FOSS.IN/2007 - Talk Details

Speaker Name	Anant Narayanan
Organization	Malaviya National Institute of Technology
Type	Talk
Scope	Technical
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Abstract	GNU/Linux, the most popular free operating system today, has its roots in UNIX, the operating system developed at Bell Labs way back in 1969. Although a lot of changes have been made since UNIX's modest beginning, the fundamentals remain the same - especially because GNU/Linux strives to achieve POSIX compliance. Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a radically new approach to operating and distributed systems. Unencumbered by requirements such as ANSI or POSIX compliance, the authors were able to take full advantage of modern technology made available to us since UNIX was first conceived. Some the most distinguishing features of Plan 9 that we will discuss in the talk are: 1) All resources as files. 2) Per-process namespaces. 3) Synthetic file-systems and the 9P file protocol. 4) Intrinsic distributed computing support. 5) The Plan 9 programming environment. We will also briefly tackle a few other features such as the graphics sub-system, window manager and network programming. The primary aim of the talk is to reach out to the developer community and educate them about the Plan 9 environment, and discuss why it is far easier, more fun and an entirely refreshing experience to develop applications for Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Pre-requisites	Fundamental UNIX concepts and beginner-level programming experience.
Speaker Profile	Anant is a student at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur. He is actively involved as a developer in several open source projects such as Gentoo Linux, PHP-GTK, PEAR and GNU Parted; besides a few of his own. He has successfully participated twice in the Google Summer of Code, the latest edition of which got him involved with the Plan 9 from Bell Labs community. Anant is also a technical writer, and has written several articles on FOSS related topics in a variety of international magazines; besides conducting tutorials at local user groups and contributing documentation to free software projects.

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