Re: [9fans] Help for a home user discovering Plan 9

[blstuart@bellsouth.net]

Oops: sent too early...  Here's the rest

> It would be nice if someone could point me to some step-by-step
> instructions for Plan 9 dummies,

I don't think such a thing currently exists, but if you keep
notes as you go along, you could provide the welcome service
of writing one...

But there are some general direction to point you in for
these specific things:

> for a wireless connection to a DHCP
> router network,

ip/ipconfig looks for DHCP if you don't give it explicit
address, so that part is easy.  The real challenge is in
the device driver for any given wireless card.  Because
our community is small, we don't have an army of
device driver writers.  So the easiest way to do this is
run Plan 9 along with something else using 9vx, qemu,
Xen, lguest, kvm, virtualbox, vmware, ...

> changing the display resolution or the Acme font,

When running natively, the resolution is set by vga(8)
form the "vgasize=" parameter in plan9.ini.  Acme
takes two command-line font parameters: -f and -F.
Usually, it's started reading from an acme.dump file
where the desired font has already been recorded.

> browsing the Web,

Ah, the web; our thorn in the flesh :)  There is abaco
and Inferno's charon, but neither supports the java/flash/
extension of the week that so many sites seem to assume.
It'd be great if someone wrote a brower that did support
them, but that's not an interesting problem for most of
the people here.

> and accessing files and running applications on a
> Vista laptop.

There's aquarela which is a CIFS server, but I'm not sure
about client.  I seem to remember it being worked on at
one point, but I'm not sure if it was ever completed.

> I'd also welcome any other ideas about learning to use
> Plan 9.

I'll have to leave that to others.  I tend to be interested in
things as objects of study, rather than as things to use.
I just happen to use my objects of study along the way.

BLS