From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Russ Cox" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] micro vs monolithic kernels MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20010409211530.A859E19A09@mail.cse.psu.edu> Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 17:15:26 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7c200302-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 one question does anyone find bell labs' documentation a poor disgrace to software engineering's design process. if we knew what it was going to look like when we finished, what would be the point of building it? more seriously, we're all happy to help you get going, but setting up a plan 9 file or cpu server is not like setting up a toaster. it's not just going to work. you need to get used to the way the system works so you can figure out what went wrong when things do go wrong. you wouldn't expect to set up a full-blown windows nt file server in a few hours and have it work. you wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) expect to sit down with the red hat box and have a linux system completely ready to go in a few hours. because plan 9 is a research system while those are commercial systems, you should expect even less in terms of `works right out of the box'. that's not to say that it actually is harder to install than windows or linux. i think installing a terminal is actually much easier in plan 9 than in the various linux distributions i've used. there's no similar program to lead you through installing a cpu server, and certainly not one to lead you through installing a file server. if you go at it with the right frame of mind, plan 9 is a lot of fun and quite pleasant to use. it _will_ be frustrating at times (especially when setting up a file server), but in general those times are few and far between, and it's more rewarding than frustrating. russ