
Introduction to 9front - xj9
http://fqa.9front.org/fqa1.html
======
plan6
To those not in the know:

1\. Plan 9 was led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil
Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie and released (closed source) by
Bell Labs (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs)
) in 1992. In 1996, AT&T decided to deprioritize it. Lucent open sourced it in
2000 and free sourced it in 2002. It was a process-based OS where each process
had its own filesystem (called a namespace) where each process could share
virtual files (via 9P, later 9P2000, protocol) in the other processes' file
systems. Like Unix (and Linux), files could represent devices. UTF-8 was used
everywhere (since Ken Thompson invented it). rc was the default shell, rio was
the windows system, plumber allowed system-wide hyperlinking, and sam and acme
were the text editors.

2\. 9front is a fork of Plan 9.

3\. If you refresh the linked page (the main page for 9front), it has a new
picture. There are a lot. Some are really bizarre, like the man in the
wheelchair in front of the elevator. Others like the shot from Jurassic Park
are funny and wrong- "it was a Silicon Graphics workstation (using IRIX, the
SGI System V based Unix) running a three dimensional file system browser."
(not Plan 9 which was not Unix)
[http://movies.stackexchange.com/a/9746](http://movies.stackexchange.com/a/9746)

~~~
f2f
I think you missed the most important contribution of 9front: theo(1). it's
like fortune(1), but with quotes from deraadt :)

------
gghh
from their FAQ (named FQA, frequently questioned answers? not sure):

 _1.1 - What is 9front? Plan9front (or 9front) is a fork of the Plan 9 from
Bell Labs operating system. The project was started to remedy a perceived lack
of devoted development resources inside Bell Labs,[citation needed] and has
accumulated various fixes and improvements. This FQA specifically covers only
the most recent release of 9front._

The code appears to be at
[https://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front/file/tip](https://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front/file/tip)
and can be cloned with

    
    
      hg clone https://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front/
    

There are about 30 contributors, the first commit is from 2011 and the last is
from last week.

------
jstanley
I know what Plan 9 is, but I have no idea what this website is about, what
they're trying to say, who they are, etc.

~~~
the_duke
The very first sentence on the page states:

"Plan9front (or 9front) is a fork of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating
system. The project was started to remedy a perceived lack of devoted
development resources inside Bell Labs,[citation needed] and has accumulated
various fixes and improvements."

What's so confusing about that?

~~~
jstanley
They've changed it now, it's much better.

------
keithpeter
I don't know who does the manuals or the propaganda but they are always spot
on. The Think About The Future release is using images from late 60s/early 70s
Northern Ireland.

I really must put this on an old thinkpad just for the lutz.

------
Quequau
Presumably if the front has fallen off, they've removed it from the
environment.

~~~
jeff_petersen
Let's hope no cardboard was used in constructing this OS.

In all seriousness, I've been meaning to play around with 9front so maybe this
weekend is the time I'll finally get around to it

~~~
mveety
We develop according to the highest of maritime standards.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
I'd guess their web server is running plan9. Pretty clean headers, lovely.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html Server: rc-httpd

~~~
4ad
Yes, it's running Plan 9, and the web server, rc-httpd, is written in rc, the
Plan 9 shell.

------
seesomesense
TLDR: 9front is a fork of Plan 9.

Plan 9 was probably the finest operating system in the world.

~~~
Koshkin
Some say it was BeOS. Others say it was MS-DOS. Yet others, Oberon. Operating
systems differ widely, and so do opinions. In my opinion, each and every one
of them was a product of love, each served the purpose it was designed for,
and each deserves to live forever - if only in our hearts (and VMs).

~~~
TurboHaskal
Somewhat relevant:
[http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html](http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html)

------
itomato
AKA Plan 9 for sociopaths.

~~~
bhickey
The site seems to portray it like TempleOS meets 4chan.

------
duck2
If only I could get it to drive one of my three NICs...

Then the only remaining concern would be running JavaScript. mothra is nice
but god-browsers are teh standard now.

I have always seen playing with boot.ini and aux/vga easier than messing with
xorg.conf. Switching from something keyboard-driven like i3 or dwm, rio would
cause some upset but it does not take much time getting used to- come on, you
just click and drag. I also find acme a lot more convenient than vim or emacs
and regularly use it on Linux via plan9port.

~~~
mveety
Yeah driver support is lacking. We have support for some Intel NICs and some
Intel wifi. Basically we only have drivers for stuff we use. If you have the
time it would be great if you could write a driver for your hardware. :) On
the javascriptlessness: we're not big fans and have better things to do so we
don't support it. And honestly you get used to being without it.

------
xj9
Git mirrors (via git-hg):

[1]: [https://github.com/tokyo-jesus/9front](https://github.com/tokyo-
jesus/9front) [2]:
[https://gitlab.com/xj9/9front](https://gitlab.com/xj9/9front)

------
MrJagil
If you are unfamilliar:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs)

~~~
Hondor
Thanks for the link but I still don't understand the significance of this
post. It seems to be a complaint about somebody else's complaint. Isn't that
fairly common in open source software?

------
guessmyname
This needs a NSFW because on the first try I was welcomed by a picture of a
Asian child apparently sleeping in a small room full of random objects while
using several Anime porn books as his blanket. I had no idea what this website
was about until I saw the Plan9 logo at the bottom and decided to reload the
page to find a different picture, this time of a nuclear explosion. In fact,
after every reload the image changes to something usually more cryptic than
the last one. Here [1] you can see all the pictures used in the front page.

[1] [http://9front.org/img/](http://9front.org/img/)

~~~
delinka
So I looked at the /img directory and found this:
[http://9front.org/img/9cat.gif](http://9front.org/img/9cat.gif)

Terrifying...

~~~
lsh
Terrifying ...
[http://9front.org/img/rms23.jpg](http://9front.org/img/rms23.jpg)

