plan 9

anyone ever use plan 9 from bell labs?

Actually, no.

But I didn't want your post to pass by without comment.

To be honest, I had never even heard of it...until now that is so thanks for sharing this information.

apparently its somewhat big and is somewhat of a derivitive of unix. i'm just curious because it seems to have some popularity and importance.

I tried to get it going in Vbox, but it wouldn't boot up. Btw, have you seen the screenshots? Looks like windows 3.1

Plan 9 was intended to be the successor to UNIX and fixed a few of its flaws, but so few people use it and develop for it that it is hardly worth using.

Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.

• Eric S. Raymond

wolfen69 said: I tried to get it going in Vbox, but it wouldn't boot up. Btw, have you seen the screenshots? Looks like windows 3.1

It isn't aimed at desktop users. It's for mainframes and servers, just like UNIX was.