This week OSNews spoke to the CEO of Vita Nuova Michael Jeffrey. VitaNuova are the publishers of the Plan9 and Inferno Operating Systems. Originally created at Bell Labs, both OS are descendants of the Unix family tree, but they are massively distributed in their nature.
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I wonder how much pressure Vita Nuova would be ready to put on the market. Their technology seems proven, long established and working. Couldn't they directly take against the software giants and shatters .NET before it takes too deep roots?
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it can either run as a native OS on bare hardware or as an application on existing operating system platforms (Windows 95,98,2000,NT, Linux, Solaris and others). Inferno also runs all its applications within a Virtual Machine that guarantees byte code portability across both native and hosted platforms. Inferno is uniquely capable of providing an environment for distributed applications across devices large and small.
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This sounds just like Tao's stuff! What is the difference??
rishi
> it can either run as a native OS on bare hardware or as an
> application on existing operating system platforms
> (Windows 95,98,2000,NT, Linux, Solaris and others).
> Inferno also runs all its applications within a Virtual
> Machine that guarantees byte code portability across both
> native and hosted platforms.
Smalltalk has been doing this since 1976, if you take out the "across devices large and small." However, Squeak Smalltalk (a modern Smalltalk-80 implementation) runs as many platforms as Inferno (possible more), and is open to porting to new ones- which is more valuable than having a fixed set of platforms on which your so-called cross-platform code can run.
> Inferno is uniquely capable of providing an environment
> for distributed applications across devices large and
> small.
Mmmm, business hype! Squeak can do this, and has been able to do it for a while. Perhaps longer than Inferno was around. And, Squeak is totally free (as in beer, pretzels and speech) for personal and commercial use.
Sounds just like Smalltalk.
Yay. Yet another embedded/handheld OS. It's hard to get excited about something I will probably never use...
The links to the Plan 9 license make this clear. To quote the (non-legalese) version:
The main points are:
You can modify, copy and distribute the source code as you wish.
There are no royalty payments on the distribution.
Nice to see some attention to Inferno and Plan9 which imo seems like two very cool OS.
I havent tried out either yet but in theory they (especially plan9) sound great. Too bad neither of them have a very large user community.
... that made me never really try hard to make it work (yeah, I did give it a shot but it died) is the ugly GUI. I mean, look at the screenshot, it's nothing to motivate ppl to give it a try.
I might give it yet another try, since the window manager I'm using now doesn't look much better than what they have on those screenshots (I'm using Ion), but if they plan to get more ppl to even try their stuff, they should at least make it look nice. Shouldn't be too hard if you have a good system under the hood, which they do.
Good interview.
I still haven't got around to trying Plan 9 anybody got any comments on it?
>... that made me never really try hard to make it work (yeah,
>I did give it a shot but it died) is the ugly GUI. I mean,
>look at the screenshot, it's nothing to motivate ppl to give
>it a try.
Why do so many people equate an operating system with a GUI? Inferno and Plan 9 are real operating systems, not Fisher Price toys. If you can only comprehend pretty colours and big shiny buttons, go use Windows.
Inferno and Plan 9 are excellent OSs, but they don't make ideal (newbie) desktop OSs (nor are they designed to be).
It is too bad that Plan 9 was never released as GPL'd software.
It is a simpler and elegant design... but besided the embedded space there are no apps. Cute but it will fade away in the background and become part of the heaps of research stuff lying in the library magazines till its features are re-implemented
much later.
One measure of the impact of a new tool is the ammount of books
or literature that can be bought per year... try finding any book on Plan 9. One hit in amazon... and it is out of print!
I purchased plan9 from vita nuova (boxed set), yet many video cards are not supported at all (in fact, none of my current x86 computers are even supported by plan9 - as they all use nvidia cards) - it would also be nice to see 16bpp depth support on at least a few cards (much less a port of mesagl).
Also, I know ports to various architecutres have been done, but I would like to run this on my old mac - yet it seems like there is no precompiled distribution available for any other platform other than x86.