Introduction to 9front

To those not in the know:

1. Plan 9 was led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie and released (closed source) by Bell Labs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs ) in 1992. In 1996, AT&T decided to deprioritize it. Lucent open sourced it in 2000 and free sourced it in 2002. It was a process-based OS where each process had its own filesystem (called a namespace) where each process could share virtual files (via 9P, later 9P2000, protocol) in the other processes' file systems. Like Unix (and Linux), files could represent devices. UTF-8 was used everywhere (since Ken Thompson invented it). rc was the default shell, rio was the windows system, plumber allowed system-wide hyperlinking, and sam and acme were the text editors.

2. 9front is a fork of Plan 9.

3. If you refresh the linked page (the main page for 9front), it has a new picture. There are a lot. Some are really bizarre, like the man in the wheelchair in front of the elevator. Others like the shot from Jurassic Park are funny and wrong- "it was a Silicon Graphics workstation (using IRIX, the SGI System V based Unix) running a three dimensional file system browser." (not Plan 9 which was not Unix) http://movies.stackexchange.com/a/9746

from their FAQ (named FQA, frequently questioned answers? not sure):

1.1 - What is 9front? Plan9front (or 9front) is a fork of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system. The project was started to remedy a perceived lack of devoted development resources inside Bell Labs,[citation needed] and has accumulated various fixes and improvements. This FQA specifically covers only the most recent release of 9front.

The code appears to be at https://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front/file/tip and can be cloned with

  hg clone https://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front/

There are about 30 contributors, the first commit is from 2011 and the last is from last week.

I know what Plan 9 is, but I have no idea what this website is about, what they're trying to say, who they are, etc.

Presumably if the front has fallen off, they've removed it from the environment.

I don't know who does the manuals or the propaganda but they are always spot on. The Think About The Future release is using images from late 60s/early 70s Northern Ireland.

I really must put this on an old thinkpad just for the lutz.

I'd guess their web server is running plan9. Pretty clean headers, lovely.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html Server: rc-httpd

TLDR: 9front is a fork of Plan 9.

Plan 9 was probably the finest operating system in the world.

AKA Plan 9 for sociopaths.

If only I could get it to drive one of my three NICs...

Then the only remaining concern would be running JavaScript. mothra is nice but god-browsers are teh standard now.

I have always seen playing with boot.ini and aux/vga easier than messing with xorg.conf. Switching from something keyboard-driven like i3 or dwm, rio would cause some upset but it does not take much time getting used to- come on, you just click and drag. I also find acme a lot more convenient than vim or emacs and regularly use it on Linux via plan9port.

Git mirrors (via git-hg):

[1]: https://github.com/tokyo-jesus/9front [2]: https://gitlab.com/xj9/9front

If you are unfamilliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

This needs a NSFW because on the first try I was welcomed by a picture of a Asian child apparently sleeping in a small room full of random objects while using several Anime porn books as his blanket. I had no idea what this website was about until I saw the Plan9 logo at the bottom and decided to reload the page to find a different picture, this time of a nuclear explosion. In fact, after every reload the image changes to something usually more cryptic than the last one. Here [1] you can see all the pictures used in the front page.

[1] http://9front.org/img/