The SDF Public Access UNIX System has opened registration for the Fall Plan9 Boot Camp which begins on September 22nd through December 10th.

This quarter the Boot Camp is a little different in that it now includes access to a shared server in addition to the individual virtual machines.

In 2019, SDF made an effort to incorporate some of the amazing work made by the 9front team and has moved exclusively to plan9front. While the older 9xen instances are still available, the focus is on continuing to move forward as Plan9 develops especially in the light of its release this year under MIT license.

What is Plan9? Plan9 is a UNIX-like experimental research operating system that may be deceivingly familiar at first, but takes different approaches as to the way process environments are constructed and how fundamentally I/O is handled. Things we see in other operating systems as /proc and UTF-8 originated in Plan9.

Why a Plan9 Boot Camp? While it is fun to play around with an esoteric OS on your own, Plan9 really benefits from a communal experience. The goal of the boot camp is to provide a very low barrier of entry to a curious user and immediately put them in an environment where they can experience Plan9 at its best. There are no "stupid" questions or "did you RTFM?" in the SDF Boot Camps. They are friendly experiences with users helping users as we all red pill a bit together.

Can I use Plan9 as my daily driver? Many of us do, in fact, repeat Boot Camp members make use of their VMs with local installs and now with the 9p server, it has deepened SDF's Plan9 offerings beyond the Boot Camps and Plan9 for User Space.