Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, originating in the Computing Sciences Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s, and building on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. The Labs' final release was in early 2015.
>What is 9front?
9front.org/ 9front is a fork of Plan 9. It was started to remedy a perceived lack of devoted development resources inside Bell Labs, and has accumulated various fixes and improvements.
>What is The Grid/ants/plan9chan?
9gridchan.org/ ANTS is a collection of modifications and additional software which adds new namespace manipulation capabilities to Plan 9. It is free software based on 9front and uses the same licensing, MIT for original code, LPL for modifications of Bell Labs source.
Features of the grid include services for chat, wiki, ramfs, rootfs, plumber, and registries.
>Where do I start?
Download the 9front ISO and run it in a VM, reading the FQA as you go.
Harvey is much more experimental and cant really do as much, it also deviates too much from the plan 9 tradition in my opinion. 9front is stable and active and heavily used by its small community.
John Johnson
Is there a decent guide on how to build the system? Both from within plan 9 and (if possible) from within osx/linux. I want to get an x86_64 image.
Carson Long
Its in the 9front fqa. ANTS also has prebuild 64 bit isos that are based of current 9front also.
Matthew White
See: fqa.9front.org/fqa5.html , section 5.2.2. I was able to get a rpi image built once, but there was some firmware stuff outside of 9 that I couldn't get working.
Plan 9 is like a mythical Lost City of Gold hidden deep in the jungle - often lost, often found, travelers tell tales of crumbling glory, namespace temples overgrown with file descriptor vines. transparent connections between different places and times as the bind structures are uncovered through excavation.
Yes it is, its all just 9p fses so any client which can speak 9p can use them, several people use various grid services from unixes with plan9port tools or even inferno on phones
Asher Smith
What's the program in the top right corner?
Brandon Moore
can I get some chess and stockfish working on this? (or any other good opensource engine, am opened to alternatives)
Matthew Cook
also if the answer is no then I have my winter project
Alexander Ortiz
I thought plan9 was abandoned. Where did you find that?
Bentley Thomas
There is sudoku and some other games installed. I don't see why not.
Charles Davis
Can somebody tell me? Can I run acme without the shitty mouse chords and with my based Emacs key bindings?
Chase Thompson
There is some decent chess software for plan 9, it is included in the 64-bit ants image - crafty is one of the engines which ought to be plenty strong, if not stockfish level.
Logan Scott
No.
Adam Taylor
Is there a lot of (useful) software available? How compatible is it with Linux or other *ux/*ix software?
Landon Perez
Could I set up a VM on my homelab and do a cpu resource share and the run another vm on my workstation and hook into it? Or something? That sounds cool but also maybe a bit pointless. Benefits I could imagine are freeing up resources on workstation while still having native VM rather than having to vnc into it. I don't really know how this stuff works though
Julian Wright
Yes, this is actually how Plan 9 is designed to be used. Ideally you would have three machines: a cpu server, a file server, and the terminal, which is a monitor, keyboard, etc that is used to connect to the two. Check out the FQA, it'll have more info as I've only ever set up services on one machine before.
There's about as much cli software that you could need along with a somewhat primitive browser, some emulators, hypervisors, a couple games, and a collection of other graphical utilities. Compatibility with existing UNIX software is practically non-existent out of the box.
Are there technical reasons why emacs is not ported or is it because emacs violates their dear unix principle? Infact that it doesnt have such essential software makes me think it cant be really a serious OS.
Daniel Scott
>emacs >essential software lmao
Caleb Nelson
1) it's too big for anyone to want to do it 2) no one cares what's the reason for having OS on top of OS anyway?
Joseph Kelly
How to user? Also how to get 9front?
Asher Reyes
Read the OP
Josiah Foster
> 9front 9fetch*
Benjamin Adams
Incase the OS is garbage (e.g. windows) you can use emacs. That no one cares shows how super niche plan9 is. Even the bsds have emacs.
Jason Lopez
Also seems like there is no vim. Are minimalism fags doing the development?
Mason Turner
there is sam and acme
Jaxson Reyes
Hardware support is a real issue. Even though there's a cult following on the Internet, few people are l33t enough to actually write drivers.
David Sullivan
there's a vim port but you shouldn't use it
Kayden Mitchell
I wanted to write drivers but everyone in #cat-v called me a faggot and told me to fuck off.
James Walker
You probably asked a stupid question. Were you the one that said "can someone point to me towards resources for porting firefox thanks" and then bitched when people told you to go away
Tyler Butler
Minimalism means no drivers. You dont want to bloat the codebase.
Nathan Evans
No, I politely asked if someone could point me to resources for getting started with driver development for Plan 9. Everyone told me to fuck off and decided to circlejerk their PowerPC port that no one is ever going to use.
Jace Sanders
Never go to #cat-v. They're the reason nothing ever gets done on 9. They don't actually know or do anything so they get very very mad when someone comes along and actually does work.
Austin Jackson
What 'were' you going to write drivers for? Have you written anything since? Did you read the docs? Do you use Plan 9? Post your fork
Mason Gray
I was interested in writing wifi drivers, but have never done it before and didn't know where to start. I figured one of the other developers would be able to point me in the right direction. I was very wrong.
I said fuck it and just settled for only having ethernet on my set up. In the meantime I've been porting more modern features to acme (e.g. syntax highlighting) and working on porting Ruby.
Dylan Gutierrez
Can you actually run plan9 on bare metal on a recent amd64 machine or is it just meant to be in a vm. Can you watch x264/265 videos in it?
Tyler Gutierrez
There is no video player. I am running 9front my x220.
Justin Green
>amd64 Yes >recent YMMV, if it's a thinkpad it's likely to have been tested and work out of the box, check the FQA >video No Were you expecting there to be a wifi driver tutorial? The best they can do is use the openbsd ones, it's not a simple task.
Justin Sullivan
I wasn't expecting a tutorial, but I was expecting someone to at least give me a bit of guidance on where to even fucking start. I'm not a professional driver developer, but I wanted to try to contribute. The #cat-v guys are pricks.
Aaron James
So you told 9front developers "I never did this thing, I would like to do this thing for your project how do I do it?" And you thought that that would make you looks like a buffoon?
> Syntax highlighting in acme > Ruby Did you even take a look at the 9front website? You are obviously not 9front target and they saw it probably
Mason Stewart
There's an MJPG avi player
Brandon Powell
everyone has to start somewhere
Elijah Nguyen
Fellow Yooper?
Jason Wright
Yup, although I'm temporarily displaced to Wisconsin. Got a lot of snow yet?
Joshua Parker
what are the challenges of video player for Plan 9? (beside getting people to do it) I remember seeing something about Carmack wanting to port DOOM to plan 9 but the rendering was slow, but there was some response with an option to map framebuffer directly to memory instead of file interface. I would assume any basic video player would have to do this as well? How is current state of hw acceleration? Is it used anywhere else? Does the assembler even recognize the instructions? Is it doable to do rendering without it? Which format would be the format of choice? x264?
so this is MJPG and it's pretty much a series of JPEG images?
Brayden Cruz
is there a decent tutorial for sam out there? I'd actually like to learn it. I already have plan 9 from user space installed.
Wyatt Sanchez
That's actually kinda cool.
Elijah Evans
The manfile, mainly. Do you know ed? The commands are similar. w write, q quit, ! runs command, < pipe, etc. Yellow windows are files, blue window is command buffer. Right and middle clicks are self-explanatory.
