Hey, in this thread you can share your experience with
Plan 9 from Bell labs and related operating systems.

Furthermore, it is possible to post stuff like screenshots,
custom plumbing files and programs written for Plan 9, 9front,
nix, 9legacy, 9atom and others.

Enjoy!

I never tried plan9 myself, but the more I read about it, the sexier it looks!
Looks more like a network based OS though, that one would use in universities or a company (with the CPU/File servers + terminals model)

I started reading 'Introduction to Operating Systems Abstractions-Using Plan 9 from Bell labs' by Francisco Ballesteros and solving
exercises. It works fine with the newest version for the raspberry pi (single machine) and one already gets a good experience.

The most amazing thing is the code-you open a random file in /sys/src and you find readable, good code.
Most codebases have ugly spots and you see them when you skim through-but I haven't had this experience while reading
any Plan 9 code.

Digging up this thread because I got pretty hyped on plan9 lately, so I wanted to share this video with you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m3GuoaxRNM

Anyone here runs plan 9 in the wild ? Could you explain your setup ?

I started to set up "a Plan 9" as my backup capsule on a Raspberry Pi. I'm too lazy to finish it though. :(

I started looking at plan 9 again recently because of its distributed nature. During the pandemic, I started working from home, and installed my company laptop and docking station alongside my tower build. Multiplexing the keyboard, mouse and monitor is really tedious, so add a gaming console on here, and you have an idea if the mess it can be...

After some weeks, I realized that I never access my home PC directly, but rather ssh into it from my work laptop. This is easier because I don't have to crawl under the desk to replug everything. I would like to take it one step further, and be able to access the whole environment from a different computer, and not just a shell.
This is exactly the plan9 promise, and I would love to be able to access everything from any "terminal"

(15-05-2020, 01:25 PM)z3bra Wrote: I would like to take it one step further

Have you heard about plan9 hubfs? I haven't tried it yet, but it might suit you better than regular ssh.

I didn't know about it, thanks for the link. I guess what I'm looking for is more to use my main station as a CPU server and remotely access it from whatever terminal I have at hand. Be it a laptop, notebook or even my phone, do that I can access files, compile stuff, read mails, etc.. withou resorting to work arounds like terminal multiplexers.

I wrote a crappy rc one-liner that gets the links from lobste.rs frontpage. If you run it inside acme you can view these links by right clicking on them.

Wouldn't that even be a multi-platform script?

(18-05-2020, 04:55 AM)jkl Wrote: Wouldn't that even be a multi-platform script?

Of course not, hget is a plan9 tool ?
What I'm more interested here is HOW you open those link ? Are you running plan9ports, so you open it in your browser of choice ?

Do you really run plan9 full time, or you are just giving it a try for fun ?

(18-05-2020, 06:52 PM)z3bra Wrote: HOW you open those link ?

Right clicking a link in acme runs the plumber, plumber looks at the plumber rules file to figure out what to do with the url (open in mothra by default.) You could run this on linux with p9p and edit the plumb rules so that urls open in whatever modern browser you use.

(18-05-2020, 06:52 PM)z3bra Wrote: Do you really run plan9 full time, or you are just giving it a try for fun ?

Not full time, but for simpler tasks like email, irc, scripting and reading pdfs. I have a bunch of old hardware laying around so I don't have to worry about what os can run what software.

(15-05-2020, 02:48 PM)z3bra Wrote: I guess what I'm looking for is more to use my main station as a CPU server and remotely access it from whatever terminal I have at hand. Be it a laptop, notebook or even my phone, do that I can access files, compile stuff, read mails, etc.. withou resorting to work arounds like terminal multiplexers.

Did you ever manage to find some way of doing this? I recently built a desktop and realized this is exactly what I want to do with it.

Nope. I didn't put to much effort into it though. Plan9 seems to solve this issue, but I'm not quite ready to switch yet. I should look into setting up a remote plan9 file server + cpu (at least) and access it using 9ports' drawterm. I'm not quite there yet though… Still just an idea in my head ☺️

Firstly, thanks z3bra for re-opening this thread. I was specifically coming to nixers to get some more info on plan9 so you've saved me some time!

Has anyone looked at JehanneOS?

http://jehanne.io/
https://github.com/JehanneOS/jehanne

- most of userland tools, a lot of wisdom and some kernel modules, come from 9front
- the kernel is a fork of Charles Forsyth's Plan9-9k
- most of the build system and some valuable piece of code come from Harvey OS

From what I've read it sounds good, but I know nothing!

One thing I would like to know from you knowledgeable folk is, what SBC should I choose for a dedicated 9front installation? I'd love to have a 9front desktop workstation but I've got no idea what hardware is supported... ...wifi???

z3bra, I'm keen to get your thoughts on where to start if you were building a plan9/9front SBC.

I have, indeed, looked at Jehanne, but its most obvious bottleneck is that upstream Harvey is (more or less) stalled. I like the approach to make Plan 9 “almost” Linux-compatible, but it seems to be a lot of work for very small teams.

At least the mksh runs on Jehanne. :)

(22-07-2020, 12:34 AM)Ramiferous Wrote: what SBC should I choose for a dedicated 9front installation?

9front has premade ISOs for all the 4 raspberry pi versions, so I would choose any of those.

(22-07-2020, 12:34 AM)Ramiferous Wrote: I've got no idea what hardware is supported...

http://fqa.9front.org/fqa3.html

(22-07-2020, 01:43 AM)jkl Wrote: its most obvious bottleneck is that upstream Harvey is (more or less) stalled.

Hmm true. I noticed that Harvey has stalled.. although the last post in Jun '18 announced that the project hasn't been abandoned... I'm hoping that Isolation has allowed the devs time to get stuck back in!

(22-07-2020, 01:59 AM)sokx Wrote:

(22-07-2020, 12:34 AM)Ramiferous Wrote: what SBC should I choose for a dedicated 9front installation?

9front has premade ISOs for all the 4 raspberry pi versions, so I would choose any of those.

(22-07-2020, 12:34 AM)Ramiferous Wrote: I've got no idea what hardware is supported...

http://fqa.9front.org/fqa3.html

You're the best. Thank you for not scalding me for not doing my own research! :p

Someone mentioned this project to me: https://github.com/perpen/lx

It's a semi-equivalent to the "cpu" command, but to connect to a linux server instead. It also gives the possibility to start X11 clients within a rio window (using VNC as a middleware).

This seems pretty hackish, but the result looks pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJmn78dyDBc

(22-07-2020, 09:15 PM)Ramiferous Wrote: Hmm true. I noticed that Harvey has stalled..

I was wrong, they are continuing.

https://github.com/Harvey-OS/harvey/commits/main

The future is now! 9front has a video player!
https://git.sr.ht/~ft/treason

Stumbled upon this on irc, maybe some of you might be interested.

(16-09-2020, 04:45 PM)sokx Wrote: The future is now! 9front has a video player!
https://git.sr.ht/~ft/treason

Stumbled upon this on irc, maybe some of you might be interested.

Whaaat?? Now it just needs a web browser and it's gonna be the Year of the Plan9 desktop!

(24-07-2020, 04:36 AM)z3bra Wrote: Someone mentioned this project to me: https://github.com/perpen/lx

It's a semi-equivalent to the "cpu" command, but to connect to a linux server instead. It also gives the possibility to start X11 clients within a rio window (using VNC as a middleware).

This seems pretty hackish, but the result looks pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJmn78dyDBc

This is actually incredible. Thanks for sharing.

(17-09-2020, 03:55 AM)opFez Wrote: Now it just needs a web browser and it's gonna be the Year of the Plan9 desktop!

Use NetSurf.

Yeah, netsurf is ported, it works pretty damn good. There's even a native UI for it! There's git, even git/serve to host from; and a plethora of other cool shit being worked on pretty much every day.

I'm sorta working on a way to use Linux/Unix as a service on a plan9 network, in my x9srv/x9dev repos. They're works in progress; but I'm hoping they'll be much, much less hacky than lx. I hope it'll also be less finnicky than running vncv (vnc viewer, from plan9 side) and allow more powerful applications to be ran than with the vmx + equis approach (vmx is a vm on plan9, you can run like Alpine, and using equis draw to plan9). Again hopefully, they'll allow one to `rcpu` into a Unix/Linux box, and run an Xserver that will draw to plan9's /dev/draw system, using rio's wsys if it's available for window creation and feedback. So much to do, so little time though.

(26-11-2020, 03:12 AM)Halfwit Wrote: Again hopefully, they'll allow one to `rcpu` into a Unix/Linux box, and run an Xserver that will draw to plan9's /dev/draw system, using rio's wsys if it's available for window creation and feedback.

You should consider using wayland instead, and make a "9p" backend, that would translate wayland messages to read/writes to /dev/draw. I'll be much cleaner than making an X server that does the same.

It's literally just a DDX for Xserver though, and I get X11 apps and Xwayland baked in. Like the code itself is fairly well trivial, most of the work was on draw for 9. (I don't know if it works yet, it builds and should work; but circumstances have been such that I've not had systems to test it on https://github.com/halfwit/x9dev )

I was mostly working from Equis, which is an X11 server that builds on plan9