Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

[jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com]

Rob and I had a private mail conversation with someone about VMware
last week. Here's a summary of my input:

The topic of VMware has been popping up for years. The sticking points are
1) ethernet doesn't work out of the box;
2) display doesn't work out of the box.

On 1), I looked at this a couple of years ago and reckoned the AMD79C970
driver we have was 98% ready for it.
On 2), I saw the described patches [source code patch for Xfree86 version 4]
at some point but then forgot where they were by the time the VMware topic
popped up again. From the description it sounds doable.

At one point I even purchased a copy of VMware in order to do those things
but didn't get to install it as I have neither a Win2K or Linux machine.

I think all it takes to get this working is for someone who has Plan 9
already installed and has VMware to do a little hacking, but no one seems
to want to actually do the work. It's not even as if there would be any
compatibility problems with the declaration of 'main' to surmount.

--jim