What is Plan 9 ? Inferno ? & Limbo ?

[Agent_Steal]

I found this interesting OS while searching the net. It is called Plan 9 an Operating System developed by AT&T Bell Labs. Here's is some quotes from a website about it.

[Quote]

Fundamental Differences Between Plan 9 and Unix :

specialist hardware

A typical Plan 9 installation will have a dedicated cpu server, a dedicated file server and many dedicated terminals The file server and cpu server will be connected by the fastest link available.

"everything is a file"

Device drivers, network connections, environment variables and many other services are represented by files in the individuals file name space. This name space can be manipulated to customise the user's environment. User-level file servers are trivial to write and use, and all of this is easily distributed as the file server communication is all in a simple protocol.

minimalist philosophy

Plan 9 is an operating system for programmers. It emphasises simplicity over configurability, good design over compatibility and pragmatism over "buzzword compliance".

sensible security

There is no super-user or root. Communication with the file server is only through a simple protocol which allows no special access. Passwords are never transmitted across the network, instead the terminal manages a challenge/response session with the authentication server.

1990s user interface

A three-button mouse and bitmapped display are assumed. Support for Unicode has been included from the ground up. Character-based user-interfaces (vi, xterm, rn) have been superseded.

Some Special Services Available Only To Plan 9

Time travel back-up
Acme user interface
Alef concurrent programming language

[End quote]

What really caught my attention was " no super-user account or root ". I've just begun to learn how the *nix OS works. From my understanding this is a really good idea. Since a lot of hacks that I have read about focus on super-user priveleged accounts and
the sort . To learn more about Plan 9 just click on the links that I have provided below ...

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
http://www.cs.su.oz.au/Plan9/ - This page is still under the works
http://www.fywss.com/plan9/

Also check out this Operating System as well called "Inferno".
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

[Quote]

Inferno is a compact operating system designed for building distributed and networked systems on a wide variety of devices and platforms. With many advanced and unique features, Inferno puts an unrivalled set of tools into your hands.

[End Quote]

Here's some links to the programming language in which Inferno applications are written in. The language is called "Limbo".

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html
http://casl.csa.iisc.ernet.in/Operat...f20/primer.htm
[ Dictionary of Programming Languages ]
http://cgibin.erols.com/ziring/cgi-b....pl?_key=Limbo

I did a search before hand to see if anyone had posted any of this info before or had talked about Plan 9 , Inferno & Limbo I got no results. Hope that you guys find this post useful.

What do you guys think about the Plan 9 OS, Inferno and Limbo ? Does anyone on this board have any experience with any of these ?

[spurious_inode]

Plan 9 is pretty cool. Don't believe the hype though, it is _very_ Unix-ish despite attempts to make it
seem like a completely different OS.

-- spurious