Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!

Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!

[Steve_Kilbane]

>     This I do not doubt, but comp.os.linux.* is not a multi-billion
> dollar corporation and Linux does not cost $350, either.

This is a "piece of string" issue, here. How much, specifically,
*should* the manuals and CD-ROM cost, then? How much do you pay
for the Linux equivalent? At what point do you draw the line and
say, "Right, anything costing $x or more must be bug free"?

And how much have you paid for those four disk images?

steve

Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!

[Martin]

My $0.02:

If you just want to play a around with the free Plan 9 floppies, get
a fresh hard drive.  Plan 9 is demanding very little.  Considering
that several hundred MB cost no more than a few hundred bucks, many
people upgrade their hardware, so it should be easy to acquire an old
20 or 40 MB drive for nearly nothing.

If you have a serious interrest in Plan 9, especially if you want to
install the CD-ROM version with full source, you probably need a fresh
hard disk anyway.  Using a 1 GB drive with one half for Plan 9, the other
half for your "serious work" will cost about the same as two drives of
half the size.  I'd choose the latter alternative.

Years ago I equipped my PC with a unit called "Mobile Rack", which
allows me to pull out the HD and replace it with another in less than
a minute.  The part you fix in the PC costs about $15, the part you
need for each drive costs about the same, but IMHO it's worth the
price:  I have drives for my serious work, I have others to play with,
and I've never had any headaches if more experimental ventures like
installing an unknown OS could step on valuable data.

--Martin

Help wanted Plan9 a piece of junk!

[Boyd]

    From:	bhogan@bedlam.rahul.net (Bill Hogan)
    
        This I do not doubt, but comp.os.linux.* is not a multi-billion
    dollar corporation and Linux does not cost $350, either.
    
        BH

plan9 comes from a small group in 1127, not the at&t colossus.

Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!

[Pete]

At 06:56 AM 8/17/95 -0400, Kilbs wrote:
>This is a "piece of string" issue, here. How much, specifically,
>*should* the manuals and CD-ROM cost, then? How much do you pay
>for the Linux equivalent? At what point do you draw the line and
>say, "Right, anything costing $x or more must be bug free"?

This is a very good point. Lots of people who lack the time, inclination or
facilities to get the system off the net go out and buy one of those
user-patronising doorstop Linux books with a couple of CD-Roms in the back,
and/or buy ; I can quite easily imagine someone spending a couple of hundred
dollars on a Linux installation and docs....

As for "if it costs >$x it must be bug free" -- every software house I've
ever heard of would be destroyed by lawsuits by now :-)

>
>And how much have you paid for those four disk images?

Exactly.  :-)

pete
--
Peter Fenelon - Research Associate - High Integrity Systems Engineering Group,
Dep't of Computer Science, University of York, York, YO1 5DD (+44 1904 433388)
pete.fenelon@minster.york.ac.uk http://dcpu1.cs.york.ac.uk:6666/pete/pete.html

Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!

[Bill]

"j" == jmk  <jmk@plan9.att.com> writes:

  j> I took a look in comp.os.linux.misc and felt right at home -
there were articles about weird hangs trying to install distributions,
hardware not being recognised, mice not being found, filesystems being
trashed (NOT related to Plan 9), etc.

    This I do not doubt, but comp.os.linux.* is not a multi-billion
dollar corporation and Linux does not cost $350, either.

    BH
   

Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!

[Brian]

jmk writes:
|I took a look in comp.os.linux.misc and felt right at home - there were
|articles about weird hangs trying to install distributions, hardware not
|being recognised, mice not being found, filesystems being trashed (NOT
|related to Plan 9), etc.

Welcome to the PC world. :-)

Seriously, though, the "plan 9 install way" of picking out what "partition"
it wants to use on the disk leaves a lot to be desired, especially when
you've got other operating systems on the disk. That you can't use a DOS
partition that's not the first partition on the disk to install it is a bug
(well, I consider that you need DOS in the first place to be a bug, but
it's worth putting up with for now), and so is that it seems to want to use
everything at the first "empty space" on the disk. This could seemingly all
be solved by just teaching prep to know about regular PC partitions and
have the install program ask which partition to install onto.

However, I don't have any sympathy for anyone who tries to install an
operating system on their computer without making backups.

Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!

[jmk]

I took a look in comp.os.linux.misc and felt right at home - there were articles
about weird hangs trying to install distributions, hardware not being recognised,
mice not being found, filesystems being trashed (NOT related to Plan 9), etc.

	From: bhogan@rahul.net (Bill Hogan)
	Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
	Subject: Re: Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!
	Date: 14 Aug 1995 22:26:05 GMT
	Organization: Reasonable Systems
	Lines: 56
	Message-ID: <BHOGAN.95Aug14152605@bedlam.rahul.net>
	References: <40p6oe$q2t@paul.rutgers.edu>
	Reply-To: bhogan@rahul.net
	NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.160.13.192
	NNTP-Posting-User: bhogan
	In-reply-to: xke@paul.rutgers.edu's message of 15 Aug 1995 00:10:54 -0400
	
	"XK" == Xiao Ke <xke@paul.rutgers.edu> writes:
	In article <40p6oe$q2t@paul.rutgers.edu> xke@paul.rutgers.edu (Xiao Ke) writes:
	
	
	  XK> Hi, there,
	  XK> Help wanted, Plan9, the so boasted next generation os is just a piece of
	  XK> junk. This time, AT&T really picked a good name for plan9.
	
	  XK> I've run linux1.2.0 for about a half year, everything seems OK.
	  XK> Today, I download the plan9 to play with, it looks working too.
	  XK> However, actually when I was installing plan9, it overwrote my linux
	  XK> partition without any pre-warning.
	
	  XK> My linux partition is not bootable now, and I try to boot from floppy,
	  XK> and do fsck on it, it says: "bad magic number". So definately
	  XK> plan9 overwrote my linux partition.
	
	  XK> I want to recover my more than half-year work, since I don't have tape
	  XK> backup. Please help! Any suggestion will be mostly appreciated.
	  XK> I guess this is doable, since my linux partition occupies 400Mbytes, 
	  XK> while plan9 only occupies 20Mbytes according to its installation notes,
	  XK> so it looks like the rest 380Mbytes should be able to recoverd, sounds
	  XK> reasonable?
	
	  XK> Thanks,
	
	  XK> -----Xiao Ke
	  XK> xke@paul.rutgers.edu 
	
	   Hello Xiao.
	
	     I do not know if you will be able to salvage what used to be your
	Linux partition or not.
	
	     I do know that the plan9 installation guide is something I would
	be ashamed to have appear in print under my name.
	
	     Given that ATT is apparently planning on *selling* plan9 at $350
	per, and given the availability of packages like the Slackware Linux
	book/CDROM at < $50 per, I find it totally amazing that ATT would put
	out such a half-baked, half-hearted PC/plan9 demo package!
	
	     Some demo.
	
	     Up until now I had thought I was having a problem because I could
	not reboot plan9/B after it was installed on my hard drive but now I
	count myself fortunate it didn't.
	     
	     Bill
	
	     
	--
	<bhogan@rahul.net> |- "5. Improve constantly and forever the system of
	production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus
	constantly decrease costs." (W. Edwards Deming)