[9fans] third edition, installation experiences

[Scott Schwartz schwartz@bio.cse.psu.edu]

My notes are at home, but here are a few comments from memory.

* The installation instructions didn't say so, but the disk
partitioning programs accept '?' as a command to get some help.  That's
useful to learn that you can use 't' to change a fallow partition to
type PLAN9 (a fallow partition conveniently available, since I had been
planning to install Linux there for the last five years but somehow
never got around to it.)

* When the kernel boots, it says something about 128MB swap.  In the
second edition, the penalty for having less backing store allocated
than the kernel expected was a panic the first time one of those page
frames was written out.  Is that still the case?  The installation
instructions suggest that it should be harmless.

* The system complained about not being able to assign an irq to the
printer port.

* The vga stuff works fine with a #9 771 card.

* The installer is willing to try reading from an ext2 partition, but I
had mixed results with that.  (Ok, linux was recently installed on a
second disk.)  The mini-shell was unwilling to cd into /home, for
unknown reasons.  Putting plan9.9gz into / worked around that.

* If you told the install-floppy-maker that you have ethernet,
but then you use the local media to load the distribution, the ip
information never gets configured, which makes ndb/dns pause a while
before timing out.  Don't panic if that happens.

* It looks like glenda's home directory has a mode 0555 tmp directory
in it, which should be 0777.