[NTLUG:Discuss] An NTLUG Distro

[David Stanaway]

David Stanaway wrote:
> Chris Cox wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, 2009-04-02 at 10:17 -0500, Daniel Hauck wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> I just read some commentary regarding criticism and Linux.  The original
>>> notion was that Linux needs more critics to keep it moving.  Another
>>> person pointed out that the reason there are so many very different
>>> Linux distros out there is because it is essentially "criticism applied."
>>>
>>> This got me to thinking.  Chris Cox is unquestionably a really smart
>>> fellow with strong views on various things.  I wouldn't think to suggest
>>> this if I didn't think he was smart enough to pull it off.
>>>     
>>>       
>> I'm not that "smart".  It's (Linux) just more a part of my life than for
>> most.  I have thought about a distro project.
>>
>> My idea is a character based distro.  I want to go back to some of
>> Unix's roots and develop better tools that can be used to build
>> better tools... and eventually including a graphical desktop.
>>
>> What does that entail?  Well, unfortunately, it's a radical project...
>> not an evolutionary one.  GNU FSF tools are great, but NOT well
>> designed.  Shoot, there are even parts of the kernel that frustrate
>> me, but I'm NOT a kernel expert.
>>
>> I want to make something more uniform... yet still VERY Unix
>> (but not necessarily messed up Linux) compatible.  Having 3,000
>> command line switches is cute, but not when they don't make
>> any sense.  I would preserve what is mostly portable and
>> extend with frameworks that are easily extended and used to
>> make bigger and better tools.
>>
>>   
>>     
>
>
> Have you tried Plan 9?
>
>   

The reason I ask, is they seemed to have had very similar aims to what 
you have.

*Introduction *

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs 
starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken 
Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were 
joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to 
the present.

Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems 
problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar 
to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign.

In Plan 9, each process has its own mutable name space. A process may 
rearrange, add to, and remove from its own name space without affecting 
the name spaces of unrelated processes. Included in the name space 
mutations is the ability to /mount/ a connection to a file server 
speaking 9P, a simple file protocol. The connection may be a network 
connection, a pipe, or any other file descriptor open for reading and 
writing with a 9P server on the other end. Customized name spaces are 
used heavily throughout the system, to present new resources (e.g., the 
window system), to import resources from another machine (e.g., the 
network stack), or to browse backward in time (e.g., the dump file system).

Plan 9 is an operating system kernel but also a collection of 
accompanying software. The bulk of the software is predominantly new, 
written for Plan 9 rather than ported from Unix or other systems. The 
window system, compilers, file server, and network services are all 
freshly written for Plan 9. Although classic Unix programs like /dc/(1) 
<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/dc>, /ed/(1) 
<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/ed>, and even /troff/(1) 
<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/troff> have been brought 
along, they are often in an updated form. For example, /troff/ accepts 
Unicode documents encoded in UTF-8, as does the rest of the system.

The paper Plan 9 from Bell Labs <http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/> 
gives a more in-depth introduction to the system.


http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/about.html