I've managed to install plan9. Finally.  It appears I misunderstood the
error message (messages actually - plural). The problem was that the
hard-drive image I created wasn't big enough. 1GB seems to be enough though.
However my troubles aren't over it seems, since as soon as I log in as
glenda the screen goes blank or white with a bit of garbage (blank when the
mode is 640x480x8, white when the mode is 800x600x16 or 800x600x24)

2010/11/14 Eugene Gorodinsky <e.gorodinsky@gmail.com>

> Hi list!
> I've been trying to install plan9 today, on a qemu vm. When trying to
> install from local the installer seems unable to find quite a few files in
> plan9's src directory. It seems there's some problem with the cdimage. I
> tried booting from the floppy image, but got stuck at the point where one
> needs to enter boot media (it seems I need something of the form fd0!file,
> but I have no idea what file needs to be specified)
>
> Also, when trying to install in qemu from net, the installer cannot
> autoconfigure network from dhcp, and doesn't work on manual configuration
> either (I tried 10.0.2.1 for gateway, 10.0.2.15 for ip and 255.255.255.0 for
> netmask, which should be the correct qemu settings). The boot prompt
> indicates that the virtual network card has been found, though. Has anyone
> tried to do a netinstall of plan9 in qemu?
>