Re: [9fans] installing plan9

[Andries Brouwer <Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl>]

I wrote:

>> the plan9 boot messages show that plan9 gets the ne2000 irq wrong
>> and assumes irq 9 instead of 3. After adding "irq=3" in plan9.ini I get
>>
>> i8259enable: irq 3 shared but not level
>> intrenable: couldn't enable irq 3, tbdf 0xffffffff for ether0

rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com (Russ Cox) answers:

> Add "eia1=disabled" to plan9.ini, and then the serial driver
> won't grab IRQ3 for its own uses.

Thanks! This works.


Second question.
Before getting this answer, I had installed plan 9 by first installing
a small Linux system, getting the plan 9 distribution to a local disk,
and installing from there. Afterwards, floppy boot worked, but LILO
boot failed.

Given this answer, I discarded the 60MB partition with the distribution
(plan9.9gz) and reinstalled via ethernet. This time both floppy boot
and LILO boot worked. Interesting.

Why did booting via LILO fail the first time? The error message was

	Bad format or I/O error
	Press almost any key to reboot...

given by the plan 9 boot sector.
I see 3 differences between the first and the second time:
 (i) during 2nd installation I had asked for a plan9 boot
(apparently all this does is make the partition active;
it gave an error message that the action was useless because
the installation was on the second, not the first IDE disk)
 (ii) the second time the installation was on the first partition,
the first time on the second one (both primary)
 (iii) the first time there was already a nonempty partition on
the disk; the second time plan 9 fdisk was the only one to write
something in the partition table. Linux assigns this disk a geometry
CHS=1057/16/63. Plan 9 wrote a table as if the geometry was 528/16/63.
A bug in plan9 fdisk? Could this influence booting?


So far about the question why booting via LILO failed the first time.
(This installation is not yet usable - in particular the video mode
does not really allow one to do anything useful - so I cannot yet
read the sources.)

Andries