[9fans] Display problem

[Wynand Winterbach <wynand@dip.sun.ac.za>]

First a bit of useless history (may be skipped):

Originally I heard about Plan 9 in a CS lecture at uni.
The lecturer was raving about how cool it was, but that
it wasn't "object oriented" etc. In my ignorance I dismissed
it (what a stupid mistake).

A while ago I read Eric Raymond's "The Art of Unix Programming",
and I read about Plan 9, but he spoke about it as if it was
more or less dead.

Then the other day I stumbled across it on the Net, and started
reading more. The more I read, the more excited I got.

I have to tag down to my local cyber cafe for internet access,
since I'm a poor student, and net access is comparatively
expensive in South Africa. However, I was adamant that Plan 9
must be the coolest thing since sliced bread, and I blew a
few bucks to download the distro.

----

Greatly excited, I installed it, and the installation went
well. After that is where things however went awry...

When I boot up, everything goes well until it starts up Rio.

It prints 3 lines (where pc differs for each):
fifo stat 0 scrio dc000000 scr 80304C74 pc 80171E9C
fifo stat 0 scrio dc000000 scr 80304C74 pc 80171E9C
fifo stat 0 scrio dc000000 scr 80304C74 pc 80171E9C

then it prints character by character (SLOWLY):
dossrc: serving #s/dos

After this it continues in its slow char by char mode, and prints the
previous line (the one starting with fifo).

I assume this line is a debug line, and that pc is the program
counter?

Anyhow, nothing happens after that :(

I have a classic Athlon, a Via KX 133 (I think) motherboard, which
uses the 82C686 IDE chipset, and an Nvidia TNT 2 - according to the
Wiki, this setup should work flawlessly. I tried to replace the TNT 2
with an old ATI board (I don't know which one it is. A Rage board I
think) - this allowed me at least to see a highly corrupted version of
the window manager, but it was pretty useless.

I'm really disappointed, since this OS seems so cool.  If anyone has
any short (less than 160 characters) suggestions, please send them to
0824576827@voda.co.za, which will deliver a text message to my mobile
phone :).

Thanks in advance.

--

Wynand Winterbach
wynand@dip.sun.ac.za

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    COMMERCIALISM RANT   COMMERCIALISM RANT   COMMERCIALISM RANT

Consumerism = bad. Why? Comsumers are meant *only* to consume.
What can I do!?
Go the Open Source way:

1. General info
  http://www.libresociety.org
  http://www.gnu.org

2. Music, Movies, and other media
  http://www.locarecords.com
  http://creativecommons.org
  http://www.free-music.org

3. Software
  http://www.gnu.org
  http://www.linux.org
  http://www.debian.org

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