[9fans] Beginner question and experiences

[Randolph Fritz <randolph@cyber-dyne.com>]

When I saw the announcement, I had to take a look at this system (I've
been waiting for years), so I downloaded it, and started to install
it.  After some difficulty I got it going on my home system.  It
fascinates me, and I want to continue to work with it (in my copious
spare time, no doubt. :-) I am writing with two questions question and
an account of several problems.  Question one: how do I boot Plan 9
from a primary IDE slave disk (sdC1) with lilo?  I have it working
from a boot floppy, but having it working from lilo would be really
cool. :)

Question two: has anyone tried using Plan 9 to run a rendering farm?
I am working with Radiance <http://radsite.lbl.gov> on a Beowulf
cluster, and it looks to me like it might work better on Plan 9--has
anyone tried this with any rendering software?

Second: problems encountered on the way up.  I am working with the 6/7
release, and have downloaded the upgrades; it may be that some of
these have already been taken care of.

1. I was never able to successfully read an ext2 partition.  On the
   first system I tried (Mandrake 7.1, Linux 2.2.14), the installer
   saw the partition but would never show me files.  On the second
   system, it didn't even see the partitions because...
2. Apparently DOS extended partitions are opaque to the installer.
   This made a major difficulty for me in installing and led me to
   try...
3. Installing from a CD-R, which could only be seen after I switched
   the drive to the secondary IDE master position (scD0).  Before that
   it was in the technically incorrect, but common, secondary IDE
   slave position (scD1) and was not recognized.  I'd installed my
   CD-ROM drive out of the box in that configuration and I'd never had
   any problems with it before this install.  Before I tried that, I
   tried...
4. Downloading (again) using PPP.  I gave this up when the modem
   refused to connect at more than 9600 bps (I believe the installer
   configures the serial port to 9600 bps, rather than the 230kbps
   needed for best results with a 50kbps modem) and the download would
   probably have taken several days. :)

Once the system was working, I was very happy.  Being a crazed ex-QA
engineer, I also noted the following minor problems:

1. The "9fat:" command assumes that the drive is scC0; mine is scC1.
   Is there a configuration-independent way of resolving this?
2. The Mach 64 driver  produces little jittering horizontal
   lines on the right-hand side of the screen with my Rage IIC .  The system is
   functional with them, but they are distracting.

Anyhow, thanks very much for making this technology available!

--
Randolph Fritz
Eugene, Oregon, USA