[9fans] Investigating the Plan 9 Operating System - OSNews.com

[cse.psu.edu!9fans-bounces+9fans-archive=plan9.bell-labs.com]

I read with some interest the criticisms of my recent Plan 9 article
on osnews. While I appreciate constuctive criticism and factual
corrections (yes, it's Gforce not GeForce, yes there is an emacs) I
think for the most part your criticisms are misguided.

The article was meant as a brief exposure of Plan 9 for people who may
have had little to no exposure to "alternative" operating systems and
as such its point was not to delve deeply into issues. The intent was
more to open a door to concepts that people without a computer science
degree might not have been exposed to.

With regard to David Leimbach's comments about the value of Osnews
being overrated, I have this to say. I pulled all of my materials from
the available Plan 9 web sources. Which by the way are mostly dead
links now. My impression when researching Plan 9 was that the
documentation barely made it out of internal releases. There's
certainly nothing polished about any of the Plan 9 repositories. There
is a lot of contradictory information on some fairly important topics,
like running under virtualization.  If you read through them there are
a vast number of disclaimors. These sorts of issues really don't give
one the impression that Plan 9 is undergoing a resurgence. If anything
it looks like other projects have taken the family jewels and left the
core project on life support.

Many of the Plan 9 web links are dead. The links to LLNL are dead and
it's my impression that LLNL is no longer involved in Plan 9 efforts.
Mail to some of the more visible Plan 9 proponents at LLNL went
un-answered or bounced.

Links to VMWare support for Plan 9 are mostly dead and an archived
post on 9Fans said V4 would never run on it. I couldn't get Plan 9 to
install under the now free Microsoft Virtual PC. Considering that MS
VPC is free, completely skirts most driver compatibility issues, and
could greatly increase Plan 9 trials you would think someone might
publish a FAQ for nubes. But there isn't one.

Here's a real issue that I don't think was ever adequately addressed
in any Plan 9 literature I ran across in my all-to-brief research. How
do you convey the deep concepts of Plan 9 to someone who doesn't have
5+ years of large scale system admin experience, or a Master's degree
in Computer Science? How do you convert the unwashed masses of Linux
users who boot the LiveCD and don't find KDE, Gnome, an IM client, or
Mozilla? The importance of an OS these days isn't about all the magic
in the kernel, it's what the OS can do for the user.  And by the way
you have 15 minutes to provide the new user with an exciting
out-of-box experience before you have lost them. With so many OS
alternatives out there already, people have a low threshhold for a
LiveCD with few user privileges.

Please forgive me if this has already been discussed. For all I know
it could have been a recurring thread since the Plan 9 inception. But
the fact remains that you have an operating system that is dazzling in
brilliance to a small number of really bright people, and no one else
gets it.

So please let me apologize for not completely conveying some of the
important issues such as SecStore and ndb. I worked with the material
at hand, had a limited time to write the article, and provided
references when I could. It was a fun research project. If, however,
other people see the reaction that 9Fans have to earnest contributors,
don't expect a lot more of them.

Kind regards,
Andrew Hudson
Ahudson.inc@gmail.com