Subject: Re: 9term under Linux?

From: "Chaotrope" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 19:25:45 -0500

On 99.01.27

> James A. Robinson <[email-masked]>

replied to

>  Aharon Robbins <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked]

on the

> Subject: Re: 9term under Linux? 

saying
 
> I've got 9term, 9wm, 9menu, wily, sam, and rc working on my 
> system. I really love the interface! =)
> 
> Jim

This plan9 interface that Jim has is exactly what started
me a few months back investigating getting a Linux system even 
tho I swore a number of years ago that I'd no longer spend my 
own money on computer stuff (I've got two closets full of junk 
already!).

I read some articles of Aharon's (Arnold's) in 1995 "Linux Journal"
and had the old R. Pike 'sam' article, and have been 'window shopping'
(where in this case 'window' has nothing to do with Microsoft) with
the intent of maybe putting together some no name x86 system.

So when I read here that Arnold has difficulties, I think, Maybe I'm
over my head, if *HE* has problems, what am I going to run into?! 

Thus far, Debian is the only Linux dist that has p9 emu binaries at
its ftp site (Red Hat has 'sam' only). The NeBSD/FreeBSD people
even have a 'plan9' directory at their ftp sites, just like an
'editors' and  a 'TeX' directory. So I'm leaning toward BSD rather
than Linux just because that indicates to me that these people are
"thinking" along those lines.

So my question is, e.g., Jim, what are you using? Is there a general
consensus on ease of installation, whatever, getting this p9 'look and
feel grafted on top of what version of Unix? Are there known problems
with (obviously) RedHat vs. whatever?

TIA,              - kim

BTW, Aharon/Arnold: I enjoyed your LJ articles enough that I'm
planning to get your AWK book just because I assume it will be well
written also.

---

From: "James A. Robinson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 21:01:28 -0500

> with (obviously) RedHat vs. whatever?

Hi,

I'm using a heavily modified, stripped down, and generally munged
version of RedHat 5.0 here at work. At home I'm running a customized
Slackware 3.0 setup.

I've got a /usr/local/src/plan9 tree on the home machine which has
the source for 9menu 1.4, 9wm 1.2, es 0.90beta1, sam 4.3, 9term 1.6.6,
rc 1.5b2, and wily 0.13.41.  I've fiddled with the various make files
and source so that they all compile without any problem on my box. As
I recall, 9term is the hardest to compile. 9wm, 9menu, the editors,
and the shells compiled without any trouble. 9term now compiles, but it
does tend to give off quite a few "seems to be harmless" errors.

Oh yeah, all the little tools that wily comes with were a pain in the
ass to compile.  But I got win, and tools/shell/* to compile. So, if
people want to download entire 1.0 meg binaries and 2.9 meg source tree,
grab it from

		http://highwire.stanford.edu/~jimr/plan9/plan9.bin.tar.gz
		http://highwire.stanford.edu/~jimr/plan9/plan9.src.tar.gz

The only thing missing from the tars are the Xg unicode fonts. It doesn't
have a clear distribution-rights copyright statement, so I can't bundle
it in the archive.  I'm not even sure where I got them from originally,
so you'll have to hunt them up. =(

If you unarchive both from your root, they will go into

	/opt/plan9/^(bin doc lib man)

for the binaries, and

	/usr/local/src/plan9/^(9menu-1.4 9term-1.6.6 9wm-1.2 es-0.90beta1 rc-1.5b2 sam-4.3 wily-0.13.41)
	
for the source.

Jim