This is a quick-start guide to the user interface of the Plan 9 operating system based on my own experiences getting started at Coraid. For concreteness, it describes the setup actually used at Coraid. Some knowledge of UNIX and of commercial GUIs (Windows, MacOS, or recent Linux) is presumed.

This is not a technical guide to Plan 9. This is only a “guide for the perplexed” to teach you just enough Plan 9 to get you started.

The information given here is not complete my goal is to give you a useful subset. Thus I will skip some menu items and commands at every stage, the ones you do not need immediately. I assume that you will eventually read the official documentation

Plan 9 is an experimental UNIX-like operating system developed by Bell Labs and released as open-souce freeware. It has requirements comparable to Windows 95 (e.g., 32 MB RAM on a 486) and is often used in embedded systems.

That is bad Latin for, “More UNIX than the UNIXes themselves” (cf. Romanis ipsis Romanior) and sums up what Plan 9 is like. Plan 9 is based on the same ideas as early UNIX simplicity, compactness, and orthogonality but implements some of them differently, in ways that are (I would argue) closer to the spirit of UNIX than normal present-day UNIX implementations. Specifically: Instead of NFS, SAMBA, etc., there is normally just one file-sharing protocol, called 9P, and it is transparent to the user. You just carry your whole….

Download pdf A Plan 9 Newbie’s Guide