[9fans] New to Plan9: Greetings and Questions

[9fans] New to Plan9: Greetings and Questions

[Rick Henderson]

Hello all, I spent most of my evening reading through so posts from the last
few days, this is my first time to the list. Hi!

In my day job I teach Java tutorials for a 2nd year Advanced Datastructures
course at a Canadian university, and for last weeks tutorial a student
asked, "What is Unix anyway? I keep hearing about it but don't know what it
is."

Now, not to comment on the low quality of today's education, but this was
week 6 of a course where the students were expected to do all their work on
a Solaris workstation and all our tutorials are in our Solaris lab... but
thats beside the point. So we had a grand old talk about unix and who built
it and other developments in the OS world. So when I went back to my office
to get my facts right, I came across Plan 9.

So here I am. Got it installed today and before I get too involved in the
comings and goings of Plan 9 Philosophy, I just need some help getting it to
run well on a P2 266 with a crappy monitor:

If I'm using the glenda account and the windows manager is running (rio,
right?) is there a way I can change the resolution down to 640x480? At
800x600 I get the last 2 inches of my screen going all fuzzy (like I said,
crappy monitor but Win98 worked ok with the right drivers..its a Daytek).

It also seems to have major trouble refreshing the screen, so I can't even
read most of what is going on in Acme and I end up with copies of the
right-click menu left all over the place. I can do a little work with the
term% window, but only if I resize the window. Is there away I can run the
glenda user without rio? using %kill rio doesn't seem to really do anything
major, except the processes appear to no longer be running (from ps).

I apologize for the new questions, I had a little experience in Unix/Solaris
but forgot most of it when I started taking teaching seriously. Besides I'm
normally teaching 1st year students how to use Word/Excel and Access. ( I
don't know how I make it thru the week either.)

Thanks,
    Rick
PS: Love the bunny.

Re: [9fans] New to Plan9: Greetings and Questions

[nigel]

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Alter the environment variable vgasize to be 640x480x8 in plan9.ini.

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From: Rick Henderson <rick.henderson@sympatico.ca>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] New to Plan9: Greetings and Questions
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 09:54:00 GMT
Message-ID: <BA74759F.4D9D%rick.henderson@sympatico.ca>

Hello all, I spent most of my evening reading through so posts from the last
few days, this is my first time to the list. Hi!

In my day job I teach Java tutorials for a 2nd year Advanced Datastructures
course at a Canadian university, and for last weeks tutorial a student
asked, "What is Unix anyway? I keep hearing about it but don't know what it
is."

Now, not to comment on the low quality of today's education, but this was
week 6 of a course where the students were expected to do all their work on
a Solaris workstation and all our tutorials are in our Solaris lab... but
thats beside the point. So we had a grand old talk about unix and who built
it and other developments in the OS world. So when I went back to my office
to get my facts right, I came across Plan 9.

So here I am. Got it installed today and before I get too involved in the
comings and goings of Plan 9 Philosophy, I just need some help getting it to
run well on a P2 266 with a crappy monitor:

If I'm using the glenda account and the windows manager is running (rio,
right?) is there a way I can change the resolution down to 640x480? At
800x600 I get the last 2 inches of my screen going all fuzzy (like I said,
crappy monitor but Win98 worked ok with the right drivers..its a Daytek).

It also seems to have major trouble refreshing the screen, so I can't even
read most of what is going on in Acme and I end up with copies of the
right-click menu left all over the place. I can do a little work with the
term% window, but only if I resize the window. Is there away I can run the
glenda user without rio? using %kill rio doesn't seem to really do anything
major, except the processes appear to no longer be running (from ps).

I apologize for the new questions, I had a little experience in Unix/Solaris
but forgot most of it when I started taking teaching seriously. Besides I'm
normally teaching 1st year students how to use Word/Excel and Access. ( I
don't know how I make it thru the week either.)

Thanks,
    Rick
PS: Love the bunny.