[9fans] someone thinking about trying plan 9

[9fans] someone thinking about trying plan 9

[david.bates2]

Hiya all,

I was reading about plan 9 recently. To be frank, I'd never head of it until
a week or two ago... I suppose I was just writing to ask whether it was
worth installing at this point in time. I don't doubt that it has some
powerful ideas, but does it have any decent apps that run on it at the
moment? An example would be apps for spreadsheets, databases, and text
editing.... and of course compilers for various langauges. Also, I am a
little unclear on the role of rio. Is it the window manager? Is it an
essential part of the system or can it be replaced as with a linux window
manager?

Anyway,

See you all,

Chris.

[9fans] Re: someone thinking about trying plan 9

[cbbrowne]

"david.bates2" <david.bates2@ntlworld.com> writes:
> I was reading about plan 9 recently. To be frank, I'd never head of it until
> a week or two ago... I suppose I was just writing to ask whether it was
> worth installing at this point in time. I don't doubt that it has some
> powerful ideas, but does it have any decent apps that run on it at the
> moment? An example would be apps for spreadsheets, databases, and text
> editing.... and of course compilers for various langauges. Also, I am a
> little unclear on the role of rio. Is it the window manager? Is it an
> essential part of the system or can it be replaced as with a linux window
> manager?

You're missing a rather _crucial_ point; there is no such thing as a
"Linux window manager."

There are all sorts of window managers that run on "reasonably
Unix-like systems, in conjunction with the X Window System," and since
the Linux kernel combined with GLIBC and GNU binary and file utilities
provides a "reasonably Unix-like system," the WMs cope adequately.  

The _proper_ tie is to describe them as "X window managers."

Plan 9 provides a bunch of parts that are "reasonably Unix-like,"
which would make it not unreasonable to hope that a window manager
might be able to compile and search for resources on Plan 9.

However, one of the resources typically required happens to be an
operational instance of the X Window System, which _doesn't_ happen to
have been ported to run on Plan 9.  

"No X" has the result of "no applications that require X." 

Which leads to:
 - No X window managers
 - No Motif-based applications like Netscrape
 - No GTK-based applications like ApplixWare or the GNOME applications
 - No Qt-based apps like the KDE apps
-- 
(concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" "@hex.net") <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/>
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it
every six months."  - Oscar Wilde

Re: [9fans] Re: someone thinking about trying plan 9

[Theo Honohan]

In message <tVdO5.81224$YX4.2540049@news2.giganews.com>, cbbrowne@hex.net write
s:
> "david.bates2" <david.bates2@ntlworld.com> writes:
> > I was reading about plan 9 recently. To be frank, I'd never head of it unti
>  l
> > a week or two ago... I suppose I was just writing to ask whether it was
> > worth installing at this point in time. I don't doubt that it has some
> > powerful ideas, but does it have any decent apps that run on it at the
> > moment? An example would be apps for spreadsheets, databases, and text
> > editing.... and of course compilers for various langauges. Also, I am a
> > little unclear on the role of rio. Is it the window manager? Is it an
> > essential part of the system or can it be replaced as with a linux window
> > manager?
> 
> You're missing a rather _crucial_ point; there is no such thing as a
> "Linux window manager."

That's not a very helpful answer!  I wonder whether you might have
missed the word "as" in the second last line...

I think you could say that rio *is* analogous to an X window manager,
in some ways.  In the sense that the X window manager is intended to
provide policy and the X server to provide mechanism, rio provides a
particular "window system" implementation on top of the underlying
raster graphics facility (/dev/draw).  As such, it provides a set of
window management facilities, while the draw device multiplexes the
display among a number of "clients", to use the X terminology.

You could certainly replace rio with an alternative window system,
although it's probably the case that most of the interesting window
systems you might want to develop in Plan 9 would present a similar
interface.  It's conceivable that if you want to have windows that differ
substantially from "asynchronous layers of text" -- some kind of
multimedia, maybe -- then they might be better handled by a different
display management discipline.

Just as you can run a "nested" instance of rio inside a window, you
could run an instance of your new window system within a rio window,
or vice versa.  Knock yourself out!