Re: [TCLUG:233] Odd chatter (was: Re: bash error and fat32)

[mikk0022@maroon.tc.umn.edu]

On Wed, 20 May 1998 16:47:04 -0500 (CDT) Christopher Reid Palmer wrote
>On Wed, 20 May 1998 mikk0022@maroon.tc.umn.edu wrote:
>> Depending on how much you care about the paper -- I've had a few classes
>> where I felt like using cat > file to write papers.
>
>rotfl

Yeah, I was joking with the cat...  I was dead serious about ed, though.
It's a good editor, just different. 

>> >He who is without /usr is indeed a sad man. 
>> 
>> Or a plan9 user.  Or a HURD beta tester.
>
>Have you ever tried HURD? I've always wanted to but never had a "spare"
>computer.

Well, I used to be set up for doing the OS experimentation thing.
When I got my current computer though, I made it FreeBSD only.  No
windows is good.  But now I can't experiment.  D'oh!

Before that, I had tried (unsuccessfully) to boot VSTa.  I didn't
have the patience to download HURD, and am still skeptical of its
microkernel approach.

>> It persists mainly on tradition.  I know I wouldn't miss it if it
>> were gone -- not to say it wouldn't feel odd for a week or two....
>
>You and I are alone, it seems. I proposed a directory reshuffling on the
>Project Independence list, and the kids there almost had a shit fit...

Old habits die hard.

>> Plan9 is a really cool looking system.
>
>Can you tell me/us more about it?
>
>> Second, it requires two machines to run at all, and three if you want 
>> decent performance.
>
>!!! What is it, a multi-processing thingie or something?

Well, plan9 was designed to be a distributed system.  It's not like
Amoeba or anything that transparent, though.  It just was designed
from the ground up to support the network of terminals/workstations
around some central file servers.

So, to do a minimal system, you need a terminal (which runs a full
plan9) and a fileserver (which can run under Unix).  As far as I
know, they have to be separate machines.  In addition, plan9 has
a kerberos-style authentication scheme, so you need an authentication
server also.  You supposedly can run auth and fs on the same machine,
but you suffer a nasty performance hit.

In general, everything about plan9 seems to be a radically cleaner
version of the Unix equivalent (if any).  The standard plan9 shell,
rc, is available on Unix.  You should try it out for a while.  It
is wonderful for scripting, and is very elegantly designed.  It's
much less idiosynchratic than tcsh or bash (or ksh).  It only lacks
nice features like filename completion and command history editing.
That's because it was meant to be used in a mousy-text environment
with infinite scrollback.  Such a cool thing is available for Unix/X
in the form of 9term.

What is really wonderful about plan9 is its view of they filesystem.
The fs is not static.  Rather, different processes can have different
views of the filesystem. For example, the file /dev/console can
point to one device in one process and a completely different device
in another process.  This is how remote login is done -- all
processes on the remote machine have their /dev/console pointing
to the local file /dev/console.  Plan9 has a standard method for
designing user level filesystems.  File system servers have been
written for ftp, nfs, and ext2fs.

The /dev/console trick is how plan9 implements its window system,
8-1/2.  The plan9 /dev/console handles text, /dev/bitblt handles
graphics (using a standardised protocol), and /dev/mouse handles
the mouse.  8-1/2 opens these files, then serves these files to
its clients, each in its own namespace.  Thus, 8-1/2 only multiplexes
access to the mouse and screen.  This allows 8-1/2 to be run inside
itself, with no modification!  It also allows 8-1/2 to be a clean,
simple program.  The 68020 version of 8-1/2 is smaller than xclock
on a 68k based SunOS system.

Plan9 is very well documented.  The main site is at
   http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/
If you really want to read about plan9, check out "Plan 9: the
early papers" CSTR #158 at 
   http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr.html

Those papers were enough to keep me interested for a while ;-)

-- 
Chris Mikkelson         	mikk0022@maroon.tc.umn.edu
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
 safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." 
    -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.