There's a super-user out there who single handedly made Plan 9 a usable (for u) OS over the last 10 years between the time he was first introduced to Plan 9 right here on Sup Forums, and now. This thread is dedicated to him, desu.
PLAN 9 GENERAL, GO!
i dont need more namespaces
swerves le pudgy black girl
Literally who?
Also usable how?
The Plan 9 cd is already bootable fuck your retarded psuedo "distro".
You are misleading and it makes me think your version is malicious.
>made Plan 9 a usable (for u) OS
that's the 9front team
>[...]over the last 10 years between the time he was first introduced to Plan 9 right here on Sup Forums
that's the ANTS guy
truth: none of you fags need some fancy ass distributed system.
what you need is an os designed for personal computing. like I mean fucking up close and personal. think back to the microcomputer days. C64, Amiga, ST that kinda shit. even DOS.
templeos niggers.
>you don't need network
what do you even do here?
>truth: none of you fags need some fancy ass distributed system.
probably
plan 9 is still pretty neat, and the 9front team really did add a fair few quality of life things though
and a lot of the architecture is amazing compared to the way things are now
it's not even massively complicated to use, and all the UI issues stem from the fact that the interface takes basically nothing from the way things were done on Windows and on the Macintosh
like, almost every single UI convention is different
got used to it after an hour though
some of the configuration is a mess (as far as I can tell, you need at least two machines to do multi-user support with passwords, at one acting as a auth (and CPU) server, and then terminals to attach, unless I'm really missing something basic)
and the 9front team doesn't care about trying to make any sort of setup in plan 9 easy
the other real issue with it in modern times is getting a vaguely modern web browser working (supposedly, you can use linuxemu to run something and equis for x11, and then Opera works... but as far as I can tell, all traces of a download for equis have disappeared from the earth)
people used computers for ages without networking
that being said, I'd have quite little use for a computer without it
yeah multiuser support in plan 9 is really shit if you're doing it on one computer
i wish there was an easy way to just log out or lock the screen
That bun is cute.
>drawterm
>drawterm.9front.org
>pic related
these guys!
9p.io
maybe these instructions might help but I haven't tried 'em yet
>these guys!
yeah, there's a lot of that
Hey, your OP isn't accurate. The people primarily responsible for taking Plan 9 from "research os" to "truly usable" are the 9front developers. I know, because I think I'm the guy you are talking about, and what I do is based on their work. I have added quite a few of my own customizations and features, but the 9front guys deserve way more credit for improving the OS than I do. I was actually about to make a new thread for a new release of the stuff I've done, but I think I will wait a bit, this thread makes it seem like the time is not quite ripe. I appreciate your enthusiasm op, but don't over-credit my achievements, they aren't single-handed at all.
you're a good guy. i like you
It's always good to see a dev who's humble about his work. Keep it up
is that terry and not the bb frank zane in your pic?
Say, since you're actually here -- where the hell is equis (the X server) for 9front?
Supposedly it's over at bell labs contrib (it's sure not in the 9front one)... except that's down, and I can't find it anywhere else.
the 9front fqa page claims it's on 9front.org
someone has to have it
shoutout to my man cinap
>Plan 9
Can you run modern software with ease.
Does it run software like Gimp, FireFox, or Pale Moon? Why should I run Plan 9 for a general consumer desktop? I tried running Plan 9 From Bell Labs on my Raspberry PI and struggled with doing shit on it. Like really, why did they call one of the commands snarf? Why not call it copy, edit, cut, etc. like normal people? What were they on when they thought of snarf?
Why would you install Plan 9 to use it like Lunix?
LMAO
>Can you run modern software with ease.
no, it's very different architecturally
you might be able to build a fair few things though (IIRC, there's an SDL port)
>Why should I run Plan 9 for a general consumer desktop?
fqa.9front.org
The 9p.io site has a mirror of labs contrib, you can find it there. I have no idea how well equis works, or if it works with 9front nowadays at all.
Cinap is absolutely the man. I (the ANTS guy) feel kind of embarrassed by the op, I do not want to fuck up my community relations with the 9front guys by causing any confusions, they help me a lot with the stuff I do even though it doesn't exactly with their goals for where they are taking 9front, but they have said they don't mind me distributing my stuff as a live cd. An op like the the one this thread seems like it might make them feel differently about that, which I hope doesn't happen.
Where can I download your ISOs?
I just uploaded 32 bit and 64 bit versions of latest spin, you can find them linked from 9gridchan.org landing page and from the doc.9gridchan.org
Thanks. The last time I tried Plan 9 was years ago, so I’ll give it another spin tomorrow.
>distributed system
I played with PelicanHPC a few years ago. It was nice, you only had to have to put in the liveCD and boot your PCs up, it couldn't handle different architectures. They find each other over the network and you could get started... only it sucked ass actually. I needed specially compiled software and only very little actually made use of that distributed system. It was basically useless and since I wanted to play a game in wine using a distributed system it of course was a huge dissapointment.
Plan9 on the other hand, can pool ressources. CPUs, RAM, Storage... Anything that runs Plan9 can join and pool together. From my understanding, any program there could make use of it. If there was native WINE for plan9 (and drivers for hardware), it for sure would make use of those pooled ressources. I still don't get why plan9 never reall took off. I only see it as superiour to everything else.
>I still don't get why plan9 never reall took off
no c++ compiler
okay, I finally found it -- didn't find jack on the 9p.io site (like, at all, the site looks gutted), but doing a 9fs on contrib.9front.org worked
unfortunately, the instructions I found don't work since contrib/fgb/root/386/lib/ape/X11 seems to be empty (the other folder, 386/bin/X11 seemed to have everything else and I downloaded that to my machine just fine) and when I start X11/equis, I get the window to flash white and nothing happens, no error messages pop up, just nothing
so I'm clearly missing files
#instructions taken verbatim from the cached 9p.io page I get when I look up "equis 9p.io" on google -- going to the page directly just spins without loading
mkdir /386/bin/X11 /386/lib/ape/X11
9fs sources
dircp /n/sources/contrib/fgb/root/386/bin/X11 /386/bin/X11
dircp /n/sources/contrib/fgb/root/386/lib/ape/X11 /386/lib/ape/X11
naturally, replacing /n/sources/contrib with /n/contrib.9front.org/sources/contrib
You can come to my house and fuck my sister.
>I still don't get why plan9 never reall took off.
It wasn't fully open sourced until the 21st century. Much like the BSDs, Linux got there first and everyone said "fuck it, close enough, we'll all use this."
right. however it's opensource now. it still is capable of things any other can't do. programmers should be willing to kill just to contribute a line of code to make it the new top os even a little faster. however it's neglegted like black babies by their parents.
snarf is copy (yeah, this one pisses me off, and it sounds more it'd be cut anyway)
as for software... it's a research OS, so its main focus is for doing software development rather than being a vehicle for pre-packaged software, so it provides a C compiler, editors, a shell, that sort of things, and not massively much more
9front adds nice things like emulators (c64, gb, md, etc), a decent image viewer (page) and image conversion utilities (topng/togif/tojpg, etc), an updated if still pretty limited web browser (mothra, similar to using links2 on X11), the look command in rio (IIRC, you had to use acme for this in original plan9, and acme's learning curve was quite higher than rio's, not to mention that you'd really want to be able to look for strings in your scrollback), a bittorrent client, and a handful of other nice things
sadly, there's no way to X11 these days (see rest of thread)
if you need access to a linux machine, you can use sshfs for sftp access or ssh (run vt first for ssh use, since rio explicitly works like a dumb terminal for non-graphical programs, vt is a proper terminal emulator)
linux ended up absorbing a bunch of ideas from plan9 (most notably /proc and FUSE) and the majority of the standard software packages that came with plan9 have ports
and like always, the enemy of what is great is what is just good, or okay
no point in putting effort into switching when what you have works, even if there are issues
probably could have been the next big thing if it was properly open sourced earlier though
linux gutted the field for alternative OSes, and pretty much all the big UNIX vendors fell
What's up with the compiler though? It seems like that linker for x64 binaries doesn't work, which I found surprising given some of the ones that DO work.
>the enemy of what is great is...
This is what I have difficulty to understand. If one does something isn't there a desire to do it well? Make something you can be proud of or you just wasted time in you life with nonsense. Even if you don't got this honorabe thought process, I've seen enough regarding Linux to know how many levels shit you have to deal with. Improving Plan9, making it usable in general, could take away so much frustration in life it's mindblowing. It's like all programmers are masochists or something, they need the pain or otherwise I can't make sense of it.
Does anyone have some example program that makes you say "wow this would have taken a lot more work to write for POSIX(or whatever other thing you're targeting)"?
I hear people say programming for Plan9 is really nice compared to other systems and I'm looking for some visual example, what makes it so great? The C dialect, the standard library, their quick compilers, features of the OS such as exploding programs into a filesystem? What's the hook.
>If one does something isn't there a desire to do it well?
not really
the entire point of computing is to get shit done -- if it works, it works, and a lot of the ideas from plan 9 got pulled to other OSes anyway, so there's even less incentive
no one wants to migrate from anything if they can get away with it -- see the continued success of Windows for further explanation
if you want something done right, you better be lucky enough to get it right the first time (or at least before your first attempt has enough infrastructure surrounding it to make people leery of something different)
personally, I think Plan 9 did have a chance, but licensing killed it back when it could have actually made a difference somewhere
my favorite bit is everything related to file mounting and access to things (eg, /dev/screen to capture the screen, /dev/window to grab the window contents (it's read only, but there's other mounts for doing screen drawing), /dev/snarf to read/write the clipboard, /dev/text to read/write the scrollback), etc via files
it's really, really fucking nice
>my favorite bit is...
Good examples, /dev/windows is particularly interesting to me. I watched a video from Russ Cox on ACME where he wrote to the text buffer via the filesystem and that was pretty neat to have such a direct method of IPC, it's literally just a write to some path, no socket setup no pipes, no nothing. Really interesting and simple. I might have to look into this further and give it a try.
Are there any good resources for programming on Plan9 specifically? I don't mean like an intro to C or the compiler, but more like common effective patterns that are only typical on Plan9. I'd love to see some collection of these things but I wonder if it exists (yet).
>not really
Thus the war or what will otherwise be known as the greatest bloodbath in the history of this planet loomed before our eyes. I'm not kidding you. Being "okay" with bad things and the lack of responsibility for one's own actions is exactly why those of honor won't be able to take it any longer and will bring judgement upon the world.
fuck plan 9 use an os with drivers
What if Plan9 works on my hardware?
enjoy you are meltdown or spectre