Re: [9fans] Plan9 as an everyday OS

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:05:13 +0100
Lorenzo Bolla <lbolla@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> I've just installed (with few difficulties, I must admit) a fresh Plan9 on
> my Dell Inspiron laptop.
> I played with it and I'd really like to study it and get used to it.
> Ideally, I would like to make it my "everyday OS", to do all the nice stuff
> you can do with a computer (a part from work and study), like browsing the
> web, watching movies and so on...
> Is anyone using it for such things?
> Is there, for example, a decent browser for Plan9 (I haven't found any)?
> Or a music/movie player?

There is no "decent" browser for Plan 9 as such by many peoples' standards. The big problem here is that the Plan 9 community by and large really appreciates sane design, and it seems to be quite impossible to write a browser conforming to w3c standards without putting a lot of very very crazy code in it.

*Howevah* there is Linuxemu. You can run Firefox under Linuxemu in Plan 9. You may be able to run mplayer or xine-whatever that way too, but some of Plan 9's display drivers may be too slow, you'd have to try it and see. Linuxemu is in rsc's contrib... 9fs sources && cd /n/sources/contrib/rsc/linuxemu ... then I guess cat README & go from there. I couldn't tell you how to install it since I've never done it.

What works for me is rather the other way around. I run Linux (64bit, for a machine with 4GB of RAM), and run Plan 9 in Qemu. It works nicely, although it was a bit of hassle setting up. Some people do this & use the plumber to communicate with the plan9port plumber running on the Linux side, it all sounds a lot of fun but I haven't got that far yet. :)

Have fun with it, anyhow. :)

--
Ethan Grammatikidis

Those who are slower at parsing information must
necessarily be faster at problem-solving.