[9fans] Awakening the Dormant and Printing with the Illiterate

[9fans] Awakening the Dormant and Printing with the Illiterate

[Akshat Kumar]

I've been looking into the tools of
Research UNIX versions 7 and 8 and
4.2BSD, as well as other old utilities
that we may still find useful. So,
with the sources at hand of most such
programs, I've started porting some
to native Plan 9. As the ports are
completed, I'll make them available
in /n/sources/contrib/akumar/^(cmd relic).
Only a couple exist so far; diff(1) files
are included for comparison - I've tried to
retain the original coding style and logic.
See the respective NOTES files for
extraneous comments in the style of
annotations, and some background
information on the tools.

If there are any such tools you would find
useful and would like to see ported to
Plan 9, let me know (perhaps offline).

Thanks to Russ Cox's help and Prof. Kenji
Okamoto's code, I was able to get my Post-
script illiterate printer, an HP OfficeJet 5610,
to print with Plan 9. For anyone else requiring
IJS support in gs(1) (hpijs binary included), the
necessary files are in /n/sources/contrib/akumar/gs
-- see the NOTES file therein for documentation
and references.


Best,
ak

Re: [9fans] Awakening the Dormant and Printing with the Illiterate

[andrey mirtchovski]

make sure you teach cat(1) the -v flag. that should make some people
very happy and will widely be regarded as a good move ;)

Re: [9fans] Awakening the Dormant and Printing with the Illiterate

[erik quanstrom]

On Tue Aug 18 00:42:24 EDT 2009, mirtchovski@gmail.com wrote:
> make sure you teach cat(1) the -v flag. that should make some people
> very happy and will widely be regarded as a good move ;)

i believe the point here is that the first paper i read on plan 9
	"Plan 9 from Bell Labs", /sys/doc/9.ps
points out that dropping the old tools is part of the point!
	Providing a more efficent way to run the old UNIX
	warhorses is empty engineering...

i'm all for history.  but there are plenty of old timey unix projects.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Awakening the Dormant and Printing with the Illiterate

[Akshat Kumar]

> make sure you teach cat(1) the -v flag. that should make some people
> very happy and will widely be regarded as a good move ;)

Research UNIX version 8 has vis(1) --
the not-so-harmful.


ak