On Saturday, 29 January 2022, at 7:12 PM, Grant Defayette wrote: > Honestly I really don't see the issue with an 800mb network image. These > kiosk machines and network should be able to handle that with no issues and > it should fit on a disk easily. What constraint are you trying to solve? You > want to switch from an easy to maintain by any Unix expert with fully > available source to an obscure system that very few people use today and > might have issues with redistribution of sources and fonts etc just to > satisfy a constraint that doesn't exist. This is the kind of thing that would > only fly at a university where they allow people to make strange decisions > that solve problems that don't really exist.
I wrote earlier that the first project I'm using plan9 now is this kiosk application and this was already realized with FreeBSD. The purpose of such a step was also to test how difficult would it be to realize a project with plan9. I am also developing embedded software for bare metal and this test made clear plan9 is the best choice for this kind of projects. Its small the underlying abstractions fulfilled their purpose and you get a full fledged OS useful for many tasks if you are brave enough to change some parts which won't fit your demands. We are writing on 9fans so everyone present here made the choice to at least test a system which you call "obscure system that very few people use today". plan9 was a research project to start with and its not obscure at all. plan9, 9front are available running on different hardware even in raspberry pi (4 B) out of the box. I don't think that its a strange decision to use an existing working platform to realize projects. The code quality is good as could be expected from people who created unix. As a side note when the first ten people used unix and others also decided to switch than all of them made this so called "strange decision" and today unix used everywhere. I didn't have any remarkable problems substituting the fonts, and I won't have any problems substituting the remaining parts which are not MIT licensed if needed. You can only decide to use a project like this as a basement if you realize a few projects using it. As the Bell people remarked on the plan9 papers plan9 was used as an embedded system in commercial projects. You think Bell would have distributed this system and products based on it without verifying its reliability and quality ? The people involved in the development of plan9 are creators of unix the most important compilers the best known tools and they used this in their daily work. If you look in one of the current threads regarding a three buttoned mouse you will see that the first who answered was Rob Pike who perhaps still uses acme and some form of plan9. I don't have any doubts about the software quality of plan9 so be assured that I will use this project without doubts and this decision is definitely not obscure. Believe it or not if plan9 had an MIT license from the beginning you can be sure that the market share of plan9 would have be at least on the level of BSD systems. Its simpler its smaller and the concepts are good. There would have been forks cause of different tastes for the GUI but that is something normal. A kiosk app as a test case for the decision if the chosen OS can be handled or causes unpredictable problems is the way I have chosen for myself. After a while I will learn about problems arising from this decision without harming anybody. Not the users and not me as the maintainer. This will improve my experience. Regarding the size of the image. This is a service I'm providing from a dedicated Server on a commercial host. The most students today are using apple mac books they can't and won't install any operating system on those machines and I'm not willing to support x machine architectures for a students course. On my dedicated server there was placed a torrent file so I could handle the bandwidth problem in a acceptable way. At the beginning of each semester there are hundreds of downloads for this ISO. Estimated 60% of the students have to use virtual machines to start this ISO. Reducing the size of the ISO and the necessary RAM drive size where the ISO gets loaded to increases the performance. If a student has a 4 GB laptop he can afford approximately 1 to 2 GB of system memory for use with the virtual machine. Besides the ISO you have to allocate process memory so the size impacts performance regarding my experience. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T3e07bfdf263a83c8-M5bae393595a57178e96c5959 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
