Plan 9 thread
Sup Forums told me to install plan 9 in 2008 and I did. It was the best decision I ever made. Since then I have had a sane, productive, and elegant os and software environment.
Does Sup Forums still experiment with Plan 9? It's been a few years since I was on this board much, but Plan 9 is still my main os. General Plan 9 discussion thread?
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> 10 extra horizontal pixels
Shit, that is good.
I have a 9front VPS, I used to mess with it a ton but not recently. Had it on a Pi too.
How are you posting on here?
You're right, I never noticed before that my native plan 9 thinkpad x240 has such a distinctive screen resolution. Learn something new every day!
I'm using VNC from one of my plan 9 systems to a random craptop running firefox. Back in the old old days you could actually post on Sup Forums using plan 9 web browser such as Abaco, but no longer.
Using bloat
What company are you using for the VPS hosting? I have several 9front nodes hosted on vultr, but I'm looking to diversify so my Glenda-eggs aren't all in one VPS basket so much.
Yep, vultr.
Observation: the fundamental design innovations pioneered by Plan 9 have become the standard for modern distributed architecture. Nowadays a new company is often going to architect its systems as a set of docker containers (relying on the plan 9 innovation of per-process namespaces) that each provide a single specific service across the network (same design as Plan 9 distributed concept, just usually using HTTP protocol rather than the 9p protocol)
Observation: autism.
Why do you feel like Plan 9 is autistically complicated and technical? It's simpler than axiomatic set theory, at least.
no they haven't
Only faggots with autism/down syndrome use that shitty "operating system"
fuck off and go back to your furry diaper forum
Your prose is autistic, you fucking autist.
I think you are getting a little worked up about this, were you mauled by a bunny as a child?
Plan 9 is actually an amazing environment for programming, because 99.9% of everything is just C and rc shell and the total LOC is orders of magnitude less than Linux/BSD/whatever. You can actually learn to understand and easily modify everything from the kernel up through userspace. Linux is open source, sure, but in practice, you can't meaningfully hack most of the software stack without being a full-time expert in that particular domain. In plan 9, customizing your system at the source level is actually workable for any amateur who knows some C.
muh mouse chording
wish i could run it full time
The web browser is a joke.
so it's amazing because ricing? kys yourself.
The best thing to do for a standard home user is to have a plan 9 virtual machine always running, and use drawterm to connect to it from the host os. You probably know that already, but I'm mentioning it for the benefit of those who don't. Because drawterm does filesystem and copy/paste buffer integration, it is easy and efficient to share data between the oses and use the software from each on the same files.
Howdy, fellow Glenda worshipper
Abaco is shit
"ricing" usually means cosmetic-level alterations, or attempting to tweak for minimal performance gains. That isn't the kind of customization I am talking about. The whole point is that with a modern unix-derivative, it isn't easy to do more than just pointless "ricing", because the complexity of the components is too high. By virtue of greater simplicity, consistency, and modularity, Plan 9 can be easily changed in more fundamental and meaningful ways. Examples on request if anyone is interested.
Is there a better option?
mothra (which is slightly better)
I have been thinking quite a lot about using plan9.
Its a much simpler world.
It probably won't run on my laptop though.
For now using plan 9 from user space on my linux machine is good enough.
Stop replying to that retard.
Is that your screenshot? Can you explain what use you get out of Ants, the docs are nearly TempleOS tier.
What's your workflow like? Are you using a bunch of nested rios as workspaces?
I really want something like Fossil everywhere.
Anyone tried the v9fs linux driver lately? Buying myself a spare machine and making it Plan9/9front home fileserver sounds like nice christmas present.
Sounds 2x harder than gentoo
It's thousand times more simple because everything is neatly designed.
Sounds interesting. Is there like a plan 9 iso or something
please explain to a brainlet what Plan9 does that's so special. And don't use big words
It's nothing really. It's like openbsd but 3x more autism.
It doesn't support images though or I'm doing something wrong? Also no Acme-like multi window support.
The reason for the templeOS-style docs is the guy who did the ANTS stuff was literally manic and delusional when he wrote a lot of the documentation. The actual code and concepts are surprisingly sane but it hasn't been updated since the beginning of this year.
I like it because it lets you build a plan 9 environment from multiple nodes without assuming a static unchanging configuration of servers like the original plan 9 design does. I also like the custom rio and the hubfs persistence layer, which are independent from the kernel-level changes. I like to have a bunch of different rios in different namespaces, but let them all access some of the same hubs as needed.
9front.org has isos and their FQA is excellent documentation. It is definitely the version of Plan 9 to use.
Plan 9 was really revolutionary when it first came out - in the early 90s. Since then, its useful innovations have been integrated into more common operating systems. Nowadays, it is pretty much for programming hobbyists, but that isn't a bad thing, it just won't replace mainstream oses for everyday use.
>Since then, its useful innovations have been integrated into more common operating systems
In hacky, subpar ways. linux namespaces are absolute garbage still.
It does support images, it just doesn't really work at all with Sup Forums. Works well with sites like the 9front homepage or anything that is just plaintext and images. It doesn't do multipanel acme-style stuff, true, but it does some nice things like if you plumb images to it, they will pop up in a separate window. I like it for things like browsing textfiles.com
wobbly windows and spinnan cubes on plan 9 when??!!
Maybe sooner than you think...9front has a vm host than can run some other operating systems now, although I don't think it can give access to 3d acceleration hardware yet, I haven't played with it. I wouldn't be surprised though if some crazed plan9 hacker was able to get some kind of userspace opengl emulation going and boot some ancient version of debian and have a spinnan cube at 1 frame every ten seconds though.
Go-lang mascot looks like retarted cousin of glenda.
btw, does anyone have chiruno-themed rice of plan9? asking for a friend.
Same artist, even. We used to have quite a bit of chiruno/plan9 fanart but a google images search for "cirno plan 9" doesn't turn up that much of it, I guess all those 2009-era Sup Forumsplan9 threads have permanently vanished onto decaying hard drives. 9front still uses cirno as default hostname.
does 9front have Emacs (pls don't bully)? Using vi (or vi-clone) feels like cross-dressing and using acme feels like using TempleOS.
nope, it doesn't have vi either
you could try sam, though
If you don't like acme, try sam. It is preferred by many plan 9 users. No emacs port. Plan 9 is all about a completely opposite philosophy to large do-it-all applications like emacs, it was designed to try to take the 'small independent tools' philosophy from UNIX and extend it even further, so emacs is really the exact opposite of what people were going for. I'm not against emacs myself, but it is an example of exactly what the Plan 9 "old guard" original developers were reacting against. Also, Rob Pike and Stallman were on opposite sides of the software patent issue from the very beginning, which I'm sure is part of things.
Opinions on no tab completion in interactive rc? Should I get used to it and use wild cards when needed or is there some hidden solution?
^f
Does anyone remember back when Sup Forums was using Inferno/plan9 for filesharing? We would run the inferno "registry" program and people would make post 9p shares of a directory of stuff. Of course, since 9p over WAN is really slow, it was about the most inefficient way imaginable to share static files of any size, but dammit, it was cool as hell. Those were great days.
plan9chan or 9grid or whatever it was called? Yeah was pretty cool, too bad interest died out or whatever though.
Yup! The 9gridchan.org website has stayed up although it isn't trying to hype plan9/inferno public filesharing grid any more, but all that stuff is still archived there.
The plan9chan irc channel is still around on freenode with a few people in it, although it goes months without anyone talking.
The problem was that the big surge of initial interest happened without anyone who really understood plan9/inferno well enough to do things right in a technical sense, and by the time the technical foundation and know-how was in place, people had gotten sick of daily plan 9 propaganda threads. The pre-existing plan 9 community wasn't about to embrace anything that originated on Sup Forums, because even back in those pre-pol days, the reputation of Sup Forums was not that great.
In some ways it still counts as a huge missed opportunity - with a little bit better timing and social bridge-building, things could have worked out very differently, with god-knows-what consequences. There might be a much larger and more active Plan 9 community, although plenty of Plan 9 people prefer keeping it as non-mainstream as possible. The 9front people sure have no interest in recruiting more users really, they tend to be pretty ornery about hand-holding newbies, which I understand.
Actually vi has been ported.
Do you know if that still builds vs. current 9front APE? I feel like a lot of the old contrib ports have somewhat bitrotted. It would be nice if there was an organized effort to keep all that stuff current and host binaries too, but there just isn't really the manpower of volunteers currently.
I think that would even be misguided and wasteful. If you want to use plan 9 then use plan 9 tools, acme and sam are excellent.
IPFS basically cannibalized that.
Congratulations.
This is the most autistic thread on Sup Forums since 2010.
Kill yourself you flaming faggot.
I don't really disagree, I mean I use acme happily even though I keep meaning to learn sam well enough to switch. I agree given the current huma-time resources available to work on plan 9 stuff, it would be a low priority. There actually is/was a stab at a plan 9 "ports" tree for 9front, but it didn't get a lot of community support.
The whole situation with APE is a little bit of a missed opportunity though - I mean, it works pretty decently really, you can get a lot of old/miscellaneous unix stuff to build and run, but it is clearly the red-headed stepchild of the system and nobody wants to put a lot of time and effort into it. If there hadn't been such a cultural conflict and us vs. them mentality between Plan 9 and GNU, Plan 9 would probably have fully functioning ports of everything everyone cared about. At this point, I agree it is kind of a lost cause, because the crucial stuff happened well over a decade ago. Various free software people would show up on the 9fans mailing list or plan9 irc and be interested in getting things ported into plan9 and making the whole posix environment support plan9, and would generally get nothing but tears for their efforts, because hating on gnu and linux was a cultural value of the plan 9 community, more or less.
Of course, there are people who say that is a good thing, and that the only reason plan 9 is so good is that plan9 elitists didn't let practical concerns like "having a web browser" dilute the purity of the vision.
>Do you know if that still builds vs. current 9front APE?
I made this VM last year and I think it runs the then last released 9front but I ain't sure.
i hate plan 9, it does a lot shit differently just for the sake of being different
I tried to install it.
Whatever course of action I take it results in a failure I can't understand, because the documentation is crap.
1) download => "null list in concatenation", what the fuck does that even mean?
2) local => choose the CD => only '/' seems to work => some shit failed during bootsetup
Not at all, it does shit differently because it was designed starting in the late 80s with a lot of new ideas. The expectations you have formed come from a culture where certain unix traditions were standardized by free software "unix clones" circa 2000, well after Plan 9 had already decided to try what the designers thought was a better approach to many things. At the time, nobody was really expecting that how unix worked in the late 70s/early 80s would continue more or less unchanged for decades. If they could have seen the future, probably a lot of things would have been done differently. There are plenty of written resources for understanding why Plan 9 works the way it does, nothing is done "just for the sake of being different".
That doesn't mean that all the decisions were good decisions or everything was a successful experiment, but the motivations are clearly documented.
So you hate different things?
Wow, how retarded, I bet you feel really clever for being such a faggot.
It does things differently because they are better this way.
adding an user shouldn't involve me having to log in to some fucking service
Can Plan 9 run Steam?
You should be using the 9front distribution rather than the original bell labs iso. I believe your problem is a bug in the old installer, where you are using qemu virtio disks and the old installer has some braindead logic that doesn't parse their location correctly.
using the "/" of the distribution cd is correct.
What you are talking about is the fact that adding a user means creating the user on the fileserver. Because plan 9 is a distributed design, there is no assumption that the fileserver is necessarily running on the same machine as the user terminal. If you are doing a one machine install, then they are the same, but the fileserver doesn't "know" that. The same goes with authentication - the authentication services could be running anywhere. So, it does all make sense - you need to add the user to the fileserver, wherever it is, and add the user to the authentication server, wherever it is. When you are working with just a single system install, it does seem unnecessarily cumbersome, but it is a natural and sensible consequence of creating a distributed system that doesn't make assumptions about what services are running where.
This has been a good thread
Not him but I would love some examples. I'm thinking about giving plan9 a go.
How do you post on Sup Forums with plan9?
It is a little hard to come up with good examples that don't require some existing knowledge of how plan 9 works, but I will try to give one. When any os boots up, there is always a set of steps that it goes through to create the standard user environment. In traditional unix there was a series of init scripts, which have now (very controversially) been replaced by systemd. Plan 9 has its own standard system of bootup/init scripts. I run several plan 9 nodes on a VPS service, and I wanted to set them up in a grid in a way that let me choose what services they were providing without slotting each node into a pre-assigned role. So, I made a simple modification to the boot sequence where instead of running a local set init script, the nodes would make a connection to another server, and rather than executing a prewritten script, they would attach to an input/output "hub" and then execute whatever was written to that hub, and then post a list of what services they were providing to a central service registry. This kind of thing is done in linux using highly complicated "container orchestration" software, but I was able to accomplish a similar purpose in Plan 9 with some simple modifications to the boot process.
I don't think you can anymore. I'm pretty sure that guy was just taking a screenshot in plan 9 and posting it from another os. Correct me if I'm wrong though!
I see.
Question 2: can I do actual work on this? Does it have a web browser that can post to Sup Forums and run anime liveboards?
>actual work
>post to Sup Forums
pick exactly 1
They are separate things to be sure. I'm asking for regular stuff like LaTeX as well.
There is no modern web browser for plan 9. There is a tex/latex port but I have no idea how usable or functional it is. There are very few areas where plan 9 measures up to other OSes in functionality - you can edit text, go on irc, play text adventures, host simple websites, but even then, you are generally using nonstandard tools to do so. In general, until you have a lot of familiarity with the system, the purpose of plan 9 is exploring plan 9 and messing around with hobby coding projects.
Don't lie to the kid. You can emulate Linux binaries on plan 9, giving way to a web browser.
9p.io
Oberon > Plan 9
Linuxemu is pretty much abandoned. Go ahead and ask Cinap about it, bet you he will tell you not to bother messing around with it. People use to use it to run Debian sarge + Opera browser, but that was years ago.
Oberon is very cool, but it's not really a competition. They are both worth exploring.
Got inspired by this thread to update my 9front system. New stuff like the Tinc vpn system, Vmx emulation interface, better ssh client, all pretty cool. Really glad people are working to keep adding useful features that Plan 9 that integrate well with the system.
fucking bloat! how did they even manage to run a curses program on plan9's terminal
...
I hear a lot about Plan9 but I don't know how to actually get into it or what application I would have for it.
My current server is a FreeBSD box, it runs nginx, mumble(murmur), some small http services that I wrote, and exposes an smb share that I use with my other machines.
I'm interested in targeting plan9 form y own services since people seem to say it's very easy to program for and I'm really interested in how it explodes processes on to the file system, that seems like it makes IPC incredibly easy and standard. I'm also interested in the use of 9p, I'm not fully sure how I could utilize it.
Does anyone think it's worth my time to read the fqa and try migrating some thing over? I will say the small resource usage alone is pretty appealing too, p9 seems very very light which might allow me to migrate to some SoC with low specs and power consumption.
Thoughts and advice would be appreciated.
I also forgot to say, if I should move to Plan9, what plan should I move to? Bell's, 9front, something else like inferno, or p9p?
You can try to use 'plan 9 from user space' on some nix to program something first.
Or just take the plunge and install plan9. 9front is what most seem to use.
Old days? You mean before Sup Forums existed?
Are you guys running it natively or hosted? All the guides I found were for hosted install. Got any for native?
While Unix started the "everything is a file," it didn't compete that idea. Plan9 did. And that means you can manipulate the system in many ways using simple scripts.
Also they took the opportunity to dump some Unix baggage that were not worth the trouble and simplified things a lot. That saves space and makes things faster and also reduces the attack surface.
Linux has NOT had such a flag day and accumulates a lot of detritus in the form of old interfaces and ABI that just a handful legacy systems use.
in fact, Linux is worse than unix in that aspect
There is a curses port, it uses bitmaps actually, so that just looks like the standard plaintext terminal.
Try it out and learn some stuff for fun before you commit to migrating anything over. Seems like it might work ok for your use case, but you'd have to enjoy learning new things to get it all figured out.
9front definitely. p9p is just a port of some applications, really, and the labs version is pretty much abandoned development-wise.
I have native boxes as well as VMs. Native installs are well covered by the 9front FQA, you pretty much just try to boot the live cd/usb, and if the hardware is recognized, supported, it is all good.