Plan 9 install notes

[Michael Bravo mbravo@alcatel.spb.su]

Hi,

16 Oct 95, 9fans@cse.psu.edu writes to Michael Bravo:

 9pe> The message that follows details all the things I wish I'd known
 9pe> before I started installing Plan 9 from CDROM on a PC.  If you've
 9pe> been using Plan 9 for more than a couple of hours, it has no value
 9pe> for you - quit now.

In fact, any details like these are valuable. My personal opinion is that if we 
have a trial version, then we have to try things out and share the experiences.

To throw in my $0.02 worth -

1) As I already mentioned a while ago, there is a discrepancy between the 
statements about 4-meg usage and real life. You cannot install in 4 megs - 
system runs out of memory, and I do not know of any way you can avoid that 
(enable swapping?). However, when you install in 8 megs, you can then run on 4 
meg system.

2) There's a whole lot of strange things with aux/mouse. On one occasion, it 
didn't recognise my mouse as 3-button. On my brother's system, it refused to 
recognise the mouse at all, saying 'unknown mouse type'. He fized it by 
removing the 'mouseport' statement from plan9.ini altogether, and after asking 
about the moe port on startup, it worked. I have heard that there are switches 
for aux/mouse, allowing to force mouse type, but man page doesn't list any.

 9pe> The main disadvantage of the PC version of Plan 9 is that it has
 9pe> no knowledge of the standard partition table, which means that it
 9pe> doesn't play nicely with other OSes.

I agree, and also, you have no way to verify partition integrity, both for 
Plan9 and for previously installed systems.

And as a final note, I think that not including ppp client in a trial 
distribution put out on Internet is pretty cruel :) HHOS

/\/\ike                               PGP public key  67C4EA8EEBF67C51
                                         fingerprint  2C8B78790C8ADCDC

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