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Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an emulator, IIRC.
Do you mean Plan9's terminal? If so, the whole point of it is that it's not constrained to emulating TTY.
Is there a usable version of plan9 we can install?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean Plan9's terminal? If so, the whole point of it is that it's not constrained to emulating TTY.
vt(1) [1] is a terminal emulator installed on Plan 9 which can emulate a vt100 for any program which needs it. So you have something which can give you curses if you want it. [1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/vt
Incidentally, the Raspberry Pi image was recently updated and has better multi-core support. Pretty nice for a near-instant boot terminal, although the non-UNIXness of it becomes a little bit grating when trying to remember how to SSH in a hurry. (On mobile, so I'll add the link later, but http://taoofmac.com/space/os/Plan9 has my notes)
Incidentally, the Raspberry Pi image was recently updated and has better multi-core support. Pretty nice for a near-instant boot terminal, although the non-UNIXness of it becomes a little bit grating when trying to remember how to SSH in a hurry. (On mobile, so I'll add the link later, but http://taoofmac.com/space/os/Plan9 has my notes)
You can think of a cpu server as being similar to this scenario: you ssh to a fast box, and run an app on that remote machine. However, due to the elegance of the plan9 architecture, instead of having the app run in the terminal window or over a laborious x-windows protocol, it writes quickly over the network to the window that you invoked the command from.
Unlike the unix experience, cross-compiling is trivial in this environment. Hence, it's fine to run varying architectures in the same system. Setting up a Raspberry Pi terminal is easy and cheap.
Some might ask - why? My motive: I see it as a different approach to software development. Instead of bolting monolithic systems together, I'll be able to implement platforms as devices that are exposed over 9p. Consider how much easier it is to do init for multi-host applications. Convential unix approach is and ugly spaghetti of scripts+ssh. In this design, just mount the apps and script them from one host. The network becomes transparent: you just script against devices.
Is there a usable version of plan9 we can install?
9front say to avoid virtualbox, but it works. Here's a tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5XAhsHyqow
Incidentally, the Raspberry Pi image was recently updated and has better multi-core support. Pretty nice for a near-instant boot terminal, although the non-UNIXness of it becomes a little bit grating when trying to remember how to SSH in a hurry. (On mobile, so I'll add the link later, but http://taoofmac.com/space/os/Plan9 has my notes)
More on Raspberry Pi port in case others are interested. Raspberry Pi port is interesting, because it allows us to run plan9 on native hardware (access keyboard, mouse, video and probably audio - haven't checked). It doesn't matter that there isn't much power in it, because plan9 is designed to be distributed. Once you have a terminal, you can set up a cpu server and file server to run under a linux hypervisor in the…
I don't understand the distinction you are trying to make with the phrsase "quickly over the network". SSH and networked X aren't exactly slow. The latter can be a slug with a bad network, but I recently had to do something kind of fringe and ended up running firefox over wifi with ssh -Y, and it was usable.
You can argue that protocols, implementation, API, etc. are better with plan9 (consistent with claims I heard before) but I don't totally understand how that would necessarily translate into performance (if anything I would expect things used by more people over more time would be better tuned).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
vt(1) [1] is a terminal emulator installed on Plan 9 which can emulate a vt100 for any program which needs it. So you have something which can give you curses if you want it. [1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/vt
Cool, hadn't seen that before. Unfortunately, doesn't seem to be in plan9port.
Your question suggests to me that you still don't get it: nothing in Plan 9 -- not the shell, not the ability to issue command lines and get stdout and stderr back -- depends on vt(1). vt(1) is used only to communicate with (tty drivers on) other OSes, over the network.
Just as most of time, a user of OS X has no need for an X server, most of the time, a Plan 9 user has no need for vt(1) or for ncurses.
I'm not suggesting you give Plan 9 a try BTW: on its best day ever, it had fewer than 1000 users, and if it was ever going to break 1000 users, it would have done so by now. The whole OS (excluding some fonts) has been available under an OSI- FSF- and DFSG-approved license since 2002.
So for example, Plan 9 will almost certainly never have a web browser capable a delivering a satisfactory experience on more than half of the 1000 most popular web sites -- because porting such a web browser to Plan 9 would cost 10s of millions of dollars in programmer time, and no one is going to spend that money to get fewer than 1000 new users.
Is there a usable version of plan9 we can install?
Couple of options: Raspberry Pi, or virtualisation. 9front say to avoid virtualbox, but it works. Here's a tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5XAhsHyqow