“Plan B is an operating system designed to work in distributed environments where the set of available resources is different at different points in time. Plan B 3rd edition is a modified Plan 9 system. Therefore, any experience with Plan 9 will help you to install and use Plan B. Because Plan 9 inherits from UNIX, any experience with UNIX will help as well.”
Looks like it’s sponsored by Juan Carlos Royal University in Madrid, Spain. No word on exactly how/what was modified and the ‘user manual’ is an online front-end to the man pages.
The demo videos are somewhat interesting. I wonder if their demo wmv-files play under their own os though 😉
The biggest reason Plan 9 never took off is its horrible GUI. Just looking at the screenshots makes me want to cry. If we could only get a decent GUI for it, everyone would start using it.
I don’t think the intentions of plan9 ever were to provide you a pretty workstation system rather than to research and develop new concepts.
Plan B and many of the other research operating systems are not focusing on the GUI but instead, what the project is funded for. In this case, its ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Read some of the abstracts and you’ll see that although they do mention the GUI API, X10 is mostly the focus of this operating system.
off-topic: Isn’t Plan B an emergency contraceptive?
Maybe it will prevent unwanted services :-p
Being a *nix variant the GUI isn’t really attached to the vital OS parts right?
SO couldn’t GNOME or KDE be run on it? Or maybe to take advantage of its low level features, could add some features to GNOME or KDE…?
Been interested in Plan 9, but yeah the GUI is awful, I often wondered about having GNOME or KDE running on it and then adding extra features to it!
Those complaining about the user interface should give it a try before complaining. Though lacking in eye-candy, the interface is pleasant to use and extremely quick. Just take a look at the acme development environment.
If you want to learn more check out:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/ (the official site)
http://swtch.com/plan9port/ (unix ports of much of the plan 9 user land)
I just like to tar the desktop and untar it on other desktop to restore the same session.
It is simply, and great.
Plan9 has a great gui, and planB also.
you can implement the OS X exposè feature in a shell script, isn’t that enough powerfull? I wonder how many lines of Objetive-C take apple to make that thing.
the libcontrol is the library to make graphs applications, but it is unfinished. It need some more controls and it need to be adpted by all the stuff in the system.
in the years coming we will see a lot of thing of plan9 and inferno. . .
😀
Have fun.
Plan9’s UI may be ugly to look at, but it’s a damn-sight nicer to use than metacity etc. I believe it was the inspiration behind ratpoison (or maybe it was wmi or another similar one, I forget)
I have not used plan B, but I recently tried plan 9, and I for one like its gui very much, it is simple, simpler than anything I have come across, but elegant and easy once you get used to it. Plan 9 people like this simplicity, they don’t want gnome, kde or any linux gui ported to their system, it would feel out of place there. It is true that the gui will not be apreciated for the normal linux guy, but again, it is people who like simplicity and the elegance that comes with it (not visually, but once you know the details, in the way it has been implemented) who will be drawn to this great system. What I like of plan 9 is that everything has been carefully implementend where it belongs. No tty driver-hack, no scroll functionality in applications but in the window manager, etc. That without saying about the real benefits of the system like per process namespace, interprocess comunication via virtual files and not weird new apis, etc, etc.
What’s the benefit of Plan B over Plan 9? I’ve thought using Plan 9 but maybe I use use Plan B instead.