Here's a new release of the Plan 9 Advanced Namespace Tools live/install cd, based on 5 January 9front hg tip. This release offers both 32 and 64 bit .iso images, fixes all reported bugs, updates documentation, integrates better with standard 9front, and adds interpreters for an included selection of interactive fiction text adventures. Thanks and credit to the 9front guys for their work which is the foundation of this release, and for being ok with me distributing this variant.
Sup Forums told me to install Plan 9 back in 2008, and I did, and I've never been the same since. Now I live in a data paradise of complexly interwoven namespaces, with my local machines and my remote VPS nodes behaving like one giant system. Everyone is invited to download and play with this image, but it is primarily intended as experimental software for those already familiar with Plan 9. New users and those wanting a system for production deployment are encouraged to download the standard version from 9front.org.
The full history of 9gridchan.org is still present on the website, ranging from the early days of Sup Forums's attempt at a 9p filesharing grid in 2008 to the past few years of Advanced Namespace Tools development. The #plan9chan irc on freenode can help with general Plan 9 questions as well as specific information about ANTS. This thread is intended for general Plan 9/Inferno/plan9port discussion as well.
Finally getting around to my install this week, I've got the older iso but well now I'm glad I waited :^)
Justin Adams
Cool, all feedback/feature requests/comments are welcome.
Notable specific changes this release; The default profile now starts grio by default rather than rio Grio now has a standard manpage, man grio describes all new features beyond standard rio The terminal boot profile now provides a standard rcpu listener on port 17019 as well as the ants/boot namespace on port 17060 The 9front fshalt script has been taught how to shut down a fossil/venti fs correctly The 9front 9fs dump command now knows how to mount the fossil/venti dump archive The shareware doom1 .wad is preinstalled so games/doom "just works" Fixed a bug in the installer where manually configured ethernet settings weren't used during ants-bootup Added small interactive fiction library, just type 'fiction' to launch a menu of installed games
And below the user-facing changes, the whole ants source code repo has been restructured, with all the old bell labs code removed, so the project is 9front only for further development.
Gavin Green
Good work, OP. I don't know enough about Plan9 to contribute something interesting, but I really enjoyed reading the previous thread and started to educate myself since then. Is there some cheap hardware you can install plan9 on. Old thinkpads? Raspberry Pis? Or is it better to run it in a VM?
Ethan Gray
The RPi is currently tricky to get 9front working on. You basically need to have an existing x86 9front machine or VM and the necessary uboot/firmware files for the RPi, and cross compile.
Evan Rivera
Old thinkpads are absolutely PERFECT. Pretty much any old-to-mid-era thinkpad will be supported fine. Wireless may even work! You can also get some versions of plan9 working on rpi, although I'm not sure what the best version to use for that is. Qemu vms are also great, especially if you get drawterm from drawterm.9front.org and use it to access the vm, then you get automatic integration of your host and guest filesystems, via the magic of 9p.
Dylan Clark
Thanks. I will try it in a VM. I also found a lecture notes on the 9front site for a operating systems class using Plan9. I will follow that along.
Alexander Young
Is that the nemo book you are talking about? "An introduction to OS abstractions with Plan 9"? - it is very good, and almost everything in it still applies to 9front, the 9front people have done a great job improving the system without disrupting it.
Nathan Ortiz
Can you shitpost on Sup Forums with Plan 9 or watch a video on YouTube? I doubt it. What about video games (inb4 Sup Forums), video editing, photo editing, etc?
i don't want to derail the thread but any text adventures you can recommend apart from zork?
Sebastian Myers
Actually someone worked out a way to browse and post to Sup Forums, he posted some scripts in the thread last weekend. Apparently it depends on legacy captcha though so it may break soon. Youtube? FUGGEDABOUT IT. Video games? If you like interactive fiction text adventures, Plan 9 is perfect. Or doom. Modern gaming? FUGGEDABOUTIT.
Plan 9 is good for hobby coding, exploring distributed systems, data archiving, simple web serving, reading pdfs, general text editing, controlling unix systems via ssh, browsing very old fashioned websites, a few other things. It is not going to be your only os. It CAN be genuinely useful, depending on what useful means to you, but it is not a modern multimedia/web system. It doesn't want to be. Plan 9 is fun and interesting and minimal and beautiful, but it is not "practical" for most users.
Liam Williams
There are 8 pre-installed on the image linked in the op. In general you can't go wrong with stuff written by Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, winners of the ifcomp, old infocom games, and you can also see a list of very highly rated games via ifdb, like this:
>Apparently it depends on legacy captcha though so it may break soon There's javascript-free image captcha too which isn't bogged down by image refreshes so much.
Chase Martin
What do people think about bringing back public services to 9gridchan? There used to be stuff like a public cpu server, public venti server, public inferno registry. I never saw any abuse, because it seemed like the kind of people to take an interest in plan 9 weren't the kind of people who were going to try to trash/abuse systems, but the whole internet has gotten a lot more "hostile" in general so I'm unsure if that kind of thing is really a good idea any more. Another idea is to have a system for making accounts rather than just open public access, but its hard to know if there is enough interest to make setting something like that up. Plan 9 is at its best when there is an actual distributed network of systems, so setting up a grid of VPS nodes and accessing them is more fun than just running it one box.
Jaxson James
Auth would be simple to do given the low volume of human users involved. Send an email to something like [email protected] with your desired user/pass (or use a web form with HTTPS if you're paranoid about email getting MitM'd/DPI'd), OP or someone else he trusts punches it in to factotum on a grid auth server, and off you go.
Wyatt Bell
Yeah it is mostly about whether it is worth it to set up some public demo nodes separate from my personal systems. A few more vps nodes are cheap but maintaining a grid for, like, 3 people would be silly. This thread is pretty quiet compared to the one we had last weekend, plan 9 is the kind of thing where a lot of people have initial curiosity, but then just WTF at it in practice. Understandable.
Kayden Flores
Yeah it's that one >almost everything in it still applies to 9front Good to hear. I wondered if it is still up to date. Pls tell a newfag more about 9gridchan. What was it used for? How big was it?
Leo Morris
9gridchan.org still exists and still has a lot of plan9 information and downloads. It was started back in 2008 with an attempt to use plan9 and inferno to create a decentralized file/service sharing grid. The idea was that everyone would connect nodes in a mesh topology, and we could do service discovery across everyone connected and you could both share files and/or cpu cycles. At peak there were only maybe a dozen people tops offering anything to the grid, and we also started from almost no real plan 9/inferno knowledge. We also didn't understand that 9p latency makes it a poor choice for sharing large static files over WAN. Over time things changed to just using a centralized venti server, but it was always small and niche and underutilized. I kept my involvement with plan9, but I changed focus to developing software for my own use and/or other experienced plan 9 users, not trying to hype Sup Forums up on using it as a replacement for bittorrent or whatever.
Tyler Roberts
Sharing large static files over WAN is better done over IPFS rather than 9p. Once I get that new 64 bit iso installed I'll see if I can get IPFS built and running.
Alexander Scott
Or Quake, the best first person shooter.
Tyler Gomez
ugh this is you city
sage goes in all fields. sorry bud we know you worked for years on this but 3 shitposts a day is more than enough.
Charles Lopez
I made a thread last week, people were interested, I worked on improving things for another set of cd images and made another thread a week later. If I have reason to, I'll make another thread in a week or two. If there isn't enough interest to sustain a thread, that's fine, I was surprised by how many people were involved last weekend so I figured I'd put the new work out here too. You can always hide the threads you aren't interested in, I'm not spamming new threads multiple times a day whatsoever.
Cameron Ramirez
Lurker here, interested but too busy/lazy to actually participate or even try it out. In what cases would 9p be more useful than ipfs for distributed systems?
Liam Lopez
9p lets you share dynamic data from synthetic filesystems, ip is for static content. Plan 9 takes the 'everything is a file' approach even further than unix, so the network is accessed as a file system under /net, and even the window system is an fs mounted at /mnt/wsys. One plan 9 system can use another system's network interfaces just by importing /net from that system. Plan 9 cpu (similar to ssh) service works by letting the cpu server bind the input/output devices of the terminal, so that your programs execute on the cpu but you have control over them and see their output on your terminal, because your screen and keyboard/mouse have been bound into the cpu processes' local namespace!
Adrian Bell
> Best Linux Distro threads: 29917 > AMD/Intel/ Nvidia shill threads: 777462 > Plan 9 threads: 2
