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Last modified Fri Dec 14 20:56:10 EST 2012
These instructions are for a x86 based PC. See the Supported PC hardware page.
Find an x86-based PC with:
These are requirements for the installation procedure. A machine with 16MB of memory and no free disk space at all will work fine as a terminal net-booted but won't be able to run the installer.
If you wish to install from local media, you need a FAT file system or a CD-ROM drive. If you wish to install over the internet, you need a supported Ethernet card or a PPP dial-up account using a modem.
There is nothing magical about installing Plan 9. It's just a matter of populating a Plan 9 file system (typically a fossil file system) and arranging a bootstrap to eventually load a Plan 9 kernel that can use that file system as its root.
Once that initial file server is running, enabling authentication and pxe booting (bootp and tftp) will allow all other local Plan 9 systems to load kernels from the file server and share its file system.
If you find yourself reinstalling Plan 9 frequently, something is wrong. This should not be necessary. In particular, there is no need to give each Plan 9 system its own file system.
Download the ISO from plan9.bell-labs.com or from a local mirror. See the download page.
(NOTE on vmware fusion for Mac OS X, you probably want to use SCSI disks as the IDE emulation makes Plan 9 difficult to boot at this time. SCSI on the other hand works VERY fast for booting and installtion)
Cold boot (power off, power on) your machine using your CD. You will be given the choice of installing Plan 9 or just booting a full Plan 9 system directly from the CD.
Booting the system directly lets you explore the system without installing and also makes a good recovery CD.
The installer on the CD assumes that your CD-ROM is on the second IDE master. If your CD-ROM is elsewhere, you will see the following error:
Unknown boot device: sdD0!cdboot!9pcflop.gz Boot device: fd0 boot from:
IDE/ATAPI drives in Plan 9 are named like sdD0, where the capital letter is C for the primary IDE interface and D for the second. The digit is 0 for the master and 1 for the slave. So if your CD-ROM is the primary slave, use sdC1:
boot from: sdC1!cdboot!9pcflop.gz
If you find yourself at a "boot from:" prompt or a "root is from:" prompt, it is likely that the bootstrap program has not detected your floppy drive. See installation troubleshooting.
You will be asked if DMA should be enabled for your ide drives, the default is 'yes', only answer 'no' if you had problems during the installation with DMA enabled.
You will be prompted for a "mouseport"; if you have a USB mouse ignore this prompt, you won't have mouse support during install, but that should be OK.
Last you will be asked for your vga settings, the default resolution is the safest option and should be enough to run the installer, you can change this later once the system is installed.
Note: If you know your videocard is not supported, answer "vesa" when prompted for a monitor type.
If your video card and resolution is supported (or you selected vesa) the window system will start.
Otherwise you will be dropped into a % prompt. To start the installer in text mode run:
% inst/textonly
The installer is the same in text and graphical mode, but graphical mode is a bit more friendly.
In graphical mode the window system (rio(1)) will display a grey screen with some windows. The large upper window contains the install process itself. The window under it, is a running log of what has happened. A statistics graph is in the bottom corner; the graph, from top to bottom, shows system load, memory usage, interrupt rate, system call rate, context switch rate, and ethernet packet rate.
Interaction with the installation program is textual and you don't need to interact with rio during the install process. For systems with very small screens, you may find necessary to use the keyboard's arrow keys to scroll the window up and down.
When you are prompted to provide information (e.g., an IP address) or asked to select from a list of choices (e.g., the disk to use), the prompt will be of the form
Your choice (foo, bar, baz, quux)[quux]:
When there is a small list of possible answers, they will be listed in parentheses. If there is a default choice, it will be given in square brackets and pressing enter will select this default.
The installation program is structured as a sequence of tasks that must be performed; some tasks have successful completion of others as prerequisites.
At each step, you will be shown the list of completed tasks and the list of tasks that are ready to be done. Task names appear in parentheses in the text that follows. Typing <control-d> at any prompt will abort the current task and return you to the main menu.
(Configfs) Fossil(4) is the Plan 9 fileserver. Venti(8) is an archival block storage server. You may run fossil on its own or as a write buffer backed by a Venti server. The primary value of using Venti is to store daily snapshots of your filesystem (see yesterday(1)).
(Partdisk) First you need to setup a partition for Plan 9. If you want to boot Plan 9 directly or via a boot loader like LILO or the Windows boot menu, you need to allocate a primary partition. If you are content to boot from a floppy disk or from DOS via ld.com (see 9load(8)), you can use a secondary partition.
The install process will scan your disk devices and give you a list of them, along with manufacturer identification strings and the disks' partitions tables. For example:
The following disk devices were found. sdC0 - WDC AC36400L * p1 0 2709 (2709 cylinders, 19.53 GB) FAT32LBA empty 2709 3266 (557 cylinders, 4.01 GB) p3 3266 3807 (541 cylinders, 3.90 GB) BSD386 s4 3807 4367 (560 cylinders, 4.03 GB) LINUX s5 4367 4368 (1 cylinders, 7.38 MB) LINUXSWAP empty 4368 6201 (1833 cylinders, 13.21 GB) empty sdD0 - IDE-CD ReWritable-2x2x63.014VO07982013140700210 Disk to partition (sdC0, sdD0)[no default]:
The Plan 9 names for storage devices have the form sdXX. The names sdC0 and sdC1 are the master and slave on the primary ATA controller; sdD0 and sdD1 are on the secondary, and sdE0, sdE1, sdF0, and sdF1 are on additional ATA cards. SCSI devices are named sdNT, where N is the SCSI controller number and T is the SCSI target number.
Once you have chosen the disk, you will need to create a Plan 9 partition. To do this, the install process will run the Plan 9 fdisk program and let you partition the disk. If the disk does not already have a Plan 9 partition, fdisk will suggest one by creating (but not writing) a partition in the largest contiguous empty space it can find. For example, you might see:
cylinder = 7741440 bytes * p1 0 2709 (2709 cylinders, 19.53 GB) FAT32LBA ' p2 2709 3266 (557 cylinders, 4.01 GB) PLAN9 p3 3266 3807 (541 cylinders, 3.90 GB) BSD386 s4 3807 4367 (560 cylinders, 4.03 GB) LINUX s5 4367 4368 (1 cylinders, 7.38 MB) LINUXSWAP empty 4368 6201 (1833 cylinders, 13.21 GB) empty >>>
Each line contains a partition name (p1, p2, p3, and p4 are the only valid primary names; s1, etc. are the only valid secondary names).
Fdisk also shows the starting and ending cylinder, the size of the partition, and the type of partition. Note that partitions include the starting cylinder but not the ending cylinder. >>> is the prompt. Typing h or ? at this prompt will print the help message. In this example, the * next to p1 means that p1 is the active partition (i.e. the one used when booting from the disk), and the single quote (') next to p2 means that the partition table entry for p2 is different from what is on the disk; that is, changes have been made but not written. In this example, fdisk has created p2 in what was previously unpartitioned space.
If you agree with fdisks' proposal, you need only type w to write the changes and then q to quit fdisk. Otherwise, you can edit the table yourself, using the "a pN" and "d pN" commands to add and delete partitions.
Create the Plan 9 partition and quit fdisk.
See prep(8) for more information on using fdisk.
(Prepdisk) Plan 9 partitions are further subdivided into named partitions. You need to use disk/prep to create partitions named 9fat, fossil, swap and if you selected fossil+venti arenas and isect, disk/prep will suggest a sensible layout.
Note that 9fat must be at the beginning of the Plan 9 partition in order to boot.
See prep(8) for more information on using prep.
(fmtfossil) You will be prompted for the fossil partition to format, which should have been created in the previous step.
(Mountfs) You will be prompted to choose a fossil partition to install onto (and which will hold your data). The default should be the partition you formatted in the previous step.
(Configdist) Now you have to select where the distribution archive will be obtained from: local media or the network. If you are installing from the CD select 'local' and skip ahead to the next section.
If you choose the network, you will be stepped through setting up an ethernet or PPP connection and then downloading the archive.
If you are using Ethernet, you can enter your IP configuration manually or via DHCP. If you choose to enter the configuration manually, be sure to have your IP address, network mask, and gateway IP address.
If you are using PPP, you will have to choose a serial device and connection method. You can choose to dial and log yourself in or to have Plan 9 dial and use CHAP to log in (this is how the stock Windows PPP client connects, for example).
If you choose to log yourself in, you will be dropped into a conversation with the modem. Dial, log in, and once PPP has started, type <control-d>. You may need to type <control-m> rather than <enter> to get a response from the modem.
If you use CHAP, the install process will prompt for a phone number (exactly as you would dial it yourself, with any necessary prefixes; numbers only), user name, and password. It will then dial and initialize the connection.
(Download) Once you have a network connection, run the download task to download the archive from http://plan9.bell-labs.com to the file system mounted in the last step, in the directory /dist. If the download is interrupted and you start it again, it will pick up where it left off. If you restart the installation program after downloading the archive, you may need to tell mountdist where it is.
Once the download is complete, you may wish to run the task stopppp to hang up your PPP connection. Similarly, stopether will deactivate your Ethernet connection.
(Mountdist) If you downloaded the archive, the install program has written it to /dist on your chosen partition. The install program will run mountdist with this information for you, so you can skip to the next step.
Otherwise, mountdist presents you with a list of FAT (DOS, Windows), ISO-9660 (CD-ROM), and Plan 9 file systems that it can read. You must choose a file system and then point out the directory containing the archive.
The archive may be in one of three forms:
When prompted for "Distribution disk" the usual value is /dev/sdD0/data (but your CD drive may be a different sdXX).
Once you have chosen a file system, you need to point out the directory containing the archive. Type a slash-separated path name relative to the root of the chosen file system. If you type ``browse'' instead of a directory name, you will be dropped into a minimal shell that you can use to find the files. Specifically, the shell has three commands: ``cd dir''; changes directories, ``lc''; prints a columnated list of files for the current directory, and ``exit''. Once you are in the directory containing the archive (or if you give up the search), exit the shell.
(fmtventi) If you selected fossil+venti you will now be prompted for the arenas and index (isect) partitions usually created during the 'prepdisk' step, in that case the default values should be all you need.
Note that this step can take a long time with slow disks or qemu.
(Copydist) Once the archive has been located or downloaded, selecting unpack will extract the distribution archive to the newly created fossil file system. The log window will display the name and size of each file as it is extracted. This takes anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour depending on the speed of your computer and disks.
(Bootsetup) The first time you run bootsetup, it initializes the 9fat configuration partition with the appropriate bootstrap code as well as a modified version of your plan9.ini from the boot floppy or CD and a 9pcf kernel.
In order to boot into Plan 9, another bootstrap program must locate this partition, read plan9.ini, and boot the kernel. There are a number of ways to make this happen, all selectable from the bootsetup menu. If you wish to use more than one method, simply run bootsetup multiple times.
The boot methods are:
(Finish) Choosing the finish task will halt the file system and print a message saying it is safe to reboot your computer.
Using whatever methods you configured in the bootsetup stage, boot Plan 9.
At the user prompt, type glenda. Logging in as glenda will bring up a reasonable environment with some more descriptions of the system to get you exploring. Once you've logged in and gotten used to the system to create other accounts see adding a new user.
Note: if you have changed things so that your machine boots using a plan9.ini on a FAT partition, rename it so that the new installation doesn't get confused. The installation only edits the 9fat partition.
When you boot, look for the line
using sdXX!9fat!plan9.ini
It should say 9fat!plan9.ini; if it says dos!plan9.ini or dos!plan9/plan9.ini, 9load is still finding your old plan9.ini and will be confused.
If you have configured a fossil+venti system, you might now get error messages like
ventiSend vtWrite block 0xa failed: not connected to venti server
Your fossil does not know where to find venti. Make sure to add the following line to your plan9.ini:
venti=/dev/sdC0/arenas
if you have configured your arenas on sdC0 - this should point to where you have configured your arenas to be. See plan9.ini(8) for details. To edit plan9.ini, run
9fat: sam /n/9fat/plan9.ini
If you used the default screen resolution in the installation you will probably now want it changed. The settings are contained in plan9.ini on the 9fat partition. To access it, run
9fat: sam /n/9fat/plan9.ini
and modify the values for monitor and vgasize are desired. Monitor must be set to one of the names defined in /lib/vgadb. Vgasize is of the form HRESxVRESxDEPTH. See Setting the right monitor size and plan9.ini(8) for hints. If you make a mistake, boot Plan 9 off the installation CD and edit plan9.ini as described above. Also note that many video devices are only supported at a color depth of 8 bits or less.
When you want to turn off your computer, you need to halt the file system(s) so that all unwritten data is flushed to disk. (If you don't do this, the file system will perform a disk check next time it boots and may or may not have kept the last few changes you made.) To do this type
fshalt
Then turn off the computer or type Ctl-Alt-Del or "^t ^t r" to reboot
Of course this is not needed for net-booted terminals, in that case it's safe to just turn off the power.
You might want to configure your system's timezone. Figure out in which timezone you are, and then, assuming e.g. you are in the CET zone:
log in as user adm, then:
cp /adm/timezone/CET /adm/timezone/local
or you may need to create a new timezone information file e.g. /adm/timezone/India, by copying a relevant file from the /adm/timezone files:
cp /adm/timezone/Japan /adm/timezone/India sam /adm/timezone/India
After edititing, the above should show:
IST 19800 IST 19800
now you may:
cp /adm/timezone/India /adm/timezone/local
Last, but not the least, you may also want to edit/change the TIMESYNCARGS in your /rc/bin/termrc or /rc/bin/cpurc; for example, to use an NTP service, set it to:
TIMESYNCARGS=(-n pool.ntp.org)
and reboot.
