My first steps in plan 9 | Hacker News Reader

My first steps in plan 9

nuxified.org

29 pointsgnosis10 comments

I'm sorry, but I couldn't even get through the article.

Every time I hovered over one of those underlined ad words in the article, a popup blocked my view of the article. It was really distracting.

I got fed up with it after the 5th time and closed the tab. I expect many technically-inclined people did the same.

they are irritating, but there are extensions to most browsers to get rid of them. this page got me to add esources.infolinks.com to my JavaScript Blacklist set.

it would, of course, be better if people stopped doing the stupid thing in the first place...

Are people using Plan9 for Real Work™? I've always found it inspiring in it's simplicity and orthogonality, but it's easier to be simple and orthogonal when you aren't concerned with the last 10% of performance or compatibility with existing software, and I wonder if Plan9 sacrificed real world usefulness for conceptual purity.

One of the national labs uses or has used Plan 9 for cluster computing. The leader of that effort is Ron Minnich.

Russ Cox still uses Plan9/Acme: http://russ.cox.usesthis.com/

According to that (an interesting link, thanks), Russ uses Plan 9 from Userspace, which is similar in feel but still counts as running Linux for the purpose of my question, I think.

yes, people are. i use it daily (on top of p9p and 9vx). there are people building commercial products, using plan9 both for development and in the product itself. there are many research projects using it, including running it on some of the largest computers on the planet.

it'd be hard (but not impossible) to use it to the exclusion of other things as a desktop today, because you can't get a very good native browser (there are workarounds, but they're all tough in different ways). there's lots of other environments where it makes great sense, though.

While the article is old, I think it's a decent howto for installing plan9. Now I just need a use for it...

Well, really, about the only guide you need to install Plan 9 is "Hit Enter a whole bunch of times", and before you know it you'll have it installed to your hard disk. (I simplify, but pretty much every prompt either 1. Is clearly explained or 2. Has a sensible default.)

The article is fairly old, so I think it may be worth pointing out that kqemu is no longer non-free.

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