Can someone help out a newbie ?

[Matthew David ALDOUS aldous@mundil.cs.mu.oz.au]

Hiya, I've got some general installation questions,
and think if I explain my situation, someone might be
able to fill me in on what to do.

I have a spare pc or two on our local network here on which
I can install plan nine. I also have a few spare Personal Iris's
and about 40 or 50 sun 3/50's. I would like to configure the
Personal Iris's as CPU/FILESERVER machines, and have the diskless
sun 3/50's running off them. Numerous people here have expressed
interest in getting plan9 working.

However, when it comes to installing the ethernet card, I only
have an NI6510, (every machine at uni here does practically - it's
the only thing we're allowed to buy) - but I noticed it might
do NE2000 (and there's only NE2100 - is that right? something like 
that.) - I can only assume it might work.

When it boots, I get the screen, I follow the stuff in the manuals.

I *have* the CD - and want to install it over the network. (The PC's
I can do this to don't have CDroms in them.) - Is this possible?

I'd love to try to get the networking started, but I hit a dead wall
when it came to editing the file. I guess I'm a new enough admin 
that I don't know ed really that well. (Yoikes) - I've grown up
on vi. Never touched that emacs stuff ;) Throughout the manual
it refers to just "editing" the file - but for those of use
who don't know ed that well, eek. So I turned to sam, and when
I started it, I got a window at the top of the screen, and another
window down the bottom. Then I look through the manual on how to
use sam, and I'm stuck. *thud*

Before I go further, is it possible for me to do what I want to
do? One thing I have noticed that struck me as odd, was that if 
I do an lc, or anything that goes longer than the screen, the screen
doesn't scroll down. I have to use the mouse to move it down. Is
this normal?

Oh, and is it possible to have it boot directly from your harddrive
instead of loading dos? (It was damn hard finding a DOS machine - 
all the PC's around here run NetBSD or Linux.)

ltr.

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