted it out.

However you don't tell someone their house is a shithole that only an idiot would want to live in even if you have a better home proposed. You point out the merits of the new house over and above what they have now.

Otherwise you will be perceived simply as an asshole calling someone an idiot. It might make you feel better, superior, etc., but it guarantees that you and whatever you're bringing to the table will be ignored or actively derided.

You hurt your cause by your presence. People will avoid Plan 9 not for its failings, but because it is associated with assholes, for example, you. If your goal is to kill the project, then by all means continue insulting others because you think they deserve it. If you actually want to foster adoption, perhaps a measure of diplomacy and a modicum of decorum would help.

In short, don't be a dick. As an added bonus, that advice works for more than just software.

--

- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user by ems2 · 2006-07-23 07:14 · Score: 2, Informative

You can also get Plan 9's c compiler (by Ken Thompson) from Inferno. FYI, they are kept in sync. The only difference is the license used with the version bundled with Inferno. The license is based on MIT-template. The text goes as follows:
This copyright NOTICE applies to all files in this directory and subdirectories, unless another copyright notice appears in a given file or subdirectory. If you take substantial code from this software to use in other programs, you must somehow include with it an appropriate copyright notice that includes the copyright notice and the other notices below. It is fine (and often tidier) to do that in a separate file such as NOTICE, LICENCE or COPYING. Copyright Â© 1994-1999 Lucent Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. Revisions Copyright Â© 2000-2005 Vita Nuova Holdings Limited (www.vitanuova.com). All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

--
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user by OnanTheBarbarian · 2006-07-23 12:08 · Score: 2, Interesting

It's really easy to make operating systems elegant if you aren't constrained by the terrible task of supporting a large base of (often old) software and hardware (particularly software).

Nothing epitomizes, to me, the Plan 9 attitude like your remark later in the thread about how not having shared libraries is something to celebrate (it's a feature, not a bug!). I'm aware that you didn't just make this up; it's a pretty common thing for Plan 9 implementers and fans to say. Yes, shared libraries are awkward to implement and do some nasty things to the semantics of your run time.

However, out there in the real world, programmers are frequently required to use complicated, feature-rich libraries that do things undreamt-of on Plan 9 (e.g. create a user interface that looks and works even vaguely like the user interface from any other recent system, for example). The fact that Rob Pike's taste for minimalism in user interfaces conveniently scales down the size of the UI library to almost nothing is neither here nor there. acme is a neat idea, but if you wanted to make the argument that shared libraries are bogus, then you need to show that you can deliver something that's as substantial as the functionality of existing libraries through other means (e.g a user-level file server).

The tendency of Plan 9 boosters to write off anything that they don't need to do as 'obviously inelegant and not worth doing' is fine, but it's hard to see how one can draw system design lessons from it.

Plan 9's web browsers by ems2 · 2006-07-23 02:54 · Score: 4, Informative

First of all there is Charon from Inferno. It supports html, EMCAScript (1.1 IIRC), CSS, DOM (level 1 IIRC) and https. (See screenshot however this one is a bit outdated)

Abaco is the most actively developed Plan 9 web browser. It supports most of html. DOM level 3 development has been started. Mozilla's Javascript engine has been ported to Plan 9 and can be used today for a Javascript shell. This will provide abaco with Javascript in the future. Work on CSS has started but I do not know what has been done or where it is heading. Abaco has been ported to Linux and friends via Plan 9 from Userspace. Package managers are encouraged to make packages of abaco for their systems. (See screenshot)

Then there are webpage, links, mothra, and htmlfmt.

Finally there are text web browsers for acme (htmlfmt for Plan 9 and see this for Inferno)

In other news, SDL now works on Plan 9.

--
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

Re:Wow! I have never heard about this before! by despisethesun · 2006-07-23 02:57 · Score: 2, Funny

Yeah! Fucking assholes! The only OS they should mention more than once is Linux!

--
This poo is cold.

For those of you who haven't seen plan 9 yet... by ChePibe · 2006-07-23 03:16 · Score: 2, Funny

Plan 9 is now available for free from Google Video.

I must warn you, however, that everything you will see is based on sworn testimony...

Re:How does it compare with the SavaJe OS by ems2 · 2006-07-23 03:17 · Score: 4, Informative

There is APE for POSIX support. And linuxemu for emulating linux binaries.

I personally have not checked out Savaje OS. Inferno would be most comparable to such an OS. Inferno is based on many of Plan 9's ideas but with a new programming language, Limbo (famed for being the only other language than C Dennis Ritchie documented) and a virtual machine, Dis. Limbo can run on bare hardware without a host operating system with around 700KB of memory.

Rob Pike explains the advantages of the Dis virtual machine. Unlike the .Net and Java virtual machines which are stack based Dis is register based. This allows it to run on bare hardware and doesn't require a (according to some heavyweight) operation to translate it from stack to register. Dis provides virtually infinite registers like Parrot. For more information read Pike's paper, The design of the Inferno virtual machine.

--
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

/proc on steroids by DrDitto · 2006-07-23 03:19 · Score: 5, Interesting

My university had a visitor from Los Alamos several weeks ago and he gave a live demo of using Plan9 to control a 10,000-machine cluster.

Really cool how _everything_ was a file.

To start a program on some machine, he would cd to some directory corresponding to the machine. I don't remember exactly, but this directory had files corresponding to "exe", "stdin", and "stdout" among others. To start a job, the program was just copied to the exe file. And then if you looked at the "stdout" file, the output from the running job was there. Now you can imagine how launching a job on thousands of machines and collecting the output becomes really trivial.

I got the impression that this was sort of like the Linux /proc filesystem, but expanded to work seamlessly across a cluster and with more functionality.

Re:/proc on steroids by ems2 · 2006-07-23 03:50 · Score: 2, Informative

Linux got the idea for /proc from Plan 9. However, it a very dumbed down version of Plan 9's. One of the major differences is that Plan 9's /proc controls processes while Linux really does nothing but represent them to some degree. One example is that you either kill a process by writing 'kill' to its clt (control) file or delete its directory. Plan 9 requires less syscalls thanks to this design. Inferno also has this design to manage its processes. Imagine this with Plan 9's distributing ideas...

--
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Re:/proc on steroids by spitzak · 2006-07-23 04:36 · Score: 4, Informative

Linux copied the idea of /proc *from* Plan9, so there is certainly some resemblance!

Despite the limited nature of the copy (somebody else says that Linux version is pretty much read-only, I'm not sure) it shoud be obvious what a big win this is. Suddenly a whole lot of utilities like "ps" do not have to be recompiled to match the kernel. And you can peek into /proc directly, without using a program, and get useful information (such as what files are open or the executable name, I've done both of these plenty of times).

The only other Plan-9 thing that is copied extensively is UTF-8 text encoding. This one is also a HUGE win, as suddendly we don't have to write two streams through all our programs for handiling Unicode and handling "legacy" ascii files, as they are now the same thing, as long as some (very minor) fixes are done to the "legacy" code. Plus UTF-8 seamlessly handled Unicode going past 65536 characters, while the "wide character" solution that Sun and HP and Dec and Microsoft struggled with for 20 years fell apart the moment this happened, by adding "surrogate characters" and thus deleting the *only* advantage it had over UTF-8.

Considering how incredibly useful both of these ideas are, I would certainly like to see a lot more of Plan 9 brought out into the real world. There is a lot there!
Re:/proc on steroids by Apotsy · 2006-07-24 01:18 · Score: 2, Informative

If you're referring to surrogate pairs, those are a result of the insistence by Microsoft and IBM at including so many thousands of compatibility characters for their existing character sets. Everything currently in Unicode could have easily fit within 65k chars if it weren't for those two companies. The original vision of Unicode as pushed by engineers from Xerox and Apple (I know some of them) did not include surrogates.
Also, you talk as though UTF-8 were inherently superior to UTF-16 because of the smaller space taken up by ASCII-rage characters. However, for data that is say ... east Asian, UTF-8 is actually larger (characters in the unified Han range take up 3 bytes instead of 2).
Not everyone in the world speaks English, and UTF-8 is not optimal for everyone and every situation. There is more to life that ASCII compatibility.

--
Free Hans!

Plan9 runs on Xenopix DVD by Anonymous Coward · 2006-07-23 03:31 · Score: 2, Interesting

Plan9 runs on Xenopix DVD. Xenoppix runs Plan9 on anonymous PC.

http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/xen/index-en.h tml

Xenoppix is a combination of Virtual Machine Monitor "Xen" and 1CD/DVD "KNOPPIX".
It runs Plan9 and NetBSD on Xen-DomU(GuestOS) and KNOPPIX on XenDom0(HostOS).

Interesting reads. by ratatask · 2006-07-23 03:31 · Score: 2, Informative

In addition to the Plan 9 papers, here's some nice reads:
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDE ADYET.pdf
http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/9book.html

Re:Sounds like what The Hurd was supposed to be... by DrSkwid · 2006-07-23 03:34 · Score: 2, Informative

Plan 9 predates The Hurd

Erlang - don't think so. Limbo & Plan 9 C use CSP channels.

Stripped down plan 9 for RTOS - not as far as I'm aware, it's used more for clustering. LANL use it there, they might be the people to ask.

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

Wow, he managed to compile a "Hello, world" by Lisandro · 2006-07-23 03:44 · Score: 2, Funny

Great review guys!

Plan9 on Qemu by int19h · 2006-07-23 04:56 · Score: 3, Informative

If you wish to try out Plan 9 without burning a CD and rebooting, Free OS Zoo offers an image of Plan 9 (108M) that works fine with theQemu emulator.

Step-by-step instructions for a Debian-based distro:

sudo aptitude install wget unzip qemu
wget http://www.oszoo.org/ftp/images/plan9_060327.zip
unzip plan9_060327.zip
qemu -net nic -net user plan9/plan9_compressed.img
A window with Qemu will pop up. Press Return a few times, and you'll reach the commandline.

Other tips:

Press Ctrl+Alt to toggle mouse-grab
Press Ctrl+Alt+f to toggle fullscreen
Note that Plan9 is intentionally relatively minimalistic, compared to Linux

Good luck!

To answer some of the authors questions by ems2 · 2006-07-23 05:27 · Score: 4, Informative

1) The live cd is the install cd. This isn't Linux... Installation is done by an interactive rc script ("everything is a file") in a running Plan 9 with or without rio. Try and imagine how simple it is to automate a Plan 9 installation. Unlike Linux we don't need Red Hat to develop some complex standard for doing something that should be simple.

2) The cd comes with all the official software. Everything but the stuff that can be found in /n/sources/extra/ or /n/sources/patches/. Or anything made or ported by anyone else that can be found in /n/sources/contrib/ and elsewhere. And it definitely is not missing anything that would be basic in any operating system.

3) It does include ping. Ping is not just limited to IP so you will find multiple ping programs for different things in their respected directories. The ping for IP is in /bin/ip/ like the rest of the IP tools (on x86 the actual location for IP's ping is /386/bin/ip/ping. /386/bin/ is bound to /bin/ during boot up on x86. Likewise /alpha/bin/ is bound to /bin/ during boot up on alpha. etc.). You use IP ping like this: ip/ping $ipadr. If you want skip the ip/ part then bind /bin/ip/ping to /bin/ping.

4) This all fits in 80MB. Plan 9's cd is small because it doesn't have bloat. (This includes: PDF/postscript reader, page; Word processor, troff; an advance shell, rc; a web server, httpd; plus thousands of other applications.)

5) Why didn't you ask any of your questions on 9fans before coming to your assumptions?

6) This isn't Linux there are rules (e.g. ip tools in /bin/ip/ and http tools in /bin/http/) we don't just dump everything where ever we feel like it. What is the point of having a hierarchy without using it?

--
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

Re:Plan 9, the OS for Smug Elitist Assholes? by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · 2006-07-23 05:29 · Score: 2, Funny

Use Plan 9 - we're so arcane we'll always be smug and superior!

He he! It's fun seeing Linux users getting a taste of their own medicine.

--
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.

Re:"lacks some graphical refinement" by LWATCDR · 2006-07-23 05:30 · Score: 2, Insightful

1. It is a research OS.
2. It isn't about HCI.
3. Most of the modern GUIs also seem to care very little about usability as much as they do about marketing.
The truth is that modern GUIs seem to be more about distraction than actually getting work done. I admit that I to love my eye candy but that isn't what Plan 9 is all about.
Maybe that should be the next step for Plan 9. Since Plan 9 seems to be a great solution for distributed systems maybe some university should take it and start working a research project GUI for it.

--
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.

Re:"lacks some graphical refinement" by andrewzx1 · 2006-07-23 05:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

More university support for Plan 9 sounds like an excellent idea to further some of the innovative ideas in the OS. U. Calgary has some support as detailed here: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/lanlp9/

Re:the mocking... by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · 2006-07-23 05:38 · Score: 2

How old is the operating system again? And that's all they have?

He he. Your feeble excuses for criticising OS 9 are hilariously funny. Do you have any more like that?

and of the social resources of the users, hint "none"

Oh I see you do. You should do a stand up routine.

--
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.

Plan 9 under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 by CodeArt · 2006-07-23 05:40 · Score: 2, Informative

Plan 9 installs and runs without any problem with Plan 9 GUI under under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 running on Windows XP SP2. I have created virtual machine with 128MB of RAM. It boots directly from the latest Plan 9 ISO image. I haven't tested with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 but I guess result would be the same. Both virtualization software can be now downloaded for free.

PlanB (based on Plan9) by ixra · 2006-07-23 06:13 · Score: 2, Interesting

As an alternative to Plan9, you may try also PlanB, a distributed operating system based on Plan9.

EULA - Weapons of Mass Destruction?? by Gerk · 2006-07-23 07:12 · Score: 2

does this still exist? When they "open sourced" it a few years ago I went to download it to give it a run through ... and it had a horrible EULA attached to downloading it. One of the most important terms (and forgive this as it's been a while so it's not verbatim) was that it was "not to be used to make weapons of mass destruction outside the US". Seemed to infer that it's ok in the US and in fact it is probably already being used thusly ...

I clicked I Don't Accept on the web page and have never gone back since.

Re:EULA - Weapons of Mass Destruction?? by Shrithe · 2006-07-23 09:09 · Score: 3, Interesting

That EULA no longer applies, it's legitimately open source now. That was back when Lucent still controlled it very carefully.

Unfair to Ed Woods by Doug+Merritt · 2006-07-23 14:52 · Score: 3, Interesting

Bela Lugosi really deserved better than Ed Wood. It's a shame to see this man who scared the living daylights out of so many people with his Dracula and really made a mark on movie history be reduced to lap-dog in the hands of a complete hack. I guess Wood helped him make another mark on movie history.

In some sense, sure, but on the other hand, that is grossly unfair to Ed Wood's beneficial relationship to Lugosi. Consider the following (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Lugosi, but which agrees with similar details from some films on the subject, including one with Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, from some years back):

Later on, the acting jobs dried up, and Lugosi became addicted to morphine...Late in his life, he again received star billing in movies when filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., a fan of Lugosi, found him living in obscurity and near-poverty and offered him roles in his films, such as Glen or Glenda...in Bride of the Monster...and in Plan 9 From Outer Space [*]

( [*] Plan 9 was a posthumous performance, and note that the death of Lugosi early in filming was precisely the reason that Plan 9 became "the worst film ever made" rather than merely the usual Ed Wood grade B movie.)

Yes, Wood was a hack (albeit a fun one with a cult following to this day), but he did his best to rescue Lugosi when the rest of the world had given up and no longer cared. Give credit where credit is due, rather than simply sneering at the charitable, no matter the flaws you see in the good samaritan. By all accounts, Wood seems to have done the best he could by Lugosi.

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Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary

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