[9fans] Plan9 installation

[vdharani@infernopark.com]

Hi,

I was trying to install plan9 this weekend and ran into lot of poblems. I
got many little questions in this exercise. I have listed the
questions/issues below. I will be very happy if you can give your
comments/answers.

- first, where can i get the latest cd image? can i get the latest one in
http://cm.bell-labs.com/magic/9down4e/ureg?haveread=yes&exportok=yes
or
"download the distribution archive" link of download section? or is that
both have the latest nightly build cd image?

- bootsetup seems to get confused many times. i tried with CDROM image and
bootsetup reported errors like "null concatenation" or didnt install 9fat
contents properly or install plan9.ini config lines, etc. everytime i had
one problem or the other. somehow if 9fat already exists or the disk has
some previous data, bootsetup gets confused. it is difficult to predict
what exactly is happening. what is the reliable, predictable way of making
bootsetup do its job? what is more, it doesnt do boot floppy creation
also.

- i tried with another hard disk i had and then i was able to proceed with
fossil+venti installation. it takes a long time but atleast i could
install plan9. i read that venti can work faster if arenas partition
sector offsets are multiples of 16. given that venti attempts to compress
8k blocks, how good is this facility? will it still be beneficial? and
what about fossil? will it be good if it can be on a similar boundary?

- a small routine could put arenas parition (and fossil, if needed) at the
facourable boundary in case of automatic paritioning. can we add the code
as needed to avoid manual work?

- the floppy disk based installation seems to support only fossil (no
venti). is it because the code needed doesnt fit into the floppy disk?

- after i started plan9, i just did "fsys main snap" in fossil console. it
went on for many hours (btw, i havent used fossil before). then i gave the
same command again (thinking this time it is going to just come back
saying "done"). but it is going on and on. what is strange, i even
rebooted the machine. still 'stats' says system is busy. i am wondering
what it is doing. any idea?

any help appreciated.

regards
dharani