Plan 9 From User Space For Linux

Plan 9 From User Space is a port of the bulk of the Plan 9 software build environment to Unix.

While the libraries make an attempt to play nice with the rest of the system (by using the Unix rules for printf verbs and Unix system headers, for example), this port tries to reproduce the Plan 9 build environment as faithfully as possible, providing u.h and libc.h, and blithely redefining tokens such as open, dup, and accept in order to provide implementations that better mimic the Plan 9 semantics.

The result is a more complicated and less Unix-friendly environment, but Plan 9 programs can typically be compiled with little or no changes.

Most obviously, plan9port derives from Plan 9 from Bell Labs and would not exist without the work of the Plan 9 team over the past many years.

Rob Pike suggested the original X11 port of libdraw years ago, as part of drawterm, and strongly encouraged the Mac OS X work. He has also been a consistent source of good ideas to hide the ugliness of modern Unix.

William Josephson handled troff(1) (with Taj Khattra) and many of the supporting programs. He also inspired the thread library clean-up and has ported a handful of applications.

Andrey Mirtchovski and Axel Belinfante have done significant work dealing with X11 corner cases and fine-tuning rio(1). Axel never tires of finding bugs in the SunOS port.

Latchesar Ionkov has contributed many fixes to tricky bugs, and got factotum(4) up and running.

Many other people have provided help, ported programs, written bug reports, sent useful patches, and gotten plan9port running on new systems.

Bigelow & Holmes, Inc. created the screen fonts in the luc, lucm, lucsans, and pelm directories and granted permission to redistribute them with plan9port.

What's New in This Release:

� Almost everything has been updated since the last freshmeat announcement, from the new venti backup system to the new upas/fs mailbox interface. � The most recent major feature is a native GUI for OS X.