[9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[Unix]

Hello Plan 9 fans.

I just downloaded the Plan 9 iso to test on my Compaq AP550 Professional 
Workstation. I decided to boot it off CD just to see how much is 
detected hardware wise since I have a few upgrades in the workstation. 
It stopped a few times upon boot, I had to change to 
sdC0!cdboot!9pccd.gz to get Plan 9 to boot off CD (Pioneer DVR-107D at 
ata0-master PIO4) then when it tried to setup the graphics card it 
kicked me into term% mode since it couldn't use my vga settings with a 
Matrox MGA G550 AGP, I suppose it's not supported..I haven't tried to 
install it yet on my hard disk since I wanted to see if it would run on 
this PC..I don't have a spare PC left, the hard disk btw, is running off 
an Adaptec 1200 H/W raid controller IDE...Is there any way to get this 
setup to run and if yes how and is there any way to triple boot this PC, 
I currently have the following setup: FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE on 40GB drive 
ata2-master UDMA100, Solaris 10 on an 80GB ata2-slave UDMA100 drive and 
was thinking I could put Plan 9 on a 6 GB Maxtor IDE to work with it a 
bit. I currently have everything boot through the FreeBSD bootloader.

Thanks.

Domi

Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[Christoph Lohmann]

Good day.

There is an experimental ISO at 9grid.de[0], for testing, if VESA works
or not. It can be booted as LiveCD used for trying out Plan 9. The other
possibility is to use Drawterm[1] for connecting to 9grid and so try out
Plan 9 as user. Booting Plan 9 from the FreeBSD bootloader should work,
as there is a standard bootloader in the 9fat partition, in the Plan 9
installation, the ATA HDD should be supported by now and can be seen on
the CD boot, by the "dev A* ..." lines after "ELCR: ...". Each of them
is a IDE device, that was found.

Sincerely,

Christoph

[0] http://www.9grid.de/plan9/plan9vesa.iso.bz2
[1] http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/p9/ (drawterm-*.gz)

Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[Anselm R. Garbe]

On 8/12/05, Unix <unix@dominique-werner.com> wrote:
> this PC..I don't have a spare PC left, the hard disk btw, is running off
> an Adaptec 1200 H/W raid controller IDE...Is there any way to get this

I own(ed) that frking crappy controller as well, it's based on some
Highpoint 366/370 chipset, but is not detected by plan9 (including the
experimental vesa and daily ISOs of 9grid.de). When 4th Ed of plan9
was released, even Linux didn't knew that frking controller by default
- only the BSDs worked out of the box by that time.

In the meantime I throwed this controller out of the window (which you
cannot even use for RAID0 in a "hardware" setup, it is actually
incomparable with a real SCSI RAID controller) and switched back to
the onboard ide driver which is recognized by plan9 and all other
OS'es so far.

I highly recommend NOT to use any IDE-hardware-"RAID" at all...
there're better software based solutions...

Regards,
-- 
  Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361

Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[Ezequiel Reyes]

I downloaded the vesa-enabled iso image, and it works well everywhere I have
tested it, being various desktop machines and my dell laptop with nvidia
card. Of course, I can only have a configuration of 1024x768x16 max (My
laptop card allows 1600x1200x32 max). I can use and install plan 9 from the
vesa iso with no video problems, but I would like to know if the iso is and
will be mantained in sync with the latest plan 9 changes so that I know I
could download it in the future and use an up to date system. I have a very
slow internet conection, I can only download the iso from time to time. Are
there plans to insert the vesa driver in the official iso? Or better, plans
to get a basic nvidia driver in the future? In the former case, I am using
it with no problems, so if it is in experimental state, it is very stable
already.
  Thanks.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christoph Lohmann" <20h@r-36.net>
To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 8:31 AM
Subject: Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?


> Good day.
>
> There is an experimental ISO at 9grid.de[0], for testing, if VESA works
> or not. It can be booted as LiveCD used for trying out Plan 9. The other
> possibility is to use Drawterm[1] for connecting to 9grid and so try out
> Plan 9 as user. Booting Plan 9 from the FreeBSD bootloader should work,
> as there is a standard bootloader in the 9fat partition, in the Plan 9
> installation, the ATA HDD should be supported by now and can be seen on
> the CD boot, by the "dev A* ..." lines after "ELCR: ...". Each of them
> is a IDE device, that was found.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Christoph
>
> [0] http://www.9grid.de/plan9/plan9vesa.iso.bz2
> [1] http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/p9/ (drawterm-*.gz)
>

Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[Anselm R. Garbe]

On 8/12/05, Ezequiel Reyes <ezequiel.reyes@newhotel.co.cu> wrote:
> I downloaded the vesa-enabled iso image, and it works well everywhere I have
> tested it, being various desktop machines and my dell laptop with nvidia
> card. Of course, I can only have a configuration of 1024x768x16 max (My
> laptop card allows 1600x1200x32 max). I can use and install plan 9 from the
> vesa iso with no video problems, but I would like to know if the iso is and
> will be mantained in sync with the latest plan 9 changes so that I know I
> could download it in the future and use an up to date system. I have a very
> slow internet conection, I can only download the iso from time to time. Are
> there plans to insert the vesa driver in the official iso? Or better, plans

Yeah, please include the vesa driver asap into the official ISO. Many
interested people won't drop their attempts to get in touch with rio
after booting into text mode and nothing works...
Btw. including the radeon driver, which seems to be not available at
the moment, could also be very helpful.

Regards,
-- 
  Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361

Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[Christoph Lohmann]

Good day.

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:25:25 -0700
"Ezequiel Reyes" <ezequiel.reyes@newhotel.co.cu> wrote:

> 9 from the vesa iso with no video problems, but I would like to know if
> the iso is and will be mantained in sync with the latest plan 9 changes
> so that I know I could download it in the future and use an up to date
> system. 

Actually it is not updated with the ISO generated every day, because it is
experimental. As of this request is the generation of the VESA ISO now in
the everyday cronjob of the standard ISO. Only the kernel sources are not
updated, as the sources in /n/sources/contrib/rsc/9/* are from 20th April
and no real patch exists for including VESA into the current kernel.

Sincerely,

Christoph

Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[Russ Cox]

> Yeah, please include the vesa driver asap into the official ISO. Many
> interested people won't drop their attempts to get in touch with rio
> after booting into text mode and nothing works...

It will be done as soon as possible, but not for a few months.
In the fall I am going to slowly merge in the changes in
/n/sources/contrib/rsc, one by one, with sufficient testing
periods inbetween to isolate problems.  Things beside vesa
are different in that code, and some of those things break
existing card support.

> Btw. including the radeon driver, which seems to be not available at
> the moment, could also be very helpful.

Jmk has a Radeon card (either a 9200 or 9600) with DVI
output.  If someone sends him a Radeon driver that works
on that card, then it will go into the distribution.  Until then,
it won't.  That's been the story for probably a year now
but no one has done it.  Are you volunteering?

Russ

Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[Anselm R. Garbe]

On 8/12/05, Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yeah, please include the vesa driver asap into the official ISO. Many
> > interested people won't drop their attempts to get in touch with rio
> > after booting into text mode and nothing works...
> 
> It will be done as soon as possible, but not for a few months.
> In the fall I am going to slowly merge in the changes in
> /n/sources/contrib/rsc, one by one, with sufficient testing
> periods inbetween to isolate problems.  Things beside vesa
> are different in that code, and some of those things break
> existing card support.

Thx

> > Btw. including the radeon driver, which seems to be not available at
> > the moment, could also be very helpful.
> 
> Jmk has a Radeon card (either a 9200 or 9600) with DVI
> output.  If someone sends him a Radeon driver that works
> on that card, then it will go into the distribution.  Until then,
> it won't.  That's been the story for probably a year now
> but no one has done it.  Are you volunteering?

I'd like to, but I'm not experienced in graphics adaptor drivers yet -
and I only own a Radeon 7500 card, which is known to work with the
driver which already existed somewhere.

Regards,
-- 
  Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361

Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?

[Ezequiel Reyes]

Thanks, I thing it is great to have vesa in the standard iso. Newcomers like
me to plan 9 will apreciate very much being able to use rio from the
begining. I like plan 9's window system, it is simple, small and elegant and
give you the general feeling and philosophy of plan 9 at first sight. It is
a very good welcome for new users looking to experiment and try plan 9. Some
years ago I tried plan 9 for the first time, but there was no way to get
graphics working so I gave it a time, now I can start experimenting again
and having used the system for some days and can say I am pleased.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christoph Lohmann" <20h@r-36.net>
To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 9:47 AM
Subject: Re: [9fans] New to Plan 9, boot and install on Compaq AP550?


>
> Actually it is not updated with the ISO generated every day, because it is
> experimental. As of this request is the generation of the VESA ISO now in
> the everyday cronjob of the standard ISO. Only the kernel sources are not
> updated, as the sources in /n/sources/contrib/rsc/9/* are from 20th April
> and no real patch exists for including VESA into the current kernel.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Christoph
>