Plan9

My summer break in 2014 had a theme of sorts, which was “back to basics”. I wanted to forget everything I could about work and fiddle with more interesting stuff – less abstractions, less wondering, more concrete, down-to-earth stuff.

For some reason I gravitated back towards Plan9/Inferno . Call it dissatisfaction with present day computing, if you will, but I keep looking for something smaller, faster and more efficient than what we use today – so I ended up setting up plan9ports on a Chromebook and fiddling with it.

Come 2020, I revisited this again, updated a few links and dug around a bit more for a few extra resources.

Resources

Category Date Link Notes
Apps 2018 diod

a multithreaded 9P file server written in C

Community 2020 9fans topicbox

another watering hole

Bitbucket Archive

an archive of Mercurial Bitbucket repos

2016 Richard Miller's Stuff

Which includes the official Raspberry Pi image

Libraries go-p9p

A 9p/Styx library for Go

lua9p

A 9p/Styx library for Lua

Ports 2023 9ferno

an amd64/arm64 port of Inferno with partial JIT support

Inferno OS for Rasbperry Pi Pico

A port for the Pico in a dedicated branch

2016 Harvey OS

A “Fresh Take on Plan 9”, under active development

2015 inferno-rpi

A port of Inferno to the Raspberry Pi, with a few tweaks

node9

An Inferno-like hosted OS using LuaJIT instead of dis

2014 9front

Has a Raspberry Pi image that works better than the ‘official’ port (but does not include ssh2)

plan9port

Used to be easy to install on a Mac via brew, but not anymore

Reference 2023 The Fragrant Git Host

a Plan9 (well, mostly 9front)-centric Git host, with a peculiar sense of humor.

2021 Plan 9 Desktop Guide

by far the most comprehensive (modern) guide I’ve seen

2014 Installing a virtualized Plan9 server

Somewhat outdated, but workable

Tools 2024 vcrop

a visual image cropping tool

u-root/cpu

A port of the Plan9 cpu command

2023 opossum

A Go-based web browser

vdir

a visual directory browser for plan9

vim

a vim port for plan9

9Problems

A hackish tiling window manager for Plan9

2021 edit

a mix of vim and acme

2020 acme2k

acme with sane/modern keyboard shortcuts

iredis

an Inferno/Limbo client for Redis

Glenda
The Plan 9 logo/mascot, here cast in transparent PNG format for your amusement.

This page is referenced in: