Plan 9 Resources at URJC

What's this?

Plan 9 is a distributed operating system developed by the same group that made UNIX. The main guidelines of Plan 9 are:

Everything is a file
Files can be used through the network
Applications can customize their name spaces

What do we use Plan 9 for?

Some of us in the systems lab use Plan 9 both at home and for the daily work. There is an Operating Systems Design course using Plan 9 both to teach theory and practice.

This is the Plan 9 network at URJC

Aquamar (also knwon as Plan9) is our 4th edition file and auth server. It has both a fossil and a venti server installed on partitions set up in RAID using fs(3). The main fossil partition is archived on venti every day. Another partition (once) is not backed up and contains stuff not to be archived on venti.

In case that helps you, you can see here aquamar's plan9.ini, boot, cpuflproto, and venti.conf.

How to get in touch?

We all read the 9fans list. Use it (see below for how to do it).

Software for Plan 9 Fourth edition

Most of it is available at /nemo in the bell-labs sources file server used to get Plan 9 updates. See Plan 9 web page. Manual pages are included. This bellow is some stuff not available in sources:

The faces database as distributed from bell labs, with some 9fans faces added.
The mad mpeg 3 player ported to plan9. It's mostly unchanged.

Software for Plan 9 Third edition

A bib tool for troff. Together with some other utils I use.
A Lucent/IEEE 802.11 Wavelan driver, for PCMCIA cards. It is being used for daily work on a Dell Inspiron 7000.
A tar ball with the source for the fs kernel patched to make it work with large IDE disks. We are using it with two 40G ide disks. You can download it if you agree with the Plan 9 license.
Textoc writes a TOC for latex files suitable for use with Acme. It uses the textoc script.
cg. Greps on C sources files for use with acme's button2-button1 chord.
wg. Greps on matching files. You write "wg *.txt", select an identifier, and then use acme's button2-button1 chord. Requires the rarg script.
be. Generates a LaTeX environment, for use with acme's button2-button1 chord.
t+. Indents. To pipe within acme.
try Runs a program; should it fail, try calls acid to dump the stack so you could debug it.

Software for UNIX

unpack-plan9.pl A perl program to extract the Plan 9 distribution (plan9.9gz) on UNIX.
An ACME clone for UNIX called wily. All you need to build it is 9libs and wily-9libs, both available at this server.
Sam. A version for UNIX of the sam editor used in Plan 9. This is needed to compile wily.

Local documents

The manual is available on-line.
Notes on the plan 9 kernel source: pdf, postscript, a4, postscript, US letter, and text. Line numbers correspond to the Plan 9 release as of Jun 2000, you can download that source to read from the page of our Operating System Design course (see the "Resources" section).

Local projects

dumps for kfs. A student project.

Local resources

Floppy image to perform a network boot on the OS lab.
plan9.ini to boot from IL on the OS lab. You can use it with the floppy too.
An example lib/plumbing file with some useful extra rules. To use the mp3 rule, create a script that kills any player currently playing and starts a new player.

Pointers

A Wiki server for Plan 9. It's mostly a dynamic version of the FAQ. There is useful information there, so you should read it if you are a newcomer. Being it a Wiki, you can also fix anything you fing wrong, as well as add any recipe you want to add. In any case, be careful not to abuse the Wiki.
Course using Plan 9 .
There is a mailing list for Plan 9 users, world-wide. It is 9fans@cse.psu.edu. See the FAQ...
plan 9 FAQ.
Some unix programs to feel like on Plan 9.
In the plan9 web site you can find:
- Manuals
- Papers
- Updates
- Erratas
See also forsyth's Plan 9 links.
Plan 9 file system traces.
Inferno is kind of a plan 9 for set-top boxes, using a virtual machine.