Re: [9fans] vaio PCG 505 F - and Plan9 Perfect together?

[Boyd Roberts <boyd@strakt.com>]

Thomas West wrote:
> Has any one installed Plan9  on the subject Vaio?

I have it on a PCG-N505SN, which I think is the European version.

Make sure you have a compatible PCMCIA ethernet card [my kingdom
for a 3c589 PCMCIA card].

I also have it on a PCG-Z600LEK.

It has a graphics card that Plan 9 doesn't support.  Well, it works
but you get large rectangular verticle 'holes' in the windows.  To
defeat this problem during install I just resized the 'install' window
so it was really narrow, defeating the problem.

This doesn't really worry me because it has an on-board i8255x ethernet
card which plan 9 supports and I want to use it as a server [no graphics].

> If so, is the recipie available?

Yes:

    http://home.fr.inter.net/boyd/code/plan9/usbflop.html

Sony seem to chop their disks in 'half':  1/2 for c: and the rest
is unused [presumably for d:] which is fine for a Plan 9 partition.
Should you need to re-install off the VAIO CDs they seem to leave
the 'unused' part of the disk alone;  your Plan 9 is left intact.

I've installed it some small n times on both.

If it's running Windows 2000 getting dual boot to work is probably
not doable.  It is with '98.  I tried it on the PCG-Z600LEK with
the NT dual boot and it took some sort of a fault during installation.
I 'think' 2000 is lot closer to NT than it is to '9x but I could be
wrong or it could be some 'weird VAIO thing' (tm).

I don't care about running 2000 on the PCG-Z600LEK so it always
boots Plan 9.  You can swap between them with disk/fdisk and
some other windows/floopy trickery which I forget.

Both of them are sitting beside me so, if you get stuck mail me.

    http://home.fr.inter.net/boyd/code/plan9/vaios.jpg