On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 12:35 AM, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:

> > Can you briefly tell us why you (Russ, Rob, Ken and Dave)
> > no longer use Plan9 ?
> > Because of missing apps or because of missing driver for your hardware ?
> > And do you still use venti ?
>
> Operating systems and programming languages have
> strong network effects: it helps to use the same system
> that everyone around you is using.  In my group at MIT,
> that meant FreeBSD and C++.  I ran Plan 9 for the first
> few years I was at MIT but gave up, because the lack of
> a shared system made it too hard to collaborate.
> When I switched to FreeBSD, I ported all the Plan 9 libraries
> and tools so I could keep the rest of the user experience.
>
> I still use venti, in that I still maintain the venti server that
> takes care of backups for my old group at MIT.  It uses
> the plan9port venti, vbackup, and vnfs, all running on FreeBSD.
> The venti server itself was my last real Plan 9 installation.
> It's Coraid hardware, but I stripped the software and had installed
> my own Plan 9 kernel to run venti on it directly.  But before
> I left MIT, the last thing I did was reinstall the machine using
> FreeBSD so that others could help keep it up to date.
>
> If I wasn't interacting with anyone else it'd be nice to keep
> using Plan 9.  But it's also nice to be able to use off the shelf
> software instead of reinventing wheels (9fans runs on Linux)
> and to have good hardware support done by other people
> (I can shut my laptop and it goes to sleep, and even better,
> when I open it again, it wakes up!).  Being able to get those
> things and still keep most of the Plan 9 user experience by
> running Plan 9 from User Space is a compromise, but one
> that works well for me.
>
> Russ
>
>
And as you said before, there's always the vx32 port :-).  I find it's often
a lot more practical for me to run stuff in that or Inferno hosted on Mac OS
X as well.  I used to keep a Plan 9 box at home, but it released the magic
smoke the other day, and I'm afraid that means it's dead.

I've been kicking a few ideas around about replacing it, and maybe trying to
make it more useful to the community somehow that I run one, but I've got to
get buy in from the wife to invest.  (Isn't there some tax write-off for
hobbies or something in the US?)

Dave