From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Lucio De Re To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] What makes Plan 9 unique? Message-ID: <20011025113635.V2648@cackle.proxima.alt.za> References: <9r783d$s5l$1@newpoisson.nosc.mil> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii In-Reply-To: <9r783d$s5l$1@newpoisson.nosc.mil>; from Matt Senecal on Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 09:00:24AM +0000 Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 11:36:36 +0200 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0cf5c8da-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 09:00:24AM +0000, Matt Senecal wrote: > > What makes Plan 9 truly unique? What about it makes it better than Solaris, > or other UNIX systems? > I've been toying with lib9p over the past week and a lot of what seemed an extremely handy but very remote paradigm (from the developer's perspective, as a user I accepted it as a given) suddenly took on a very concrete mantle. If that doesn't do it, I also tried remote debugging of a Limbo program on Inferno with mixed results (not being much of a debugger freak). The equivalent operation with acid over a network ought to impress developers. Even if done in two distinct rio windows. > Imagine you're going to be giving the presentation to a bunch of long-time > computer users whose main attitude going into the meeting is going to be: > "Nice lines, but so what? Why should I consider Plan 9?" > I wouldn't try that approach. Perhaps "what can I learn from Plan 9?" I was thrilled when I read the very old papers, without a clue about the system itself. > I understand that I'm going to be learning a lot of this on my own in the > coming weeks, but I wanted to make sure that there wasn't some cool feature > that I missed. There's only so much you can learn on a standalone system > (although I may be networking with an old donated '486 if I can find some > NICs). Most of my Plan 9 network is '486s with NE2000s. Not great, but workable. And very stable. I was getting fileserver freezes which were resolved (I don't know why) when I took the SCSI disk out and reconnected all its cabling. In all other respects, it seems totally maintenance free. Note that this is a hybrid of Second and Third edition Plan 9, not yet up to date as regards releases. ++L