standalone plan9

[Bob Kummerfeld bob@cs.su.oz.au]

    From:	quanstro@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu (Erik Quanstrom)
    Date:	Mon, 1 Nov 1993 23:26:08 -0500
    To:	<9fans@cse.psu.edu>
    Subject: standalone plan9
    
    i know that rob et. al. were spotted at a recent usenix
    conference sporting [34]86 laptops (or so i've heard).
    so i'd like to know 
    o is this included on the cd?
yes
    o is anybody using this
yes
    o this implies that the laptop is running the 
      fileserver, cpuserver and terminal software. is this
      possible to pull off on a sun or sgi?
yes
    
The cpu & terminal server versions of Plan9 are essentially the same.
You can have a local disk on your terminal and run kfs to get local
files. We have done this with a Sun 3/50 with 70meg disk.

I have a Compaq LTE/25E laptop. This is has a full 486 (low power
version), 12meg memory, 209meg disk, ethernet, serial, parallel and PS/2
mouse port. It also has an active matrix mono screen that is excellent - it 
added $AUS2k to the price :-(

I chose the machine after a long evaluation of the contenders and the
choice was based mainly on the screen quality.

I have a small DOS partition on the hard disk and the rest is for plan 9
using kfs for the files. It was learning experience to configure the
system that I recommend - not difficult but lots of "ah ha!". I now
understand the system much better.

I carry the machine in to work, plug into the ethernet and then can
mount our main file server and cpu to our main cpu server.  I attended
INET93 and Interop in San Francisco a month or so ago and was able to
plug into the ethernet in the terminal room and use it *exactly* as if
I was in my office at home in Australia: mounting the file server,
running cpu etc!

Bob