plan9port

phrakture · 2005-08-19 20:56:31

This is a message for all of you interested in old-school unix philosophy and innovative user interface design.

Plan9 began in the late 1980's as an attempt to have it both ways: to build a system that was centrally administered and cost-effective using cheap modern microcomputers as its computing elements.

Now, many people think that, due to a recent slashdot article, Plan 9 is dead and gone. That is, frankly, not true.

So here we go, with a package of plan9port or "Plan 9 from User Space", as it is affectionatly titled. The package and PKGBUILD have made it into the community repo. I highly suggest you try it out. It takes alot of getting used to, but keep in mind these people are trying new and experimental user interface designs. Alot of man page reading is required. Some of the utilites of note are "rio", the window manager, "acme", the editor/development environment, and "sam", a regexp driven multi file editor.

There are many papers out there if you're looking for a good read on some of their philosophies as well.

I'll leave you with a bit of trivia... the name comes from a movie, called Plan 9 from Outer Space which is generally regarded as the worst movie in the history of movies (even the actors thought so).

Enjoy!
P.S. It takes community a bit to update, the package will be available soon

sepht · 2005-08-21 05:34:32

Isn't this that package that you were playing with that went totally insane and started to create(or link?) 260meg files for things that should be like 56kB? Still a pkg would be great for us to play with if u get the kinks worked out. Best wishs

phrakture · 2005-08-22 14:46:23

Nope it's totally working now... and yes, I had accidentally created a 249MB version of troff... but that was my fault.

Euphoric Nightmare · 2005-08-22 21:49:11

After reading the introduction to plan9port, i'm still unsure of what it does.

phrakture · 2005-08-22 22:15:44

Heh, plan9 is an operating system. It has it's own kernel and all that jazz - it's ideas are based on original unix. Basically plan9port is a set of utilities from plan9 made to work under linux.

Euphoric Nightmare · 2005-08-23 04:11:29

oh...sweet...anyone tried the wm yet?

cmp · 2005-08-23 15:44:12

I'm thinking about trying the real plan9, sounds quite cool.

magnum_opus · 2005-08-25 15:58:05

um the package doesn't work, well pacman doesn't see it despite being in community. and when i try to get the pkg build via the page in aur i get: /cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/system/plan9port: unknown location

phrakture · 2005-08-25 17:05:17

magnum_opus wrote:

um the package doesn't work, well pacman doesn't see it despite being in community. and when i try to get the pkg build via the page in aur i get: /cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/system/plan9port: unknown location

Ok, well, I'm a dumbass... I checked them in under "system/plan9" not thinking that this location is based on the pkgname of "plan9port" - they have been moved and fixed, and everything should be updated when the server syncs it all up

phrakture · 2005-08-25 21:38:17

Here's a screenshot of "acme" - the plan9 editor/development environment:

http://wmi.modprobe.de/2005-08-18.png

This is from a different plan9 port, but same codebase...

wiremore · 2005-08-28 01:13:18

I built plan9port from abs and have been playing with it a bit. Acme is pretty different from anything ive used before and its going to take some getting used to, but it seems interesting. Thanks for making the pkgbuild, it seems like it was quite complicated.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-08-19 20:56:31

plan9port

#2 2005-08-21 05:34:32

Re: plan9port

#3 2005-08-22 14:46:23

Re: plan9port

#4 2005-08-22 21:49:11

Re: plan9port

#5 2005-08-22 22:15:44

Re: plan9port

#6 2005-08-23 04:11:29

Re: plan9port

#7 2005-08-23 15:44:12

Re: plan9port

#8 2005-08-25 15:58:05

Re: plan9port

#9 2005-08-25 17:05:17

Re: plan9port

#10 2005-08-25 21:38:17

Re: plan9port

#11 2005-08-28 01:13:18

Re: plan9port

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