plan9

My first plan9 system is installed.

The installation went smoothly on a somewhat old system (Celeron w/96 MB RAM).
I tried running it on an even older system (you can install it on 32 MB RAM) but it didn't
detect the videocard properly.

You can just follow the instructions from the installer and you'll be up and running in short time
(little less than two hours in that hardware, but the disk is really slow).

I was amazed at the fast boot procedure, but reading the docs, it just loads a very minimal kernel
(read this) and you can load additional servers on demand.

The main ideas about plan9 is that everything is a file.
If you're like me, you might say 'I thought everything was a file in UNIX already'
Go read that link where they explain what's wrong with UNIX's model of 'everything is a file', and how it's broken.

As I said, everything is indeed a file in plan9, and files can be accessed regardless of their location (local/net).

If I'm not making much sense yet, it's because I'm still figuring this out myself, and because I haven't got much sleep in the last two days (You gotta be interested in OS design in order to try plan9, but you really gotta be interested in os design in order to try a new OS while a 5 month old baby is on the house!).

Still, I managed to take a screenshot just to document my first system, and I already broke it, too. I can't connect from my gnu/linux box anymore. Apparently I fucked up keyfs, which is good, really; I learned many things about UNIX by fucking things up too..

Here you can see me surfing the mysql-ha site using abaco, one of plan9's browsers.
As you can see, the goal of the system is not to be used as a desktop (though several people at bell labs use it as their only system..). In fact, the recommended way to browse the web is to vnc to another (non plan9) node and use that browser.

However, I'm not interested in using this as a desktop, but rather as a platform to develop service monitoring solutions, and as a way to learn more about OS design.

Don't worry, though, I won't discontinue mysql-ha anytime soon :)