Plan 9 install notes

Plan 9 install notes

[Michael]

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

--- GoldED 2.41

Plan 9 install notes

[jmk]

	> 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.
Which statements about 4Mb usage? The installation doc clearly says 'eight megabytes of
memory'.

Plan 9 install notes

[Will]

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

Note firstly that I very much like what I've seen of plan 9, and
consider the setup to be pretty straightforward; I can remember
a similar learning curve with Unix V7, and before that with CP/M.
The problem is basically one of getting to a working prompt with a
working editor; trivial if you've done it once, not so easy 
starting from scratch with a new type of OS.  MSDOS, after CP/M,
was easy, and so was any other Unix after V7, but Plan 9 is a
new breed of cat, and it shows.

Note also that what follows is my direct experience only, written
while it is still fresh enough to be remembered.  Some of my statements,
tho' correct in the particular, are certainly wrong in the general
case.  And those experienced in Plan 9 will find workarounds to many
of the problems I discuss.

I used a lashed-up VLB system with an Adaptec 1542 controller, which
I knew was supported, a cheap 3-button mouse, an ATI VGA Wonder graphics
card and an SMC EtherEZ ethernet card.  I was doubtful about the
hardware support for some of these, but decided to try it and see.

The main disadvantage of the PC version of Plan 9 is that it has
no knowledge of the standard partition table, which means that it
doesn't play nicely with other OSes.  It seems to need a disk
with one MSDOS partition on it, and *nothing* else; at least, I
couldn't install it with anything else.  Furthermore, trying to 
install the CDROM on a 501MB hard drive showed firstly that the MSDOS
loader needed 2MB, and secondly that the CDROM gave an error message
"insufficient disk space - 23 MB more needed" or words to that effect.
The docs say that 500MB is sufficient, but it looks as if 540MB
(base 2, not 10) is required for automatic install.  The loading
script seems to be compiled into b.com, and can't be edited.

Since I didn't have a larger drive to spare, I installed the 4-disk ftp
set, which was straightforward, and then tried to load the CDROM piecemeal; 
after several hours I could start the CDROM server but not bind to it, and 
had to look for help.  Fortunately I found a message from C Forsyth in the
Plan 9 newsgroup that covered the problem; I'd forgotten that the # 
character in the bind command needs to be escaped with ' from the shell. 
The commands (for a CDROM as SCSI device 3) were:

% disk/kfscmd allow
% 9660srv
% bind -a '#R3' /dev
% mkdir /n/cd
% mount /srv/9660 /n/cd /dev/cd3
% /n/cd/386/bin/disk/mkfs -a -s /n/cd /n/cd/lib/proto/allproto |
    /n/cd/386/bin/mkfs -uv -d /n/kfs

I expected this command to run out of space and crash, but for
the reasons discussed below it went successfully to completion.

Once I had installed the CDROM I could view the partition table with
% /bin/disk/prep -r /dev/sd0disk
This showed the 20MB MSDOS partition, the only entry in the standard
MSDOS partition table, followed by a group of Plan 9 partitions listed
at the end of disk - 1MB boot, 20MB (approx) swap, 512 bytes NVRAM,
480MB (approx) filesystem, and 512 bytes of Plan 9 partition table.
To my suprise, after a full CDROM install du showed around 365MB
of the 480MB used; quite why the install was so picky about having
520MB I don't know.  Furthermore, since Plan 9 is multiplatform
there are large trees for the 386, 68020, Mips and Sparc processors;
if only two of these are needed, say 386 and 68020, the Mips and
Sparc trees can be removed for a saving of around 52MB.  However,
they have to be installed first.  There are other places where
eg. Mips and Sparc code could be pruned, and there are large
sky and US road maps in /lib, so a full system could perhaps be
cut back to around 250MB, certainly to 300MB.

After installing the CDROM in this way over the ftp set, I ended
up with duplicate /bin /dev /env /net and /proc directories, one
set owned by my personal login and the other, like most of the system,
by sys; however, it all worked so I left it alone.

On getting the system running, the first thing that confused me was
that there is no cursor at the 'root is from...' prompt (this is
clearly documented in the manuals).  I rebooted twice before I
realised that this was not yet another install hang...  after
that, it took me a while to realise that the 'none' login had
a shell that pages by default.  Things were complicated by the
fact that my three-button mouse was a Taiwanese clone, which
didn't give the Logitech-format data that Plan 9 needs, so that
the center button was non-functional.  After a bit I realised what
was wrong, and bought a different cheap mouse; this turned out to be
a repackaged Taiwanese clone.  As a temporary measure I used a
two-button Microsoft mouse, with the third button being produced
by <shift-right click>.  I then bought a Logitech First Mouse,
whose packaging scrupulously avoided mentioning Logitech compatibility
and praised Microsoft extensively, but which worked fine.

Since I wasn't sure of the windowing system, never mind the editor,
I worked at the shell (rc) prompt for a while.  Some unix commands
have been ported, but there is no find (du | grep sometimes works
but seems unreliable) and the only editor is ed.  The pager, p, is
limited.  However, cat and sed are available, the filesystem is
automatically checked after an uncontrolled shutdown, and $home
(note not $HOME) works.  The real lifesaver was 'cat readme' in 
the root directory, which reminded me of the command syntax for
a controlled shutdown.  The IBM arrow keys weren't functional,
and there was still no indication of cursor position.

The sequence for entering 8 1/2 on an IBM keyboard is 8-ALT-1-2;
once I had a working 3-button mouse, the windowing system was much
more pleasant to use - for one thing, I could see the cursor.
The ordinary user's rc file sets up windows with scrolling enabled
by default, too, which is nice.  However, moving the cursor to the
current prompt at the end of a window still required voodoo, I'm not
yet sure why - two right clicks on the end of the elevator bar,
followed by pressing enter.  I am unable to fathom the obsession
that windowing system users seem to have with analog clocks.

I was pretty sure that the ATI card wasn't supported, and it worked
at 640x480x1, nothing more. I replaced it with a cheap clone Cirrus
5426 VLB card which handled up to 1024x768x8.  /bin/fb/colors showed
a satisfactory palette.

Reading the Sam paper I saw that 'the cut-and-paste editor is
essentially the same as that in Smalltalk-80' and thought 'Oh, goody'.
However, it's actually easy to learn once you realise that
right click - select file name - right click in main window
displays the current file.  For simple tasks the command interface is
basically that of ed.  For some reason I don't like mouse-driven editors, 
tho' they are so much more versatile than keyboard-driven editors that I 
put up with them; on brief acquaintance Sam looks like a good combination
of mouse and keyboard entry.

Many PC systems are part of a small network using fixed routing tables
rather than a domain nameserver.  I could find no clear example of how
to set up /lib/ndb/local to deal with this case, and I also had problems
with the SMC EtherEZ card.  It was recognised as an 8013 at sign-on, but
I could get no further signs of life out of the network.  I changed the
card to a standard SMC EtherPlus Elite16, and after some tinkering with
the 'local' database could telnet to a neighbouring SVR2 box.  The first
part of the final 'local' file was:

# This server name is a placeholder - it doesn't exist.
dom=
  ns=my.com
  dom=my.com ip=88.88.88.88

#INSTALL this network
ip=88.88.88.81 sys=penny
ip=88.88.88.82 sys=tuppen
#END

ip=88.88.88.83 ether=xxxxxxxx sys=tanner
  dom=my.com
  bootf=
  proto=

The 88.88.88 and xxxxxxxx entries are fictitious, and several of the
above entries are wrong or unnecessary; however, for the time being
they work.

All that got me a working system: logon prompt, editor, and network.
Now all I have to do is learn how it works; but at least the first step
is taken. I hope this note shortens the learning curve for someone else.


Will
cwr@crash.cts.com