Plan 9 is an olde operating system from Bell Labs. It's not a type of UNIX or Linux; it's meant to be a successor. It's different, and it's cute.
I registered for an account on the official Bell Labs repository for unofficial Plan 9 contributions. See me in the contrib index under "alltom." I haven't released anything worth looking at yet, though.
I am currently looking for ways to put a Plan 9 server on the Internet, since dropping a server at school or home is not an option. I may be able to do this in the VMWare instance that is hosting my current Ubuntu VPS, but I need a plan for AllTom before I can begin that project. Which is where sitefs comes in… or maybe werc, which I just heard of.
Beginning Plan 9
Does this sound like you?
I've installed plan9 a few times and found it to be a complete mind-bender …. I know I should Read The Fine Manuals ... but which are the best ones to read first, and where do I find them? … I've read the theoretical documents about plan9; are there some sort of practical ones for newcomers?
There, there. Members of the community have come to save you.
- Read nemo's book on Plan 9 [PDF]. Beware: it really is a book of 400+ pages. If you have Plan 9 installed, you can read it with hget http://lsub.org/who/nemo/9.intro.pdf | page.
- There is another introduction that starts with a big-picture description. It comes with the system at /sys/doc/9.ps, which you can similarly read with page /sys/doc/9.intro.
- Documentation for the shell is installed at /sys/doc/rc.ps.
- John Floren wrote an introduction to using a (the?) Plan 9 server at RIT called "RIT Plan 9 Introduction." (That is a mirror as the original has gone away. Thanks Uriel.)
- Uriel maintains a bunch of relevant and useful documents.
- Read the documentation that pops up when you first boot from the live CD.
- Read the Plan 9 wiki. In particular, see the page Unix to Plan 9 command translation.
Past Projects
AllTom on werc
werc hasn't been tested on Plan 9 but it's a CGI script written in rc and awk, so it should be possible with the Pegasus web server. But I don't have a handle on how Pegasus is supposed to work yet, so that's what I'm playing with now.
Post-mortem: It was fun to play with, but I couldn't get comfortable enough with everything to replace the Rails site with it.
Plan 9 on Linode
This is so not going to work.
Plan 9 is known to run on a few versions of Xen 3, which Linode uses, but only supports non-Linux operating systems that can be booted with pv-grub. To complicate things, Xen only runs a customized Plan 9 which I need my own Xen to install. Currently the plan is this:
- Install a Linux in Qemu which supports Xen (I don't have a spare computer, and OS X refuses to shrink my OS X partition)
- Install Xen 3 on that Linux
- Install the custom Plan 9 in that Xen
- Copy the disk image onto the server
- Reconfigure the server to boot the Plan 9 image
- Xen 3
- pv-grub
- Instructions for installing Plan 9 in Xen 3
- Instructions for installing a BSD on Linode with pv-grub
- Make a 2G raw disk image: qemu-img create -f raw disk.img 2G
- Start Qemu with a disk image and boot from a CD: qemu -hda disk.img -cdrom plan9.iso -boot d
Post-mortem: I don't know nearly enough about any of the involved technologies. ;)