first tries

first tries

[Brian]

Ok, so I tried to install the floppy distribution on one of my PCs today,
and here's what my experiences were (roughly):

9 doesn't seem to want to talk to my Maxtor 7546A drive at all. This is a
plain one-year-old 540MB IDE drive that works fine with linux, so there
shouldn't be any problem with using non-BIOS-oriented I/O. More precisely,
when I booted the first time, it said that it couldn't find my primary DOS
partition, which sure isn't terribly informative, but at least "you will
have to change your hardware configuration" was somewhere close to the
point. After fiddling around with the disk and booting it to a shell, I found
that there's no hint of a /dev/hd0disk, etc, even though #H had been bound.
To make sure that I wasn't going totally nuts, I tried the same floppy on a
variety of other IDE disks (which I can't use at moment because there's
stuff on them). All of the other disks were recognized (/dev entries
showing up, etc), so there's something particular with this one. I don't
know if it's something with Maxtor as a vendor, because one of the other
disks is also a Maxtor. So tomorrow I'll do some shuffling, to see if it
installs ok on another disk.

(I tried the disk on a few different controllers and computers.)

So then to my "opinionated" comments, which may or may not mean anything to
you:

There were seemingly no diagnostics at all telling me if the bind #H failed.
In fact, in cpurc, they're all > /dev/null >[2=1]ed out. I got rid of those
and still didn't get anything. The same goes for the mounts after that,
except that they actually say something when they fail -- they tell you the
command failed (but don't say that they failed because the device didn't
exist). A little more feedback from these commands would have been nice.

The install program looks like the MS-DOS install program (which I grudgingly
had to run for the first time ever today. more on this later.). Admittedly,
I haven't gotten very far into it because of the above, but it's definitely
not my definition of pretty.

And about MS-DOS: I do hope this requirement can be dropped soon. I found
setting up MS-DOS to be quite painful. I can understand the need for
bootstrapping at first (linux and the "others" also had to do the same
thing in the early days), but let's please not get too used to it. :-) In
fact, the linux boot-loader should even be able to boot plan 9 if you
dropped it enough hints on the floor.

It's of course fun to play around a little with the mini-system on the boot
disk. Maybe that's just me.

Last and certainly not least: I (finally) got to see Plan 9 From Outer
Space in a Viennese theater last Sunday. How very excellent! An experience
no one should miss out on.