[GRLUG] Plan 9

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Adam Tauno
Williams<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 08:48 -0400, peyeps at iserv.net wrote:
>> > Would anyone happen to have the free time to delve deeply into playing
>> > around with and learning Plan 9?  I'd like to learn more about it, but
>> > I don't really have the time to study up and experiment; I already
>> > have enough things brewing.
>>
>> Is there a link?
>
> I have an old link <http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/> but it is dead.
> I think the Plan 9 project has been at least moribund for a long time,
> and is probably dead.  Plan 9 is the perfect example [agreed on my just
> about everyone] of solution-in-search-of-a-problem.  Numerous bits from
> Plan 9 like clone and /proc have been absorbed into various other
> operating systems.  If I recall correctly Plan 9's big 'feature' was
> everything-is-a-filesystem.  Only all abstractions are leaky and there
> really is not compelling reason to deal with the leaks in order to
> pretend that some resource is a file or filesystem.

It's interesting that FUSE reopens a number of those possibilities.

>  One of the biggest
> gripes against UN*X was the 'arbitrary' ioctl() call but both BSD and
> LINUX have effectively eliminated those.
>
> I ran Plan 9 once, went "Huh, Ok?", and that was pretty much it.  If
> someone really wants a blast-from-the-past that is interesting find a
> copy of NextSTEP/OpenSTEP [and hardware that can run it].  WOW!  Was
> that ahead of its time (and *glacially* slow).

Don't really need to do that; GNUStep gives you a lot to work with if
you want to play with it.  And wmaker ran *much* faster than metacity,
enlightenment or KDE's window manager (kwm?)

-- 
:wq