From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-Id: <200007291843.OAA12538@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: [9fans] Update
From: "rob pike" <rob@plan9.bell-labs.com>
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2000 14:43:31 -0400
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
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I've just installed a new update for Plan 9 on http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9.
You can install the full download, or do an incremental update from the June 17
distribution.

There are many changes, including:

A. The kernel:

1)	Ether2114x will support PNIC (and possibly PNIC2) chips
2)	Sdmylex will now support Adaptec AHA-154x ISA cards via
		scsiX=type=aha1542 port=NNN
	in plan9.ini.
3)	Bounce-buffer bug in fileserver aha154x driver fixed.
4)	Virge/dx vga card cursor problem fixed.
5)	Different pc fileserver versions made as much alike as possible.
6)	Cursor problem on some matrox millennuim cards fixed.
7)	Some tweaking of the ata drive initialisation for laptops which
	don't respond quickly.
8)	Ownership and permissions on sd ctl and raw files can be changed
9)	More versions of the trident cyber938x vga chip handled and now
	also handles some dstn displays as well as tft.
10)	A new loopback network device.
11)	The cpu kernel no longer requires that the auth domain,
	auth id, and password be non-null.  It used to be a fatal
	mistake.
12)	Only 'eve' processes can become none.  This is perhaps he
	most dangerous change.  We are running with it but we don't
	know if this will affect others.

B. Booting:

1)	Sources for building one's own standalone boot floppies
	are in /sys/lib/pcdist; see /sys/lib/pcdist/README for more.
2)	New auth= and fs= entries in plan9.ini

C. Networking:

1)	Fixes to dhcpd to make it resilient to misbehavior.
2)	Lots of changes to ppp, including work on the compression protocol.
3)	Fatal bug fixed in ping.
4)	Format changes to stat files in the IP stack to make them more
	understandable.

D. Graphics:

1)	Bugs fixed in construction and use of alpha-blended images.

E. Applications

1)	Many bugs fixed in Acme and Rio.
2)	Scat(7) now plots proper stereographic projections and is
	connected to astro(7) to plot planetary positions.
3)	Astro(7) now knows about the outer planets.

F. New applications:

1)	Vncviewer: connect to desktops on other machines
		running other operating systems.
2)	Bzip2: a plan 9 port of the common bzip2 compression utility.
	The installation disk now uses bzip2 for compressing
	the root file system.

G. Miscellany:

1)	The authentication server now supports vnc authentication,
	but we don't use it yet.
2)	The pop3 server, still to be rewritten, now allows logins
	as "you/subdir" to read /mail/box/you/subdir/mbox.
3)	Change to 386 libmp to speed up multiplication.

I'm certain that this list misses lots of stuff.

-rob