Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?
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
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
I have come across this tutorial page: http://www.magma.com.ni/moin/Plan9Tutorial I think that the owner has been editing this site regularly. José Brandão
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
You just gave me an idea. Perhaps add a php or smf forum to the site?
Re: [9fans] P9p on Fedora 12
usage: devdraw (don't run  directly) 9term: initdraw: muxrpc: unexpected eof No one other experiencing this problem? Pavel
Re: [9fans] Netbook Install Help
I must not have made the last post correctly, so i'll try again : ( Sorry if this turns into a double post. Anyway, these pics are the output sitting still after booting from the usb stick image: www.queuevonqu.com/9boot2.jpg www.queuevonqu.com/9boot3.jpg And this is booting from the usb-cdrom drive: www.queuevonqu.com/9boot4.jpg
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
I can see the point you're trying to make. There's alot of flexibility in what can be done with a website though. In short; anything. I think it leaves for a more enjoyable experience for the user too. An easy link to remember (whatever the site name will be), space to store files, screenshots, etc. And yes, if you read my story, there's no exaggeration. I want to do this, and have the resources available. I'm not thinking of an immaculate site that is the end all of user experience or learning Plan9 by no means. Just something simple, easy to navigate, perhaps even a pleasure to read. Might have to toss up good ol' propaganda too, because who doesn't love Glenda? My site has been up for quite a while, and I have no intentions of taking it down anytime soon as it serves alot of purposes for me, so if I indeed put up this site, it won't be going anywhere for a long time, because other than a yearly $10, it won't cost me anything. I'd just be using a little bit of the unlimited storage capacity. Eh? :)
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
Very well, i'll drop the idea then. It's just a shame there's no easy and direct way to find out how to do some of the stuff I mentioned in the original post. To Tim; Why do you suppose I use a wysiwyg editor to begin with? I don't know squat about writing webpages, also, I don't know how to set up or configure a web server. My webspace is thru Yahoo's paid services, and I chose them because they give you alot for cheap, and they are a no nonsense provider. They don't interfere in anything I choose to do. On top of that, knowing you have no idea who I am, I come from a background of a non-IT, non college educated, self (and forum) taught user. I've Slackware exclusively for just a snootch shy of a decade, having recently switched to BSD. It is sufficient to say that whilst i'm not a guru or master of the trade, I am very proficient in userland things, like installing software, maintaining the system, building kernels, etc. I have yet to figure out how to do the simple things I mentioned above (what about accessing usb sticks, installing 3rd party software, etc). I can't find a simple straight do this to do this type of document on many simple user functions. How can someone who would give Plan9 a chance with an even lesser background in unix like enviroments like myself figure these things out? Praise be due to those who are more resourceful or generally smarter in these matters than I, but being quite comfortable with CLI and not being able to find a simple and straight way to do desktop/basic users tasks was the motivation behind this whole idea. I'm sorry my offer to help seems of no use. Since it is my webspace, I may just do it anyway, presuming I learn some of the things I need to. There may be other sites, a wiki, and etc., but I see zero harm in trying to help others learn this system, even if it be from my slow journey and blunders along the way. Trust me, if I could afford the costs i'd have to pay my ISP, had the hardware, and the knowledge to set up and secure a Plan9 web server, i'd do it in a heartbeat, but hardware and funding aside, I don't remotely have the knowledge of either webservers in general, or plan9 specifically.
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
When I was learning FreeBSD I found this site helpful: http://www.freebsddiary.org/ I think the thing that really makes the FreeBSD Diary work is a lack of grand ambitions. The guy who maintains it doesn't try to cover everything, and generally doesn't try to explain things he doesn't understand. He doesn't normally try to update old entries, and often goes months without doing anything. But he has been doing this for 12 years now, and has accumulated a good collection of articles. As far as I can tell, whenever he needs to do something moderately complicated which is not well documented, he makes notes and then describes how he did things and posts it. It would be nice to have something like that for plan9. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282
Re: [9fans] Netbook Install Help
On Wed Feb 24 05:19:28 EST 2010, bitpusher2...@gmail.com wrote: I must not have made the last post correctly, so i'll try again : ( Sorry if this turns into a double post. Anyway, these pics are the output sitting still after booting from the usb stick image: www.queuevonqu.com/9boot2.jpg www.queuevonqu.com/9boot3.jpg And this is booting from the usb-cdrom drive: www.queuevonqu.com/9boot4.jpg with the thumb drive, what happens when you hit enter at the use DMA for ide prompt? with the cdrom, your machine is hanging because 9load isn't properly probing the ahci drives. bios has left ahci in a funky power state. early versions of ahci for 9load had a lot of drouble with power mgnt because i originally wrote it for version 0.95 of the spec, which didn't have any. - erik
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
I personally like the inferno programmers notebook style - it's a nice way of documenting tips and tricks as well as introducing quick and dirty apps. I've long thought it a shame we don't have something similar for Plan 9. Sent from my iPhone On Feb 24, 2010, at 5:26 AM, John Stalker stal...@maths.tcd.ie wrote: When I was learning FreeBSD I found this site helpful: http://www.freebsddiary.org/ I think the thing that really makes the FreeBSD Diary work is a lack of grand ambitions. The guy who maintains it doesn't try to cover everything, and generally doesn't try to explain things he doesn't understand. He doesn't normally try to update old entries, and often goes months without doing anything. But he has been doing this for 12 years now, and has accumulated a good collection of articles. As far as I can tell, whenever he needs to do something moderately complicated which is not well documented, he makes notes and then describes how he did things and posts it. It would be nice to have something like that for plan9. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282
Re: [9fans] Netbook Install Help
It doesn't matter if I choose yes or no, the end result is the same. It asks for mouse port, resolution and screen, then goes into rio. When it comes time to partition, it says no disk device is available, installation cannot continue.
Re: [9fans] Netbook Install Help
On Wed Feb 24 10:06:05 EST 2010, bitpusher2...@gmail.com wrote: It doesn't matter if I choose yes or no, the end result is the same. It asks for mouse port, resolution and screen, then goes into rio. When it comes time to partition, it says no disk device is available, installation cannot continue. try this. at the install prompt, type !rc. then at the rc prompt type cat /dev/sdctl. the output should be interesting. - erik
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
I second this. I've found those posts to be amazingly good. On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 5:23 AM, Eric Van Hensbergen eri...@gmail.comwrote: I personally like the inferno programmers notebook style - it's a nice way of documenting tips and tricks as well as introducing quick and dirty apps. I've long thought it a shame we don't have something similar for Plan 9. Sent from my iPhone On Feb 24, 2010, at 5:26 AM, John Stalker stal...@maths.tcd.ie wrote: When I was learning FreeBSD I found this site helpful: http://www.freebsddiary.org/ I think the thing that really makes the FreeBSD Diary work is a lack of grand ambitions. The guy who maintains it doesn't try to cover everything, and generally doesn't try to explain things he doesn't understand. He doesn't normally try to update old entries, and often goes months without doing anything. But he has been doing this for 12 years now, and has accumulated a good collection of articles. As far as I can tell, whenever he needs to do something moderately complicated which is not well documented, he makes notes and then describes how he did things and posts it. It would be nice to have something like that for plan9. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282
Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?
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
Re: [9fans] P9p on Fedora 12
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:13 AM, Pavel Klinkovsky pavel.klinkov...@gmail.com wrote: usage: devdraw (don't run  directly) 9term: initdraw: muxrpc: unexpected eof No one other experiencing this problem? Pavel I've not rebuilt on my mac in a while. I'll try again today, but I don't like to run Fedora in general. I typically like archlinux these days, as it's small and fairly sane. Dave
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
Isn't storage more or less free these days? I use plan9 on a hard drive with less bits than my RAM, but of course I don't run any video streaming services on there.
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
Sorry, my last post should refer to this: On 2/24/10, David Leimbach leim...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 3:20 PM, David Leimbach leim...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Steve Simon st...@quintile.net wrote: Also, for a while the Tokyo Inferno/Plan 9 User Group (tip9ug.jp) ran a service where pretty much anybody could get an account on a Plan 9 machine. They seem down now... if it's not temporary, something like that could be a real service. I still use it from time to time, and though I agree its down at the moment but it has been reliable for many years now. -Steve I keep forgetting my password, and blowing away my keys locally, changing my plan 9 machine. Net result is I never had to remember the password thanks to the convenience of factotum and other parts of the system that make it easy to avoid memorizing the password, but then I can't get back into my stuff :-) I keep thinking one day I'll set up a public CPU server, I've got a good chunk of bandwidth available, just not a lot of time to maintain stuff. It'd be really cool if I could just do the CPU part, and someone else do the storage :-). Is there an Amazon S3 based 9P server? Just thinking out loud... Dave
Re: [9fans] Netbook Install Help
try this. Â at the install prompt, type !rc. Â then at the rc prompt type cat /dev/sdctl. Â the output should be interesting. queuevonqu.com/9boot_a.jpg
Re: [9fans] sheevaplug port available
Has any new work gone into getting the flash, usb, c working? I was planning on buying one soon and was wondering about the state of the port. -- I am a man who does not exist for others. pgpfxK0JHl4nI.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [9fans] Netbook Install Help
try this. at the install prompt, type !rc. then at the rc prompt type cat /dev/sdctl. the output should be interesting. queuevonqu.com/9boot_a.jpg okay. so it sees your controller, but not the drives. there are a couple reasons this might be. - power management. perhaps the drive is using PUIS. you might try at the rc prompt echo reset/dev/sdE1/ctl echo reset/dev/sdE0/ctl and then try to continue with the install. the contents of /dev/sdE?/ctl will be interesting. - originally, the ahci driver had trouble with ports that weren't contiguous. ahci allows drives to be missing. e.g. drive 0 and 3 exist, but not 1 or 2. if this is the problem, you'll just have to use a more recent driver. - erik
Re: [9fans] How 'bout a 9 USER site?
To Tim; Why do you suppose I use a wysiwyg editor to begin with? I don't know squat about writing webpages, also, I don't know how to set up or configure a web server. My webspace is thru Yahoo's paid services, and I chose them because they give you alot for cheap, and they are a no nonsense provider. They don't interfere in anything I choose to do. *shrug* that makes sense I guess, but... If you were to use plan9 for this, it would give you an excuse to learn how to do it in plan9, and along the way to become more familiar and comfortable with plan9. Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | thenewsh.blogspot.com
Re: [9fans] sheevaplug port available
usb has advanced a little; we can see usb devices now but attempts to read or write them hang. I don't know of progress on flash access or anything else.
Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?
What Russ says is true but for me it was simpler. I used Plan 9 as my local operating system for a year or so after joining Google, but it was just too inconvenient to live on a machine without a C++ compiler, without good NFS and SSH support, and especially without a web browser. I switched to Linux but found it very buggy (the main problem was most likely a bad graphics board and/or driver, but still) and my main collaborator (Robert Griesemer) had done the ground work to get a Mac working as a primary machine inside Google, and Russ had plan9port up, so I pushed plan9port onto the Mac and have been there ever since, quite happily. Nowadays Apples are officially supported so it's become easy, workwise. I miss a lot of what Plan 9 did for me, but the concerns at work override that. -rob
[9fans] unrecognized ethernet card
Hi Everybody, I installed Plan 9 on a new computer (Erik's 9atoms.iso), it doesnt recognize the ethernet device (there is no /net/ether0). I wonder if something can be done. If changing configuration doesnt help, I hope its similar enough to an already supported device, so a few changes here and there can make it work. By the way, I was also wondering, when will Erik's SATA support arrive in the main distribution? Anyway, here are the details of the unrecognized device, from Linux: - lshw says: *-bridge description: Ethernet interface product: MCP61 Ethernet vendor: nVidia Corporation physical id: 7 bus info: p...@:00:07.0 logical name: eth0 version: a2 serial: 00:1d:92:0b:b5:23 size: 1 capacity: 1 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: bridge pm msi ht bus_master cap_list ethernet physical mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=forcedeth driverversion=0.64 duplex=full latency=0 link=yes maxlatency=20 mingnt=1 multicast=yes port=MII speed=100MB/s resources: irq:27 memory:dfff9000-dfff9fff ioport:e480(size=8) - lspci says: 00:07.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP61 Ethernet (rev a2) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device 7309 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+ Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast TAbort- TAbort- MAbort- SERR- PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 (250ns min, 5000ns max) Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 27 Region 0: Memory at dfff9000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K] Region 1: I/O ports at e480 [size=8] Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2 Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0+,D1+,D2+,D3hot+,D3cold+) Status: D0 PME-Enable+ DSel=0 DScale=0 PME- Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask+ 64bit+ Queue=0/3 Enable+ Address: fee0100c Data: 4181 Masking: 00fe Pending: Capabilities: [6c] HyperTransport: MSI Mapping Enable- Fixed+ Kernel driver in use: forcedeth Kernel modules: forcedeth Greetings: Béla
