9fans archive / 1998 / 10 / 65 /    prev next

From: steve Simon steve-nospam@sav...
Subject: [9fans] 8.5 for NT available ?
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 20:21:00 GMT

Hi,

I sent something similar to this before but that was during the broken
comp.os.plan9 phase and I never saw a reply, I apologies if you have
already seen this.

I love plan9, but, I have to use NT for work.

I love having the Win32 version of SAM and the few utilities that come with
it, but, I have problems.

The NT version of the rc shell does not notice when many (most ?) DOS
commands exit so I can only use ls, cat, echo, rm, sort, fmt and wc - This
is a bit limiting.

I also miss 8.5 and wish I could have a 9wm like application under NT.

So...

Does anyone understand exactly how Win32 applications inform their calling
program that they have exited, the old MSDOS interrupt is obviously not
sufficient?

Is anyone working on a 9WM like program for NT, or even know if it is
possible (without breaking support for MSOffice and the like)?

Do I have to just grin and bear it and use MKS/UWIN/GNU utils or is there a
nicer way to live?

I suppose it all comes down to asking if there is any chance of getting a
copy of the Plan9 compatibility C library that was used to port the above
utils - object only would do though source would be nice :-) This way I 
could recompile my Plan9 sources myself.

Is this library is part of the NT port of Inferno and thus off limits? If
so could Forsyth sell me a copy as his company is a reseller?

-Steve