On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 12:35 AM, Russ Cox <r...@swtch.com> wrote: > > Can you briefly tell us why you (Russ, Rob, Ken and Dave) > > no longer use Plan9 ? > > Because of missing apps or because of missing driver for your hardware ? > > And do you still use venti ? > > Operating systems and programming languages have > strong network effects: it helps to use the same system > that everyone around you is using. In my group at MIT, > that meant FreeBSD and C++. I ran Plan 9 for the first > few years I was at MIT but gave up, because the lack of > a shared system made it too hard to collaborate. > When I switched to FreeBSD, I ported all the Plan 9 libraries > and tools so I could keep the rest of the user experience. > > I still use venti, in that I still maintain the venti server that > takes care of backups for my old group at MIT. It uses > the plan9port venti, vbackup, and vnfs, all running on FreeBSD. > The venti server itself was my last real Plan 9 installation. > It's Coraid hardware, but I stripped the software and had installed > my own Plan 9 kernel to run venti on it directly. But before > I left MIT, the last thing I did was reinstall the machine using > FreeBSD so that others could help keep it up to date. > > If I wasn't interacting with anyone else it'd be nice to keep > using Plan 9. But it's also nice to be able to use off the shelf > software instead of reinventing wheels (9fans runs on Linux) > and to have good hardware support done by other people > (I can shut my laptop and it goes to sleep, and even better, > when I open it again, it wakes up!). Being able to get those > things and still keep most of the Plan 9 user experience by > running Plan 9 from User Space is a compromise, but one > that works well for me. > > Russ > > And as you said before, there's always the vx32 port :-). I find it's often a lot more practical for me to run stuff in that or Inferno hosted on Mac OS X as well. I used to keep a Plan 9 box at home, but it released the magic smoke the other day, and I'm afraid that means it's dead.
I've been kicking a few ideas around about replacing it, and maybe trying to make it more useful to the community somehow that I run one, but I've got to get buy in from the wife to invest. (Isn't there some tax write-off for hobbies or something in the US?) Dave
