Glendix: Bringing the Beauty of Plan 9 to Linux

"We all know what Linux is, but what exactly is Plan 9? Plan 9, developed at Bell Labs, was supposed to become the successor to UNIX, also developed at Bell Labs. Plan 9 was written from scratch, and made many radical departures from standard UNIX conventions. For instance, in Plan 9, everything really is a file; even the window a program is running in is represented as a file in a hierarchical file system. Every program in Plan 9 sees every possible resource as a file. Plan 9 is also fully distributed, so that parts of the operating system can run on different machines. Plan 9 never made its way out of the research departments, and the reason is fairly simple: UNIX is good enough. It might not be exactly elegant, but it gets the job done."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• LinuxWorld.com: How Apache & Plan 9 will defeat Microsoft�s Passport(Sep 21, 2002)
• LinuxPlanet: Broadening Horizons through Other Operating Systems(Jun 29, 2000)
• BW: Bell Labs Announces Open-Source Release Of Plan 9 Operating System(Jun 07, 2000)