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Other Web Browsers for Bell Labs' Plan 9? 83

Posted by Cliff from the seeking-alternative-web-walkers dept.
SeanIBaby asks: "I was wondering if anyone used Plan 9, and Inferno/Charon for a web browser. Are there any other web browsers for Plan 9, or do you have to code your own? I've noticed that Inferno's company sells Plan 9 boxed sets for $150US. I guess this is because they include the Inferno/Charon binaries with the image, even though they let you download Inferno for free from their website. Plan 9 is free from Bell Labs."
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Other Web Browsers for Bell Labs' Plan 9? More

Other Web Browsers for Bell Labs' Plan 9?

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  • A Safe Assumption: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Farley Mullet ( 604326 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @02:36AM (#6791702)
    If you cut your question off at "If anyone out there is using Plan 9?", the answer would be a resounding "Nope!". From what I've read, Plan 9 seems like a good idea, but from my experience, it seems like an idea people like to talk about a lot more than they like to implement.

    • Re:A Safe Assumption: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by niker ( 593109 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @02:50AM (#6791743)
      >>the answer would be a resounding "Nope!"

      I look at a system with plan9 on my desk (currently turned off), I read your answer, and I remember this quote: "The IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to it's size".

      This was not meant to be an offense, Farley Mullet, but I do know a couple of people who currently try out the OS, and your comment neglected to reflect that - that was not a safe assumption, but a rather centric one.
      • I'm not too sure why your post has been modded as flamebait. Someone's smoking crack. Must be SC....

        Never mind. I had actually almost forgotten what Plan9 was until I went back to the site and reminded myself.

        Seems to me that Plan9 was a good idea in its time. There was never anything really wrong with it, and for some people it's the best thing since unsliced bread, but it seems most of us have moved on.

        • You haven't moved on, you're still catching up. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @05:04AM (#6792104) Journal
          OpenBSD wants the compilers.
          FreeBSD wants the namespaces.
          Everybody wants the plumber only they don't know it yet.
          GNU/Hurd would love to have a working microkernel OS.
          Wake me up when grep, sed & awk and the rest of the bunch work on Unicode!
          Then there are the ports - Wily, 9wm, 9menu
          Gawk's extensions are lifted from the plan9 way.

          The "next big thing" grid computing is old hat to us.

          Don't worry, we'll be waiting for you.

          • > Wake me up when grep, sed & awk and the rest of the bunch work
            > on Unicode!

            It's called Perl. It works on unicode (since 5.8 really, though
            there was tenative unicode support in 5.6), and it has totally
            obviated sed and awk -- and would have replaced grep too if grep
            weren't too simple to need replacing.

            At some point I intend to try out Plan9, just for the diversity of
            exposure. I've read a little about it, and from what I read it seems
            like it would be more interesting than practical, but I'd lik


          • I felt obligated to say that.

            No, I'm serious. Wily is one of the neatest editors I've ever used. The whole "arbitrary text is active menu-buttons-ish" interface is still quite a departure from the rest of the interface world, and a refreshing one, too.

            • I want to like wily. Proportional fonts, funky window handling (like Oberon, back in the day)...

              But each time I build it (about once a year), I find that I like nifty, but I need control keys, being able to use it without a mouse, fontification of code...

              I've written a few emacs functions to mimick the column layout of wily, so I've got that aspect. I believe the users when they say you can get used or even addicted to mouse chording, but I like having control keys in muscle memory.

              now, if only emacs-dev

              • Heh. This goes to show that tastes differ. I have a difficult time reading source code in a proportional font[*], so I always built wily with a monospaced font, a slightly different cursor symbol, etc. They've a couple of alternative settings commented out in the code; just flip those and rebuild.

                As for mouse chords, they're like heroin: you swear that you'll never need them, and then you try them, and suddenly you're hooked. :-)

                [*] Except for lgrind/vgrind pretty-printed LaTeX forms of the code.

          • Don't worry, we'll be waiting for you.

            That's why it's an appropriate question for Ask Slashdot.

            You can get progress from building stuff on top of what you've got.
            You can get progress from getting better stuff to build on top of.
            Long term, the second matters more but there is nothing easy about it.

            I have two distinct impressions of Unix. It has outlived its betters and it is deceptively simple. It would be surprising if some of that (soul?) were not in Plan 9.
            • Systems research is dead.

              http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/rob/utah2000.ps
              • Point made.
                Blecht!

                "Where is the Innovation?
                Microsoft, mostly. Exercise: Compare 1990 Microsoft software with 2000. ...
                If systems research was relevant, we'd see new operating systems and new languages making inroads into the industry, the way we did in the '70s and '80s. ...
                Linux's success may indeed be the single strongest argument for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decades-old operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill.
                Besid
                • Computer enthusiasts, like the rest of mankind, crave a gentle slope of novelty but we seem to make do with waiting for the next point release of what we already have.

                  Mozilla bumps up by 0.1 and it's on the front page.

                  Web browsers should have been finished in the 90's
                  HTML should be fixed in stone.
                  We don't need no steenkin extensions.

                  99% of web pages do just fine without DHTML and Embedded Objects and most can do without Javascript. Do we really need MIDI background music on a fsking web page?

                  "Oh but I *
      • While we're on the topic of IQ, let's try to rewrite your post with an eye to things like verb tense, sentence structure and the spelling of words like "its":

        The Original:

        I look at a system with plan9 on my desk (currently turned off), I read your answer, and I remember this quote: "The IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to it's size".

        This was not meant to be an offense, Farley Mullet, but I do know a couple of people who currently try out the OS, and your comment neglected to reflect that - that w

        • hmm. You, Farley Mullet, are the type of guy that probably likes to go into Chaucer's Canterbury tales and point out all of the mispronunciations.

          Its called 'dramatic effect', and 'style'. Just because his posting doesn't follow the most straightforward syntax doesn't mean that it is 'wrong'..

          • hmm. You, Farley Mullet, are the type of guy that probably likes to go into Chaucer's Canterbury tales and point out all of the mispronunciations.

            You know, I probably would, except I don't know how to find mispronunciations in a book.

            Its called 'dramatic effect', and 'style'. Just because his posting doesn't follow the most straightforward syntax doesn't mean that it is 'wrong'.

            I suppose that's fair, but at least part of my intent was enforcing the age-old maxim: "if you're going to call someone stupid,

            • and not(e) the spelling. :)
            • You made a joke saying that there are no Plan 9 users. Niker responded saying, no, he does in fact exist, and so do other Plan 9 users, and that their smallness of number simply implies they are better. It was a joke. "You don't exist". "Yes, I do, and I'm better". There was no need to go into a grammar rage. What makes you think he is even a native English speaker? It sounds like he is not. His writing was unidiomatic certainly, but it made sense. Yours however (held to more exacting standards) doesn't mak
          • Its called 'dramatic effect', and 'style'.

            I should try that when school starts up again. I'll turn in a paper full of missused punctuation marks and the letter u as a personal pronoun and call it style. Yes, many aspects of the English language can be interpreted as correct or incorrect differently by various authorities. However, there are quite a few hard rules which are no more variable than adding one and one together to make two. Dramatic effect and style are one thing, ignorance of some of the most

    • Re:A Safe Assumption: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      Which begs the question, "Why is this important enough for an Ask Slashdot?" The last I heard of Plan 9 was a story on Slashdot about Plan 9 running on an embedded virtual machine, so it could run applications under a web browser, rather like Java applets. Nothing came of that either.
      • It's also true.
      • And your memory is shit too.

        The VM you are referring to is the I.E. plug-in for the Inferno Virtual machine so that it will run .dis programs, and that nothing is about to be upgraded.

        Just because you don't see things doesn't mean they aren't there.

        Inferno pays the salaries of 6 well paid computer scientists up there in York.
        Even Linus needs a day job!

        But you are right, why the fuck is this an Ask Slashdot. afaik only 5 or so of the regular comp.os.plan9 people even read slashdot, we could easily have a
    • From what I've read, Plan 9 seems like a good idea, but from my experience, it seems like an idea people like to talk about a lot more than they like to implement.

      1: Listen to others who have not tried Plan 9 talk about it.
      2: Do not try Plan 9, but use experience of listening to people who did not try Plan 9 to extrapolate that nobody uses Plan 9.
      3: ???
      4: Profit?
    • There are quite a few users of plan9 nine.

      Okay it is probably not more than 100 regular, everyday plan9 is my desktop users but it certainly isn't "nope". But "from my experience" is a really stupid extrapolation.

      It certainly is a surprise to see this question on Ask Slashdot when it would be much easier to ask it in comp.os.plan9

      All the assumptions in the question are totally wrong.

      The VitaNuova Box Sets contain a set or printed manuals. It has nothing to do with inferno being included. Newsflash - Inf

  • Hmm... (Score:3, Funny)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @03:34AM (#6791868) Journal
    Plan 9? Bunnies in spacesuits (one might say designed for OUTER space..) called Glenda [amazon.com]???

    I'm beginning to see a theme here... [eisa.net.au]

  • This's the first I'd heard of Plan 9. I went to the website and though the intro was legnthy, it's designed to be a GUI-based OS that implements many of the things Bell sees wrong with Unix. Anyone using out there care to add something?
    • A "gui-based OS"? A GUI is just a layer on top of the OS. If you want to form any worthwhile opinion about an OS, you're going to have to dig a little deeper than that.
      • Ignoring the old Macs that had GUI stuff in BIOS calls?
        • You're kidding? No, I guess not.

          Location of the binary is an implementation detail -- something isn't "more-OSy" just because it's in ROM. Besides, the very early MacOS wasn't a real OS -- like DOS, it was just a glorified loader. The fact that it was dressed up with a GUI actually supports my argument.

  • I tried it under VMware...... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vertical_98 ( 463483 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @04:25AM (#6791997) Homepage
    I first downloaded the vmdisk that they had available. My version is 4.26 (I think, not at my desk) and it complained about the bios settings being corrupt and resetting to default. long and short, it wouldn't hang at booting the kernel. I d/led the 65 meg ISO and tried to do it from scratch. After a couple of hours, it was finally installed and ready to reboot. Hung in the same damn place.

    Now I'm all for hacking and learning and playing with operating systems, but QNX installed a heck of a lot easier.

    I realize this doesn't help you too much, but I saw that a lot of people where getting flamebait mods for saying that Plan9 wasn't used by anyone. I can honestly say I don't know anyone that uses it, but I know several people that have talked about it.

    Have you tried compiling Mozilla under it? It compiles under just about any other *Nix OS

    Vertical
    • You preview and preview, and spell check and those damn grammer mistakes still get through.

      Vertical
    • plan9 is less forgiving with hardware

      Since the downturn at Lucent no-one is being paid full time to work on plan9 and many in Bell Labs have been made redundant.

      Getting a set of hardware together is a barrier to entry but if you look at the supported hardware list you may notice that much of the equipment is old and therefore cheap to get second hand and is often the sort of stuff people will just ditch, S3 Virge's and that kind of thing.

      I can honestly say I don't know anyone that uses it

      Yes, we are a

      • Re:yes, driver support is a problem (Score:5, Funny)

        by Basje ( 26968 ) <bas@bloemsaat.org> on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @08:10AM (#6792563) Homepage
        Yes, we are a small minority but growing steadily. We have 13 people in our little irc channel.

        Crucify one of those, and you might make it to world domination.
        • 8)

          In the meantime we grew to 14.

        • >>Yes, we are a small minority but growing steadily. We have 13 people in our little irc channel.

          >Crucify one of those, and you might make it to world domination.

          That only worked once, and then only because the guy who got crucified turned out to be a ringer: he was God.

      • If you dont mind me asking, what channel is that? I tried plan 9 a year or so ago, and loved it but found it very hard to ask questions around it!
      • >It is a specialised OS with some interesting ideas, many of which are being backported to the stinking corpse that is unix.

        Care to eloborate? You lack tact but serious I am curious as to how plan9 is better than unix(which is some cases I believe it is)?

        • private namespaces - *BSD's chroot
          user level file systems - Hurd
          programmable debugger (debug programs running on a different machine with a differnt CPU)
          it isn't POSIX compliant
          no root
          backups built in
          UTF-8 throughout (source code included)
          all services should be implemented using a common protocol - 9p
          Only 17 system calls

          http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/index.html
      • Getting a set of hardware together is a barrier to entry but if you look at the supported hardware list you may notice that much of the equipment is old and therefore cheap to get second hand and is often the sort of stuff people will just ditch, S3 Virge's and that kind of thing.

        If you and the other 12 guys could get together and support the hardware VMWare presents, you'd suddenly get tons of potential users, which would inevitably lead to more hardware support.

        • VMWare is already supported, numbnuts.
          • VMWare is already supported, numbnuts.

            Yet you replied to a guy who was having trouble getting Plan9 to run on VMWare by saying, "
            yes, driver support is a problem ... plan9 is less forgiving with hardware". Did you even read the title of his post? Do you think it was unreasonable of me to assume from his post and your response that VMWare wasn't supported? Or did you just feel like being crass?

            Maybe the Plan 9 adoption rate has something to do with the attitude of its proponents.
      • what irc channel is that, per se?
    • Well, mozilla under unix runs on X normally, and although there is an X port for Plan9, most people use a propritary GUI.
  • And all this time I thought that Plan 9 was from Outer Space.

  • the $150 package includes a professionally printed and bound two-volume set of the (fairly hefty) Plan 9 manual pages and (somewhat thinner) papers.

    you don't get that with the downloads. obviously you can print off the .pdf from the download; then you'll find that doesn't give the same form factor as the printed manuals in the set.

    the boxed set does include a copy of Inferno preloaded on the Plan 9 CD, but that's not the bulk of the cost, if any.

    i know i paid $99 for another Free system's boxed set a

  • If plan9 supported something such as this, it
    bould be easier to 'use' as opposed to 'port'
    every application that is needed, and simply
    utilize them as network resources.

    Google didn't yeild anything positive, and I
    don't use it so ...but wouldnt this break a
    barrier between program platform needs in a
    diverse network setting?


  • It isn't all that wierdly difficult to port *nix software over to Plan 9, get porting :)

    I haven't touched plan 9 since back around 1996 or so, but back then it shipped with a browser called Mothra I believe.

  • What is there for Plan 9 and what isn't (Score:4, Interesting)

    by F2F ( 11474 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @09:20AM (#6792915)
    i -- a browser attempt by Howard Trickey done sometime around 1996. you can view slightly less complex pages without crashing with probability of around 50%. i know of at least one masochist that uses it regularly.

    charon -- the browser packaged with VitaNuova's Inferno [vitanuova.com] operating system which runs native atop Plan 9 (among other OS's). this is your best bet if you want to stick to using Plan 9 only.

    Everything else [ucalgary.ca] the runs under UNIX/Windows (see Opera lurking in the background?). you only need to have a machine to run VNC on.

    links -- two people have started a port of this graphical browser to Plan 9, one may succeed, who knows :)

    as for mozilla, there is a slight problem with porting it to Plan 9 -- the browser sources are twice the size of the entire Plan 9 operating system (including the PostScript viewer).
    • as for mozilla, there is a slight problem with porting it to Plan 9 -- the browser sources are twice the size of the entire Plan 9 operating system (including the PostScript viewer).

      And why is this a problem? Mozilla is big, yes, but why should that be a problem specific to porting it to Plan 9 as opposed to porting it to some other larger OS? OS size to application size ratio is a new "problem" to me, and I reckon you'll have to explain it to me a bit more plainly.

      • Rob reckons that 90% of plan9 development was taken up by implementing other people's protocols.

        Porting a web browser that has more code than our OS sounds like masochism.

        We might want to browse the web with DHTML & friends but not *that* much.

        HTML was supposed to be *simple*. It has been trashed for the sake of eye-candy.

        And on top is the DOM kludge.

        HTML Applications - jeesh, a braindead idea and I should know, I've written quite a few.
        Witness the crap that you have to go through to maintain state
        • Ah, so it is simply a matter of philosophy. You want small and simple...but it doesn't seem that is what the original poster wanted.

          I can certainly see why a lack of interest in a port from the people capable of doing a port would be a problem. ;-)

  • Want a GUI based UNIX? Get BeOS. For everything else, theres BSD and Linux. Have this unbearable itch to pay cash? Got AIX and Solaris.

    Plan 9 is and will always be too immature. The directory system is a departure from the tried and tested (and gotten used to) UNIX hier, and quite honestly, I dont see anything else new there. The niches have already been filled.

    Now if people talked about freeing BeOS from the clutches of Palm (like paying for blender), I would be heck of a lot more interested. BeOS is exa

    • because it sounds like you either didn't use it for very long or are blind.

      The directory system is a departure from the tried and tested
      I would humbly inform you that this is the whole point.

      plan9 isn't trying to be unix.

      and quite honestly, I dont see anything else new there

      Like I said, blind.
      Open your eyes

      http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/index.html

    • Re:No point in Plan9 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      BeOS would be great if it could get out into the OS world. It would make a great compainon for Linux. Linux on the server and workstations and BeOS on home systems and many desktops.

      News break... Unix is not the ultimite OS. It is very good and has evolved over the years but in someways it is holding back Computer Science much like Windows is. Very few people are willing to work on anything in OpenSource that is not Linux/BSD/Unix based. I do not blame them. Linux has a lot of tools and apps now. I can use

    • BeOS isn't UNIX in any way.
    • The directory system is a departure from the tried and tested (and gotten used to) UNIX hier,

      My thinking exactly--where are the punch cards? :-)

      BeOS is exactly the OS everyone needs right now, a kind of Linux with a really good GUI strapped on top. Beautiful FS and networking and a SINGLE package system.

      Plan9 is a research project. Plan9 actually has some nifty ideas in it.

      BeOS, on the other hand, is an object-oriented commercial operating system--well executed, but neither the file system nor the G
  • Can some Plan9 knowledgable person give us a run-down?

    Major differences good and bad over unix?

    I am not worried about current software and hardware support, but rather an overall picture of the us.

    Yes, I have read the web-site.

    • Re:Plan9 vs Unix (Score:2, Informative)

      by multi io ( 640409 )
      [Plan9] Major differences good and bad over unix?
      • filesystem namespace, mount tables etc. are per-process, not global
      • (really) everything-is-a-file, including
        • network interfaces, sockets
        • display server backend, i.e. one {/dev/bitblt, /dev/mouse, /dev/cons} set; the server re-exports one disjunct such set to each client (which means that the server may be run as a client of itself)
      • a single generic protocol (9P) for exporting files over the network. Network transparency of all kinds
  • It probably wouldn't be hard to port the "links" browser (http://links.browser.org/). It's a text mode browser that renders most pages well. There is also a graphical extension for "links" that runs on raw framebuffers and X11 and is probably easy to port as well.

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