[tlug] Plan 9 Software Ported to Unix

[Jim Tittsler <jwt-tlug@example.com>]

Thanks to Zev's demonstration last week reawakening my interest in Plan 
9, I decided that exploring it a little bit would be a good 
procrastination excuse.  I don't have a spare machine at the moment 
(and the "Plan 9 on Xen" isn't ready yet) so just doing a Plan 9 
installation wasn't practical.

My first thought was the Wily editor that I had last used 7 or 8 years 
ago.  Wily is a Unix editor patterned after the Acme editor, that still 
has a small but devoted following.  Its original author was a Python 
enthusiast, and Wily was made quite controllable by external languages.
   http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/

A bit more Googling led me to a port of most of the Plan 9 software 
tree.  Not only can I run acme, but sam, plumber, and even rio are all 
available, along with the Plan 9 tool chain.  It all seems to hang 
together surprisingly well in its own tree within my Linux system.
   http://swtch.com/plan9port/
(The current tarball's INSTALL script does not properly make the lib9 
library.  After doing ./INSTALL do:
   cd /usr/local/plan9/src/lib9
   rm getcallerpc-386.o
   mk getcallerpc-386
)

It would be fun to find a couple of junk small form factor machines to 
play with the real Plan 9, but until then this "port" of some of the 
tools is fine for exploration (and procrastination :-).
-- 
Jim Tittsler  7J1AJH/AI8A                            GPG: 0x01159DB6
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