Plan 9
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You are currently reading a thread in /g/ - Technology
You are currently reading a thread in /g/ - Technology
I keep seeing people complain that there is no momentum behind this, why can't we start it?
I was reading about it and supposedly there's a RPI distro and also a distro called 9front that a lot of people are getting behind.
If its so superior then what do we lose by trying this in a VM or on a test server?
>>51929505
install gentoo
>>51929636
Gentoo is technically inferior to plan9 you dipshit
Has a better mascot than Linux IMO.
The big reason for the lack of momentum is "good enough" syndrome. Unix is good enough in most peoples mind and whats more is a lot of features (but not all) have been taken out of Plan 9 and adapted to Unix, look at "Plan 9 from user space" for instance, things like /proc etc.
People are doing interesting things with IPFS like mounting content namespaces to /bin so you have an always up to date binary mounted from the network, while this isn't exactly the same it's somewhat similar externally to how you mount programs over the network in Plan 9.
I don't mean to imply anything with these statements either, I would love to see more Plan 9 usage, a lot of the concepts core to the system are very interesting, things like the plumber remind me of xdg mixed with zeroconf which is amazing, that just makes sense, their network and file system stuff is also worth looking into.
>>51929505
Alright /g/, I have introductory basic programming experience in C, and did SCIP with Scheme. How long till I can start contributing, given that I allocate 2 hours a day to getting good?
>>51929758
it annoys me to no end that so many dorks think unix is the be all end all of os design. hory shet, what a pile of crap. well, its not bad, but its certainly not well designed.
>>51929505
dont think me scsi is defined :( sadly cant use on komputer
>>51929765
Long tbfh, probably a year at least but it depends more on your own personal understanding and capabilities
Tbh what we really need is for the OS itself to become more widely known because it seems like the major problem is that there is no incentive even for any big company like canonical to take the initiative like they did with Ubuntu , until people care about it enough
>>51929505
The problem is that we need to modernize the UI so that newfags get onto it, and also have working Steam because gaymers.
And both above are impossible to do because if you modernize Plan 9's UI, it'll be like a civil war, and Steam is awful to port.
>>51931936
Steam only recently became relevant or noticed on Linux
A decent UI would be far more likely to bring and keep new people, something on par with LXDE would be fine. BTW I am new to the idea of Plan 9 myself. I only became sold on it when I realised that Unix/Linux has some serious shortcomings in how it is designed. I've used Linux since 1999 (RH6).
>>51929505
>why can't we start it?
because its best ideas were already implemented in UNIX derivatives since it was incapable of being marketed or licensed properly.
You're a decade late
The only thing left for Plan9 to do is exist as a resource to write CS papers about
>>51931936
>>51932243
>muh UI
The only audience you would attract with that is special snowflake ricers from Arch and Crunchbang
>>51929505
I really like what I've heard about Plan 9, but I guess I still don't understand it fully. What really makes it as great as it's lauded to be? I hear it sticks more closely to the Unix philosophy, but what else?
>>51933149
>I can't read
>>51931936
>>51932243
>make it into another half-assed abortion of XP and OS X like they did to UNIX interfaces, that will make it successful!
I think maybe a few changes to rio would be alright, but overall I find the interface rather nice, it's very tool-like, the way a professional operating system should be. Mainstream *nix pandering to Winshit and Mac migrants really killed it for me, mostly because their pandering was so half-baked and tasteless. throwing in shitty gradients and crude "polishing" effects that make everything look and feel like cheap malware imitations of a popular product.
>>51929505
Lack of driver support was the main issue for most people who wanted to try it. Lack of good documentation by the earlier VM providers (vmware & virtualbox) prevented many people from playing with it on a VM.
It has a definite learning curve, which lots of people are put off by, but it doesn't stop any serious interest.
I'm not sure about the pi2, but for the original raspberry pi, there were remade bootable images of plan9. You should still be able to find it.
Can you provide an informative link about it for mobile users?
Plan 9 is old, move on to Inferno.
>>51933411
This to be honest.
Plan9 was great conceptually at its time
It's long gone and the only way of reviving it is going back in time and making it more popular than Unix through good documentation, marketing, and licensing. It might actually be easier to build the time machine than to do that though.
Anyone seriously thinking they can revive it probably doesn't know what made it great at its time. Even if someone was to go through all the painstaking work of modernizing the OS they would still be stuck with barely any exclusive features as *BSD and GNU/Linux have integrated the best concepts of Plan9 into their operating systems long ago
>>51933411
inferno is the corporate bastardized brother of Plan9. It doesn't even have the hipster dev remnants. Why would anyone touch it?
Plan 9 is already obsolete, see Inferno
>>51932243
>Steam only recently became relevant or noticed on Linux
While true they're still right, a lot of people choose PC gaming as a hobby, if the OS doesn't allow for it easily then they may not even consider it. That's becoming more and more a moot point though with hypervisors and passthrough technology, just spin up an OS instance from a snapshot on demand for a single application, paired with a good filesystem these images wouldn't be much of a problem either.
>>51933411
>>51933570
What are the major differences?
i thought /g/ already tried to have some sort of plan 9 grid
>>51929505
gg fags.
>>51933266
rio is completely unusable outside of plan 9
applications dont even take over terminal windows
>>51935861
Can run hosted(and its pretty fast) and use the host machine resources.
Check the hellaphone demo on youtube, its pretty impressing.
Too bad Limbo seems pretty shit and development has stalled since 2002-8 or so.
I tried it for like 10 minutes in a VM and it was a usability nightmare, might have been a really old version though. Why is Plan9 better than Linux? Why should I care about it? Sell it to me, /g/.
>>51937780
The ideas behind it are pretty interesting but basically useless for regular people.
Plan 9 is designed for clustering, you can cluster computers of all kinds of differing hardware and architectures(SPARC, x86, MIPS, ARM, etc) together. As long as there's a port to the desired architecture it can be integrated into the collective. Hardware devices integrated into the cluster can be utilized by any other machine in the cluster. For instance you can output audio through the sound hardware of a completely separate machine.
>>51937780
You can mount physical resources on other machines since everything is a filesystem, so it all works transparently.
Say you have a cluster of 10 devices that can talk 9p ie a few servers, an rpi and a smartphone running inferno and you want to program something that takes data from the rpi sensors, process it on the servers and display the results on your phone, its as easy as mounting all the parts together into a namespace and going from there.
Pretty much seamless C programming experience, and you don't have to deal with Xserver nightmare for graphic output.
No reason to use it if you're not a programmer though.
>>51933112
Even if that's the case (Which I doubt), that would give Plan 9 more publicity, meaning is would attract others on top of that.
Personally, I think Plan 9 could take off if GCC and than either Qt or GTK+ is ported to it.
Neither of these are Plan9ish components (one being C++), but unless existing programs are ported, it ain't going anywhere.
>>51937780
To understand plan9, you have to understand Unix, and to some extent then Linux too; bear in mind that Linux has taken and brought to fruition some ideas from plan9 as well, like AuFS and OverlayFS.
The guys behind plan9 were the same people behind UNIX (the trademarked original). The put out the UNIXes that they did, and then sat down and said, "What can we do better?" and did it. So if you don't know Unix/Linux, you won't appreciate the changes or at least the ideas behind them. Similarly, if you like Unix/Linux, you're like everyone else that said "Why would I ever move to something else?" which is ultimately why it failed to take off: UNIX was good at what it did and needed no replacement.
plan9 ultimately was an effort to un-fuck networked computing and make it something basic to sysadmin work because the UNIX people saw that networked computing and clustering was going to take over; rather than keep all the current 1970s-era paradigms, redo it and make it nice.
>>51940375
I'd like the opposite: plan9 is thoroughly documented with its core ideas, so take the ideas that would have made it great and bring them elsewhere: eg plumber.
>>51929807
You're a triple nigger at the least. The SUS set the standard for all computing you see today you fuck nugget. The only thing that Windows got right was Active Directory, and if they had not, everyone today would be using Macs for personal computing and UNIX for servers.
>muh Windows
would be dead if it weren't for corporate dollars.
>>51940375
Honestly it sounds completely retarded, porting bloat is only going to make things end up like linux today.
I like how this OS was named after the worst movie ever made.
https://archive.org/details/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space_1959
This was already attempted with Plan G.
>>51940710
no shit you retard
>>51941147
Well, of course the name is common knowledge, but not everyone knows the reason why it was picked.
>>51938487
so the OS with no drivers to access physical resources on any modern computing device is great because it is supposed to facilitate access to physical resources
Problem is the kernel doesn't support enough hardware. However you can compile the 9p protocol in linux.
>>51929661
That's because its from rayman
>>51941382
9front attempts to solve that.
Never got it to install right, but the installer booted and worked.
>>51929505
9front has literally the best ad campaign of any OS ever.
It's even beyond 4chan meme tier.
http://9front.org/propaganda/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
BTW I have been an occasional user for a few years, but now that I have a good application in mind this OS might be the best thing since hyperinflation.
>>51943323
http://9front.org/4chan.html
there's also a templeos parody
This is not a desktop-tier OS though by any stretch so watch out. It's for serious business only.
>>51929505
because the linux way of duct-taping everything together a lot more practical than 'muh super-elegant /net/tcp'
>>51943323
>that fucking fortune
https://code.google.com/p/plan9front/source/browse/lib/theo
>>51943426
dl'd and added here, lololol
>>51940710
I like how you clearly have not seen very many movies, especially bad ones.
install gentoo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZOh-lxYadc
>>51943352
I really need to port that cat clock.
>>51944936
Is it a 9front exclusive?
Maybe with the help of p9port you could do it really easily.
>>51937780
The responses to this post are just adorable, and show what this hipster garbage is all about - insisting it's superior yet trying to subtly convince them to not use it.
It's funny to see this shit thread pop up every once in a while and see hipsters try to "convince" people to use plan9. Puh-lease girlfriend, you don't want anyone to use plan9, then you can't pretend to be cool by using it - this is the exact reason you left linux in the first place! It got too mainstream, too *good*, remember?
The responses read like this
>Well, *you* probably wouldn't like it. Buuuut, you should still try it out though
>Yeah, you really shouldn't use this if you aren't some psuedo dropout programmer. Get lost
>Plan9 is basically this 40 year old idea written by this dead man, hurr muh industry standards
He asked, "Why should I use this?" and every answer is some form of "You really just shouldn't".
Haiku and dead company operating systems like aix and solaris read the same way.
>This obscure OS, it's soo coool!
>Why?
>Well... *you* really wouldn't get it, sooo....
full hipster
>>51946005
Linux only got very usable in the last 5 years or so, before that it was complete neckbear territory
It doesn't mean Linux was technologically bad, it wasn't, something can be superior in a technical sense and yet also unusable you fucking retard.
>>51944950
It's this http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/games/catclock.c
Seems doable.
Getting emails to work on plan9port's Acme is a pain in the ass.
>>51947347
Damn that's some clean shit. Shouldn't be hard at all.
>>51941209
9front has plenty of drivers and inferno can run on top of linux/windows/osx, thus using its resources.
So what again is the problem?
>>51948008
inferno's user interface somehow manages to be worse than rio
>>51948016
Yes but we are talking about resources, you can easily just use it as a 9p middleman like the 9grid anons do for mapping new nodes to the cluster.
And its not like you cant write a new interface, the 3 dudes who did hellaphone did it all in 3 months.
>>51948044
>9grid
errr 9gridchan
http://9gridchan.org/
>>51933266
>shitty gradients and crude "polishing" effects
This isn't 2007, people realized copying vista/7 is not worthwhile and they moved on.
>>51938487
>everything is a filesystem
I hate this shit with a passion.
>>51938487
You can already do this in Linux, there are tons of tools to mount files over the network, most of them being named <protocol>fs.
>>51948250
I never really understood the pros and cons of such principle. Does anyone care to talk about it?
>>51949416
Makes it really easy to manipulate stuff externally is one of the first pros I can think of.
Think of acme for an example. You could pipe shit to /n/acme/new/body and create a new document externally. Every part of acme can be manipulated that way. So writing programs to extend the functionality of acme is trivial.
>>51949416
>>51949441
This also means in theory that you could mount the editor from a distance, I believe. There's no point, but it's doable.
>>51949441
Thanks. So I get it's sort of an API.
What about resource sharing and access control? What if two programs try to write to /dev/printer at the same time?
>>51948250
Actually It's the best thing about Plan 9
>>51949606
Unfortunately I never got to try out networking with plan 9, so I couldn't tell you.
Some other anon may know.
>>51949606
I now realize this question sounds dumber than what I had thought of initially.
>>51949606
How do you do that in Linux?
>>51949606
Plan 9's file system protocol is just an IPC mechanism.
>>51949862
I think you're referring to the plumber in that case.
Protocol itself isn't really an IPC mechanism.
>>51949899
No, I'm referring to 9P, it's an IPC.
>>51929807
this anon has it
unix was designed in the 1970's and has been tacked onto hundreds of thousands of times, which actually contradicts the original design philosphy
we need a new "unix"
>>51929505
Fun fact: The worst but most used solution always wins.
Unix win because was widely used. Linux win because was widely used. Etc. Etc.
In a ideal world we probably use Plan9 build over a L4 kernel in MIPS workstations. But in the real world we use Linux (Or Windows or OSX, choose your poison) in x86 machines because that's the most popular shit.
>tfw nobody cares about PhantomOS
>tfw nobody wants to do a "everything is a object" OS
>>51949606
>What if two programs try to write to /dev/printer at the same time?
IIRC it queues stuff.
>>51929505
Plan 9 is shit m8
>>51949606
Better question
>being able to find any drivers anywhere from any company for any printer ever ever for this poser garbage
>>51938487
This sounds easy and very powerful, is it actually that easy in practice? What do I have to know and read if I want to develop that example you mentioned, as in a 3 machine hello world program.
>>51956449
That's not really a question, wouldn't you be able to utilize the drivers for a different kernel though if you run Plan9 on top of it?
>>51946005
Plan 9 and the ideas behind it are great. The rc shell and sam are still goat. I wouldnt use plan 9 for anything more than curiosity now anyway. The point is all OSes are fucked but because the more LOC or hours spent "working" on a problem are the prevailing metrics of competency now it doesnt matter. Thank God modern hardware can handle the clusterfuck that is a modern internet bowser, text editor, and even fucking redshift. Why the fuck does redshift have any non-x dependencies?
You cant expect everyone to understand what is going on under the hood but im not stupid and i am getting lost and making concessions I wouldnt have made years ago.
