Has anyone used Plan-9 have feedback on running it?

You can check my other comments for more, but a couple of old-time UNIX folk I know described it as being dropped into a bare X11 environment with twm, a flint knife, and the Acme editor.

Acme is amazing, but the whole thing uses mouse chording and requires a 3-button mouse, so it requires a lot of getting used to if you're newer to computers than, say, 1990.

In general, Plan9 delivers on being "a better UNIX" in terms of what a standalone process perceives as its runtime environment - everything of consequence is a file, regardless of its location, and mounting remote devices of all kinds is wonderfully consistent.

Sadly, all the "nice" things you take for granted on Linux (like hardware support, graphics compositing, audio, wi-fi, graphical web browsers, even SSH and modern language runtimes) are absent or have to be bolted on with fairly ugly hacks.

Still, it runs OK on a Raspberry Pi. Wish it did so on a ODROID-U3, though.

ron puts it in perspective pretty well: http://9fans.net/archive/2011/04/230

Yeah, but that makes sense at the OS level. UX-wise (and generally speaking, for most common uses of a computer these days), Plan9 is, sadly, almost useless. I myself only use it because I _like_ messing about with different (and arguably better) operating systems, but it's very, very, VERY hard to do so for general "work" or even browsing the web.

I've considered spending time on plan 9 making the UX less crappy. I think the stuff under the covers is fantastic but the UX is not great. The three button mouse thing is pretty stupid, for one.

Thank goodness I'm not alone!

Where have you been all this time? :)

I'm just a frequent user of tiling window managers and vim on Linux and I wish I had the elegance of plan9 under the covers :)

Unfortunately I'm all talk at this point. I have to set up an actual plan9 machine at some point and start working on it if I were to get anywhere.

The three button mouse thing is pretty stupid, for one.

"All those parentheses in Lisp are pretty stupid, for one."

Considering that the Plan 9 UI fundamentally revolves around mouse chording, I wish you luck with that. It's a shame that Unix users are stuck in the keyboard-only mentality that they write off the mouse as some tool for lowly end users.

Please don't. As a Pythonista turned LISPer, I've heard all that stuff before. What is pretty stupid is being unable to use Plan9 on a modern laptop with a trackpad -- again, check my comments on previous Plan9 posts.

http://www.jonschneider.com/images/jsblog/ThinkpadTrackpoint...

works for me!

btw, you can simulate mb 2 and 3 by holding down keyboard modifiers while clicking mb1.

But how do you 'paste' without a middle button? That's the bit I miss most when I have to use a 2-button mouse. Thank god the guys who invented the scroll-mouse had the sense to build the middle-button into the scroll-wheel axle.

I'm not against a three-button mouse, I'm against its overuse. Example: in plan9, you can't hit "up" to re-use the last command you typed into a terminal. You have to copy+paste it with your mouse.

Not quite true. The command "" (much like bash's !!) runs the previous command you entered. It can also be given a prefix of a command and search the history for this command.

See wintext(1).

While modernizing and redesigning the Plan 9 UI is a valiant cause, it may not be the most efficient way to accomplish your goals.

I'd venture to say that Plan 9 was never meant to be a mainstream OS. It essentially served as a playpen for new OS/systems ideas and research at Bell Labs at the time.

A lot of those ideas were pretty influential: union mounts, per-process namespaces, user-space file systems, UTF8, human-readable protocols, rfork(), file-object interface ubiquity, concurrent programming model, etc. You can see how these ideas have pervaded our current systems landscape.

The implementation of Plan 9 itself is great, but I don't think success of the Plan 9 project should be limited to whether or not its specific implementation stays current and modern. The UX was never designed with the common user in-mind, and it arguably was never the core focus for the system. A greater success would be to see its actual core ideas spread out into other mainstream systems.

So instead of making the Plan 9 UX more modern, why not work on getting some of its missing features into Linux instead? Last time I checked, Linux still needs a union-mount implementation. This way, the world benefits.

BTW, you might like this: http://swtch.com/plan9port/

Union filesystems are (finally) supported in mainline Linux as of the most recent (3.18) release.

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....

Relevant SSH bashing: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ssh :)

So what is Plan9's alternative to SSH? SSL seems even worse than SSH in terms of algorithms that you have to negotiate, and thanks to misconfigurations you can end up in a situation with no shared ciphers (if server accepts only RC4 and client rejects RC4 for example).

Maybe tinyssh could qualify as an alternative...

There is cpu for plan9. It's a remoteshell does does mount the local filesystem, so you can continue to work.

I don't think tinyssh is less complex, as it is compatible.

As an interface designer Plan9 have always fascinated me yet I found it incredible hard to find many other designers who were into it's concepts.

I always loved the "everything is an object" approach and in a better world this not NeXT or Windows would be our underlying principle.

You may be interested in wmii [1], a tiling WM which is inspired by Plan 9 and uses 9P.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wmii

I love wmii. It's the primary reason I resent OS X.

I love wmii. It's the primary reason I resent OS X.

Huh? What's the relationship?

OSX fundamentally doesn't support robust tiling window managers. they exist only as a pale shadow of the real thing.

Isn't that the same case as Windows, BeOS, Android, iOS, PalmOS, etc?... I was wondering why OSX was explicitly called out.

Presumably it's a sort of sideways/backhanded almost-compliment to OS X: it works well enough comparatively that its plusses overwhelm its negatives for the commenter. But, they still wish it supported more flexibility; and the fact it doesn't (and yet its plusses nevertheless still compare favorably enough to its minuses that the commenter continues to use it) leads to a sort of feeling of dissatisfaction and resentment.

My experience with Plan 9 is from my first employment at Kreatel Communications and doing basic admin of the nCUBE/C-COR VOD servers that some of our customers used in production and we had for integration testing. The OS those servers ran, Transit, was apparently based on Plan 9.

Coming from a Linux and Solaris background the shell was quite basic to say the least! I remember on some instance that we for some reason wanted to bypass the web UI and hand-edit some file and the only editor available was some variant of ed...

But with a steady hand when doing such things and software upgrades etc it worked really well and was quite capable for the time (2006).

You're referring to sam, I presume? The commands are similar to ed, but the overall design is radically different.

Then of course, Plan 9 has one of the most versatile text editors out there: Acme.

The shell itself is rc(1), which cleans up the mess significantly from Bourne shells.

I quite like sam, from what I've tried so far. I think it's an interesting take on ed (but I much prefer acme) I still have "learn basic ed (or sam)" as a far-away goal (always pushed down my todo list, since knowing the commands is not enough: using them is what gives power)

This is the best writeup I've seen so far on getting comfortable with ed: http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/actually-using-ed/

Always good to check out 9front if you plan on using plan9: new drivers, filesystem, more utilities.

Homepage: https://code.google.com/p/plan9front/

Releases: http://9times.cat-v.org/

With such fun utilities as...

    bullshit(1) (print out a stream of bullshit)
    feminize(1) (replace sexist remarks)
    theo(1) (print out insults from Theo de Raadt)
    troll(1) (automated trolling) # same as theo(1) it looks like

derp looks useful.

Things like that they should call it stormfront instead of plan9front.

Watch the video on that homepage. It is fantastic. Clarke and Dawe still make videos like that.

Thankyou. Glad to see them getting some international recognition. Absolute geniuses.

For anyone not familiar, they have been the stalwarts of Australian political satire for decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clarke_(satirist)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Dawe

http://mrjohnclarke.com/projects/clarke-dawe

https://www.youtube.com/user/ClarkeAndDawe

http://www.abc.net.au/news/programs/clarkeanddawe/ (may not work outside Australia.)

I love how decent of a chunk Github's code identifier seems to think is Javascript. On a related note, has Plan9 been rewritten in Javascript yet, and if not, why are you slacking?!

I think they're waiting for the Rust port to be done first.

Rust? Don't you mean go?

Go? Don't you mean Elixir?

There is Clive from lsub, a plan9 like OS in go.

http://lsub.org/ls/research.html

Does OpenGL a work on Plan 9? If so, combined with the ability to run Go code, a lot can be done.

Can someone explain why Plan 9 matters? I mean this legitimately. How is this differentiated from yet another flavor of *nix? I'm sure it was hot shit back in the early 90s, but I don't see much of an appeal other than as a curiosity like OS/2.

It's more *nix than unix. Everything is a file. UI interaction is done via files. It doesn't cut corners at it - it takes it to the extreme.

It is the logical successor to unix that never took off because unix is "good enough"

First of all: Plan 9 is not another flavor of nix. If you expect it to be like Unix, you will* have a bad time.

With that said:

* All services are network-enabled file servers speaking a common protocol called 9P.

* UI makes heavy use of mouse chording, is inspired by Oberon and old school Smalltalk environments. Supports seamless interaction through an inter-application messaging mechanism called plumber (e.g. you can write a rule that will make all ISBN numbers in a desktop application automatically act as a hyperlink to a web application).

* The rc shell fixes a lot of deficiencies in the Bourne shell.

* Per-process namespaces obsolete a whole lot of things like symlinks.

* There is no superuser (root account). This is obsoleted by an auth server called Factotum.

* Uses its own compiler suite that makes cross-compilation particularly easy, compared to the mess of doing so with GCC. It also uses its own much cleaner libc routines that are quite distinct from POSIX or the messy glibc additions of today. Has its own thread library, as well.

* All network information is held in a text file database mounted on a file server.

* The default file system (Venti) is inherently versioned, introspectable and has backup built into it. You can do things like swap in libraries from cache and revert changes without a hitch.

* Everything is statically linked.

* Uses mk instead of make.

* A lot of things like recursive copy and find aren't built into the standard commands. It's expected you actually chain together commands instead of reinventing the wheel for every single operation. The canonical example is the use of du to walk the file system tree, for everything. This replaces find and other things.

* Designed not just to be multi-user, but multi-tenant. Makes many uses for containers and access controls unneeded because of its core design.

* So much more.

Try it. It's more relevant now than ever.

What I find most amazing is how the kernel is more like a file system multiplexer. Its job is to present a file system to each process built from mounting virtual file systems from all sorts of programs and remote machines.

If I want to access files from a remote machine — mount its file system. Want to play my music from my laptop using the speakers connected to my stationary computer — mount its sound card into my device folder. If want to use another machine as a network gateway — I mount its /net.

Even the editor acme has its own file system, which makes writing a script doing something fancy in my editor really easy. The file system gives easy access (read/write) to anything from the currently selected text in each window, to the "menu" at the top (called the tag). And if I write a script, it is executed anywhere in acme by middle clicking its name.

What makes this all work smoothly is that mounted file systems can overlap, and that each process is presented its own name space. This completely removes the need for symbolic links and unix sockets.

What I find most amazing is how the kernel is more like a file system multiplexer. Its job is to present a file system to each process built from mounting virtual file systems from all sorts of programs and remote machines.

Wow, that sounds really powerful. I've just read a bit about inter-process communication and sharing in Linux, and that seems like much more of a hassle than this.

Even the editor acme has its own file system, which makes writing a script doing something fancy in my editor really easy. The file system gives easy access (read/write) to anything from the currently selected text in each window, to the "menu" at the top (called the tag). And if I write a script, it is executed anywhere in acme by middle clicking its name.

That sounds like it might be the answer (an answer) to something I've been wondering about: how to let another process - outside the editor - have access to the contents of the editor. Like for example synchronizing the editing/viewing of a file, instead of the outside process only using the file stored on the disk, and reloading whenever the editor saves the file. Could one use the file system of Acme to have another process view for example the file that it is being used to edit, in real time? I'm thinking that something like that might be useful for collaborative editing (at the least, letting one person edit the file while the other person watches the editing, maybe in the same kind of editor but hopefully through whichever editor or program that she wishes to use).

Your comparison to OS/2 may be apt. The details are a bit murky for me, but as far as I can tell from Wikipedia[1], OS/2 3.0 was at some point simply renamed to Windows NT, which of course is the underlying technology for Windows as we know it today.

That is; Plan 9 is a research project and it is relevant the way research is relevant: For the future.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2