[9fans] Living with Plan 9

[rbnsw...@yahoo.com.au]

Is there anybody out there using Plan 9 as their primary operating system for typical user tasks such as web browsing, word processing etc.
I'm shopping for a new operating system for my trailing edge hardware, and my heart and my head cannot agree on how much effort I should devote into adopting Plan 9. I'd like to have an easy life but I am somewhat driven to minimise the "ugliness" that I have to deal with on my systems.

I do most of my computing on low spec laptops and occasionally want to remotely run apps or access files on a higher spec PC. Unfortunately, I find that remote X11 is mostly less than satisfactory on my home ethernet let alone on 802.11b. (To think people once claimed X was satisfactory on 128kbps). Perhaps compression or VNC might improve things. Then of course, there is remote access to other peripherals. Or rather the lack of it.

I am old enough to remember RFS the Remote File Sharing Protocol on SVR4 that offered access to remote devices, but I don't have that and I'm not aware of whether there are any distributed file protocols freely available for *nix that do that. Of course, there are clients and servers for most peripherals to allow remote access but one needs to go to some effort to set this up and hope that whatever software one uses can be coaxed into using the appropriate client...

I know Plan 9 solves these issues and more, but hardware and software support is lacking. I note there is a Linux user binary emulation and X11 available. Is it sufficient to set up a Linux environment on Plan 9 including all the niceties offered by Linux modern distribution? Does this completely defeat the purpose of using Plan9 in the first place ? If it makes sense, I'd appreciate some guidance in this regard. If not, some suggestions on how to best live with *nix ugliness would be welcome.

Thanks,

Andrew

[Francisco J Ballesteros]

Not for web browsing and not for office doc processing,
but I use it as my main OS for most tasks, including papers,
docs and slides (using troff for that).

[Stanley Lieber]

> I note there is a Linux user binary emulation and X11  available. Is it sufficient
> to set up a Linux environment on Plan 9 including all the niceties offered by
> Linux modern distribution? Does this completely defeat the purpose of using
> Plan9 in the first place ? If it makes sense, I'd appreciate some guidance in
> this regard. If not, some suggestions on how to best live with *nix ugliness
> would be welcome.

Linuxemu is capable of running a full Linux environment, but performance is
short of optimal.

Currently, tls is not fully implemented, so pre-tls versions of Linux
libraries are required. The example mroot[1] linked at the linuxemu wiki page[2]
is based on an old version of Debian. My own mroot[3] includes Opera 9.50
and some other pre-installed packages. Note: the snarf/copy/paste buffer is not
accessible interchangeably between equis and Plan 9 proper.

The best way to get an idea of whether or not you find this method tolerable
is to try it out on your hardware. The faster your system, and the more RAM
you have available, the better equis/linuxemu will perform. In many cases, I
find a laptop running Plan 9 native with equis/linuxemu to be sufficient for
short sessions of casual browsing.

For daily use I tend to do web browsing/multimedia in OpenBSD and drawterm
to a Thinkpad running Plan 9 native. Basically, all of my text file processing
(programming, web development, IRC, etc.) takes place in Plan 9. OpenBSD is
my firmware layer to take advantage of my hardware and a platform for reasonably
snappy web browsing in Chromium. Since I've yet to stumble across a video card
that can tackle 1920x1080 with DVI or HDMI output (VGA or VESA mode), I've
been reluctant to attempt using equis/linuxemu full-time on my primary desktop
system.

-sl

[1] http://9hal.ath.cx/usr/cinap_lenrek/mroot-linuxemu.tbz
[2] http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Linux_emulation/index.html
[3] http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/linuxemu/mroot.tgz

[Steve Simon]

Plan9 is my desktop at work and I drawterm in to a plan9 server at home.

I use plan9 for everything except web browsing,
for which I VNC onto a windows box.

somtimes some things are a little difficult on plan9,
but I find most things harder on other OSs.

-Steve

[cinap_...@gmx.de]

the tls stuff was already solved like years ago with a
kernel patch that adds gdt and ldt manipulation
thru /dev/gdt and /dev/ldt.

http://9hal.ath.cx/usr/cinap_lenrek/segdescpatch.tgz

its probably out of date now and needs adaption.

its already on the todo for 9front... :)

--
cinap

[John Floren]

I ran Plan 9 on an older AMD64 terminal (in 32-bit mode). Using (IIRC)
the nvidia driver I got reasonably good video performance at a high
resolution. I had a dedicated dual PIII set up as a cpu/auth/file
server running Fossil and Venti. I would run linuxemu on the AMD64
terminal, display through equis, and run Opera and Openoffice when I
needed them. The biggest problem with this setup was that you cannot
copy/paste between Plan 9 and the programs running under equis. If
copy/paste is supported by Plan 9's VNC client, you could use that
instead to solve the problem.

John

[Peter A. Cejchan]

... so do I, except of testing c++ and other stuff on linux first,
cross fingers, man, and welcome aboard ;-)   !!
++pac