standalone plan9

[mike@majestix.cs.uoregon.edu mike@majestix.cs.uoregon.edu]

>i know that rob et. al. were spotted at a recent usenix
>conference sporting [34]86 laptops (or so i've heard).
>so i'd like to know 
>o is this included on the cd?

Yes.

>o is anybody using this

Yes; I have it running on a 486 box.

>o this implies that the laptop is running the 
>  fileserver, cpuserver and terminal software.

No.  It is just running the terminal software.  The "file
server" in this case is just an ordinary user level process
that speaks 9P to the kernel and maintains a file system on
a raw disk partition.  It's slow, and according to the
documentation, susceptible to crashes, although I haven't
had any (yet).

There is no need for a cpu server to run Plan 9, unless you
want to run daemons that accept calls from the outside world,
for instance for mail delivery or remote logins.  There is
no real difference between a terminal and a cpu server; a
cpu server is essentially the same kernel with a different
startup script that starts various daemons.

The file server is a radically different kernel and cannot
coexist on the same machine with the terminal or cpu kernels.
However, you don't need to use the standard file server.

>Is this
>  possible to pull off on a sun or sgi?

Of course.  However, it is not supported in the system as
distributed; you have to do a bit of work...