Plan 9 from Bell Labs is still very much alive. They just got an updated website, with easier access to nightly builds. "Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present. Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign."
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Member since:2006-01-28
As far as threading, read fork(2) (for rfork) and thread(2).
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/fork
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/thread
X11 has been ported before, but it's big and clunky and unmaintained.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/addons.html near the bottom.
Member since:2005-07-06
*strokes chin* interesting
I've always wondered, given the vision - whether someone has ever sat down and thought, "lets turn this into something more than just an experimental operating system" - it has alot of UNIX good points, and fixes up where it lacks, and hence, the curiosity that if we're going to replace Windows with another operating system, wouldn't it be best to use something that addresses the failures as well as bringing new features?
Oh well, a nice little pipe dream of mine 
Member since:2006-01-30
Member since:
2005-07-06
Hi, having had a look at it - I assume that technically, there is nothing stopping someone from port X11 accross to Plan9? are there any good documentation on the site in regards to how the kernel operates, the threading model? etc. etc.