From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 11:35:27 -0600 From: andrey mirtchovski To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Pointers for using Plan 9? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Topicbox-Message-UUID: 14304400-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 I'm kind of in the same shoes -- I've taken up on Plan9 for a research project of mine. I am trying to port/reimplement some bioinformatics algorithms for plan9 and will compare them with PVM running on NetBSD (presumably on the same cluster)... The hardware I have been allocated is a bunch of old Alpha UDBs, on which I'm just starting to install Plan9. My suggestion would be to create a simple plan9 installation on i386-based machines and work from there. The stations can easily be booted off a i386 fileserver, provided you can compile a suitable kernel for sparc (don't know about NeXT boxen). The source code is very readable and will (hopefully) be no problem to customize (I've heeard of at least one non-bell-labs person who has tweaked the kernel succesfully in order to get P9 going on weird hardware, and AFAIK it's not too hard, just time consuming :) As for example programs and tutorials -- it seems to be all there, you just have to look through the code for several of the utilities that provide functionality similar to what you need. In my opinion their code reads pretty much like a book. Also there have been several links and code posted to this list/newsgroup which contain sample implementations of several types -- graphics, device drivers, utilities, scripts... Browsing through the archives may yield positive results :) Regards: Andrey On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Kirk M. Anne wrote: > > I am assisting a Computer Science faculty member with a Distributed > Systems undergraduate course and we are working on Amoeba now. I spotted > that Plan 9 is now available for downloading and have tinkered around with > it and read through many of the papers. > > I was wondering if there were any example programs or "How to" documents > that we can give out to the class to help them learn about Plan 9. We > have built an Amoeba cluster and want to replicate the experience in Plan > 9 so that the students can get a firm understanding of how distributed > systems work (where there are similarities and differences between the > two). > > So, could anyone send me the following? > > 1. Sample Plan 9 setup and guidelines for decisions (I'm still > pouring over the Overview to Plan 9 networks) > > 2. Sample programs that use Plan 9 features > > 3. Recommendations for an upper level project using Plan 9 > > 4. Pointers to SPARC and NeXT installation instructions for Plan 9 > > If this goes well, we hope to continue with directed studies on using Plan > 9 to solve scientific problems that other faculty around campus have in > Physics, Chemistry and Biology. > > Any information would be greatly appreciated. > > Kirk Anne > Manager, Systems & Networking > SUNY Geneseo > Geneseo, NY 14454 > 716-245-5577 > >