[9fans] dual-boot 9 on a laptop standalone

[9fans] dual-boot 9 on a laptop standalone

[Stephen Wynne]

After a long hiatus, I'm thinking about trying Plan9
on my primary computing device, a Toshiba Tecra 8100 with
a Xircom Cardbus Ethernet II 10/100 NIC.

My old PCs, which I had collected for running Plan9
services, are turned off. They are back in their boxes, and
are gathering dust. I'll probably ditch them soon.

But what about just running on a laptop by itself for
tinkering with Plan9 filesytems and development tools,
reading mail, and surfing the web? If I dual-boot,
I can run Win2k at work and Plan9 at home, right?

1. Will I be happy without any other Plan9 systems in my life?
    I presume the Wiki talks about how to live standalone. I
    presume I can tinker with filesystem servers running on the
    laptop and mapping them there.
2. I have a Win2k install that looks like this:
        [C:\ FAT boot partition]
        [logical slices for Linux]
        [D:\ NTFS Win2k partition]
    Can I back it all up with ntbackup and restore it
    after repartitioning for Plan9? I want Win2k on
    D:\WINNT so all my apps will continue working.
3. What are my choices for web browsing these days?
4. Will the Xircom work?

Any other words of wisdom would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve

Re: [9fans] dual-boot 9 on a laptop standalone

[steve.simon]

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I use a a PII 400Mhz laptop at home which I dual boot NT4.0 and Plan9
on. I use a 3Com 3c589 10BaseT Ether PCMCIA.

Web browsing, you can use mothra (very small but very few features),
or load inferno and run charon - which is pretty complete these days,
no flash or realplayer though.

The disk layout sounds OK, Plan9 cannot access NTFS partitions (correct
me if I'am wrong) but it cann modify your c: fat so you get a blue-screen
boot option for plan9, and it will read/write files on the C: partition
so you can pass data to win2K.

Alternatively you could use vmware though that costs.

-Steve (with a minus :-)

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From: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] dual-boot 9 on a laptop standalone
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 00:58:04 +0100
Message-ID: <1207692333@snellwilcox.com>

After a long hiatus, I'm thinking about trying Plan9
on my primary computing device, a Toshiba Tecra 8100 with
a Xircom Cardbus Ethernet II 10/100 NIC.

My old PCs, which I had collected for running Plan9
services, are turned off. They are back in their boxes, and
are gathering dust. I'll probably ditch them soon.

But what about just running on a laptop by itself for
tinkering with Plan9 filesytems and development tools,
reading mail, and surfing the web? If I dual-boot,
I can run Win2k at work and Plan9 at home, right?

1. Will I be happy without any other Plan9 systems in my life?
    I presume the Wiki talks about how to live standalone. I
    presume I can tinker with filesystem servers running on the
    laptop and mapping them there.
2. I have a Win2k install that looks like this:
        [C:\ FAT boot partition]
        [logical slices for Linux]
        [D:\ NTFS Win2k partition]
    Can I back it all up with ntbackup and restore it
    after repartitioning for Plan9? I want Win2k on
    D:\WINNT so all my apps will continue working.
3. What are my choices for web browsing these days?
4. Will the Xircom work?

Any other words of wisdom would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve