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Plan 9 Desktop Guide

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Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#61

Post by tcmart14 »

glangdale wrote: post #12

This is worse than retrocomputing; it's necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it's an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as "sitting in a car and making brrr noises". They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no…

I think in order to achieve your final point, these kinds of things are necessary. I agree that it would be great to see a project that revives the core concepts of Plan9 in a modern sense, however, you have to attract people and give them a baseline for what that is. You do that by introducing people to Plan9. Talk about its features and how it does things. Stir enough interest then go, "Hey, lets either take the code base and modernize it into a full fledged modern OS" or "Lets start from scratch with the target of where Plan9 would be today if it got decent user adoption back then." That or get a Linux or BSD dev to play with Plan9, finding a feature they really like, then they go, "Hey, I think I can implement that feature over here."

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#62

Post by ori_b »

shadowgovt wrote: post #53
anthk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsrs? Just get this and read it with page. https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/9.intro.pdf

Sorry, I never received this suggestion on Plan9 because I can't read Hacker News without a browser... ;) (... and so on and so on. HTTP, as a protocol, has eaten the world. A "desktop" anything without a native browser in it really sticks out.)

Turns out that you can browse hacker news (and a lot of the internet) fairly well from both netsurf and mothra.

[Posted from 9front.]

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#63

Post by anthk »

shadowgovt wrote: post #53
anthk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsrs? Just get this and read it with page. https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/9.intro.pdf

Sorry, I never received this suggestion on Plan9 because I can't read Hacker News without a browser... ;) (... and so on and so on. HTTP, as a protocol, has eaten the world. A "desktop" anything without a native browser in it really sticks out.)

>HTML, as a protocol

Ahem.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#64

Post by anthk »

ori_b wrote: post #62
shadowgovt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I never received this suggestion on Plan9 because I can't read Hacker News without a browser... ;) (... and so on and so on. HTTP, as a protocol, has eaten the world. A "desktop" anything without a native browser in it really sticks out.)

Turns out that you can browse hacker news (and a lot of the internet) fairly well from both netsurf and mothra. [Posted from 9front.]

A PSP, Lynx or Opera Mini 4 user agent may do wonders.

webfs(4) supports custom ones.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#65

Post by anthk »

lizknope wrote: post #52
anthk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to plan9 we have 9p and UTF-8 today. Also, rant whatever you want, but importing /net it's far better than all of the IPTABLES NAT crap you have to write in order to have an usable system build on top of stacked crap again and again. 9front is the future, and not that turd based on half baked networked file systems from Sun named NFS, or worse, Java as the 'standard' of enterprise 'computing'. Don't let me sta…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_is_a_file Why is the socket interface the way it is? Why isn't it like /dev/tcp in bash? I tried Plan 9 about 10 years ago. Since then I use VPNs everyday and it can be tricky to setup at times. The Plan 9 concept of just importing /net from the VPN machine as a union overlay is so elegant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Combinin...

>Why is the socket interface the way it is? Why isn't it like /dev/tcp in bash?

That's wrong. /dev/tcp or /dev/udp should be devices themselves, not a fake one for bash.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#66

Post by pjmlp »

anthk wrote: post #51
Koshkin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is some hope after all Inferno was created as a potential Java competitor. That hope is long gone.

Imagine today an OS from Google built on top of Linux+Inferno, or well, maybe, Golang and a custom UI.

Well, we have to contend ourselves with the Java/Kotlin, JavaScript and Dart flavours, of which Android is probably the closest, although quite twisted implementation.

However I do like the idea, either a Goberon or Ginferno version of Go's influences, but that is above all just nostalgia, they wouldn't be the same, and the time has pasted when their ideas were new.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#67

Post by shadowgovt »

anthk wrote: post #63
shadowgovt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I never received this suggestion on Plan9 because I can't read Hacker News without a browser... ;) (... and so on and so on. HTTP, as a protocol, has eaten the world. A "desktop" anything without a native browser in it really sticks out.)

>HTML, as a protocol Ahem.

Thank you; corrected. :)

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#68

Post by witheld »

glangdale wrote: post #12

This is worse than retrocomputing; it's necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it's an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as "sitting in a car and making brrr noises". They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no…

Operating systems grinded to a halt a decade before Plan 9 came out. I wish what you were saying was true, I wish that I didn't have to use a teletype emulator on Linux with no real mouse support, I wish I could do unprivileged resource organization (I'll give you ten minutes to try 'unshare', bind mounts, and "unionfs" on Linux before giving up).

It is pathetic that operating systems have remained crap for 30 years, but given that nothing has moved forward, there's no reason not to start with the newest operating system we have: Plan 9.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#69

Post by kryptiskt »

codedokode wrote: post #54

Here is what I thought after reading an article: Linux should provide an API for drivers. So that the drivers can be reused by other OS like FreeBSD or Plan9. If you are making a new OS, it is prohibitively expensive to reinvent the USB stack, write your own ACPI interpreter or port millions of lines of code. There should be an API, otherwise these drivers don't differ much from proprietary drivers. Other OS like Win…

There already is an example of such an API, it's possible to use NetBSD drivers outside the NetBSD kernel with its rump kernel feature: https://research.csiro.au/tsblog/using-rump-kernels-to-run-u...

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#70

Post by shrubble »

glangdale wrote: post #12

This is worse than retrocomputing; it's necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it's an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as "sitting in a car and making brrr noises". They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no…

The Cisco PIX firewall OS was built on top of Plan9.

It was developed by a single developer.

Perhaps the use of Plan9 can spark a similar good idea?

After all 'art cannot be created in the absence of limitations' ...

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