> I see! I mis-understood what you meant by "Plan 9
> terminal". I thought
> that the Plan 9 Live CD gave you a choice of either
> installing the
> Plan 9 server or a Plan 9 client/terminal. I now see that
> that there
> are terminals available on various OSes to connect to a
> Plan 9
> server.
It has become a little confusing over
the last 20 years. In a way too brief
way, here are the basic incarnations of
Plan9:
- Natively running the current Plan9 kernel
- Stand-alone terminal with its own fs
- Terminal (possibly diskless) talking
to an external fs
- CPU, auth, or file server (or some
combination)
All of these are running Plan9 as their
"bare metal" OS
- Same as above but in a virtual machine,
such as virtualbox, vmware, qemu, etc.
- Ken's FS: a file server that runs on
bare hardware
- 9vx: a port of the Plan9 kernel to vx32
that allows a full Plan9 system to run
as a user-level application on another
system, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX
- drawterm: an earlier port of a limited
Plan9 kernel that's similar to a terminal
connecting to a remote CPU server
- P9P (aka Plan9 ports, Plan9 from user
space): a port of the Plan9 user apps
to POSIX-like systems
And just for fun these can all play together.
At the moment, I'm using a MacOS machine
that has one file system mounted using
the P9P 9pfuse program. It's also running
an instance of virtualbox that's net booted
a Plan9 terminal. There's also an instance
of 9vx running which is accessing the file
system mounted via P9P. All of these pieces
are talking to a Plan9 CPU server which
in turn uses a Ken FS file server.
> I did see that `wily', an
> Linux ACME
> clone is available. Guess what I did? :)
I remember playing with wily quite a lot
a while back. With Russ's P9P port of
acme, though, you can run the real acme
as a Linux app too.
> I just checked - it's a 166Mhz P-I with 98M RAM and 4.5G
> HDD. Made a
> good dedicated mail server. May not have enough gonads for
> a Plan 9
> server though.
I wouldn't dismiss it entirely. My old
Plan9 CPU/auth/file server at home had
a very similar configuration.
BLS
