porting linux programs and drivers to plan9

[Rich Cannings cannings@cpsc.ucalgary.ca]

Eric Dorman wrote:
>  I think many people get scared off by the $350 price tag for the
> CD/doc, where one can download linux or *BSD for basically free.
> It's really not _that_ much money considering the effort put into
> it, the generous internal distribution rights, and the really cool
> technology :)   I guess as far as 'advanced technology' goes, you
> get what you pay for hehehe :)   They're nice systems, but they're
> still unix.

I'm an undergrad, need I say more? I order for me to get that kind of
capital I'd have to quit eating for a couple of months :-). I hope there
is some way I can explore plan9 and help the plan9 community without
paying for it

>  Personally I have no desire to see old warhorses like emacs
> ("Bugs:  Yes" :) ), gmake, gcc or anything windowsish incorporated into
> Plan9.  Writing new stuff that takes advantage of Plan9 seems more fun
> than dragging old unix cruft into the system.  The filesystem stuff
> would probably be useful and interesting to someone out there, however.

It's odd, I've always hated what I considered bloatware like borland c++
or wordperfect for windows. I've never considered Xemacs to be
monolithic until now! So what features and ideas would be born if we
mated the philosophies of emacs and plan9? Sorry, I will not except
"sam" as an answer! I asked Fenelon a similar question. Another
question: since emacs is not part of plan9 are you implying that you
would code a radiological imaging system is sam?

>  One thing I was looking at was the generalized soundcard library
> (VOXware or whatever) that seems to come with the *BSD and Linux
> distributions... that seems to be a real weak point in Plan9.  That
> would be really cool; then I can talk to my GUSMAX board :)

I don't have a SB16 either. I don't think it would be too difficult to
introduce more soundcards.

>  Granted the pcdist is pretty limited, but incorporation of old unixish
> stuff wouldn't really do Plan9 justice IMHO.  I think pcdist is supposed
> to just be a taste of real Plan9.  Besides, all that stuff would make
> the pcdist ALOT fatter;  right now to test a machine for Plan9ness I can
> carry around 4 floppies and just slap them in, getting a working Plan9
> system (with compiler and windowing) in basically no time without mucking
> with networking to load a minimal set of packages or whatnot.

For others who don't have endless computers kicking around, if the
pcdist had a free pppclient, a large documentation library, and a
commonly recognized editor (can we agree on microemacs?) plan 9 would
not be as much of a shock to new users. When I loaded up plan9 for the
first time, I could hardly get around. Soon after I printed 40 pages of
docs which was helpful, but it would have been better to have it online.
I could not access the net via ppp to get anymore information. If the
pcdist had plentiful man pages and a pppclient it would have been alot
easier to get your feet wet with plan9.

>  I wonder how the license agreement works in that case; I haven't read
> it with an eye towards that particular arrangement.

My interpretation of the license says that as long as I'm a "member" of
an organization, meaning that I'm working towards the goals of that
organization no matter my political or geographical position, I am
included in the license agreement.

rich

cannings@cpsc.ucalgary.ca