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

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

[Jim]

I only use computers at home, mostly for developing friendships on the
Internet, and helping family members with their use of the Internet,
multimedia and home office applications. I also use the home office
and multimedia applications a little bit myself.  We all use Windows,
but I've been trying for years to switch to a free software system. A
few days ago I learned about Plan 9 from someone in a Linux Questions
forum, and now I'm learning how to use it. It's installed on on my
Toshiba Satellite A45-S150 laptop, along with XP, Wubi Ubuntu, Debian
and Slackware. I've learned to use Acme and edit files on a fat
partition, created a new user with administrative privileges, and
changed the display font.

My only connection to the Internet is through a wireless connection to
my family's router network, and I haven't learned yet how to connect
from plan 9 with my Atheros wlan card. I'm using Slackware to post
this now. I'd also like to learn how to change my display resolution,
or how to change the font in Acme. If I ever get connected to the
network I'll need to learn how to access files on a Vista laptop. I'll
also need to either find a browser, some home office applications and
a photo manager for Plan 9, or learn how to run those applications on
the Vista laptop over the network from my Plan 9 laptop.

Later, I'd like to experiment with distributing the system between my
laptop and my wife's laptop.

I found a link to a newbie guide on this list, which I'm planning to
study, and I'm planning to study the man pages for all the commands
that I find in /bin.

It would be nice if someone could point me to some step-by-step
instructions for Plan 9 dummies, for a wireless connection to a DHCP
router network, changing the display resolution or the Acme font,
browsing the Web, and accessing files and running applications on a
Vista laptop. I'd also welcome any other ideas about learning to use
Plan 9.

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

[blstuart]

> 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 :)
> and accessing files and running applications on a
> Vista laptop. I'd also welcome any other ideas about learning to use
> Plan 9.

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

[blstuart]

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

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

[Steve Simon]

> 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.

cifs(1) (cifs client) is alive and well at contrib/install steve/cifs

I use it every day at work, its only (known) limitation
is that its DFS client can only follow intra-server links.
You can work around this by mounting serves as you need them
and bind(1)ing over the broken DFS link.

-Steve

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

[blstuart]

>> 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.
>
> cifs(1) (cifs client) is alive and well at contrib/install steve/cifs

I happily stand corrected.

BLS