[9fans] Installation keyboard troubles

[9fans] Installation keyboard troubles

[sqweek]

 Hi guys, I've had a little experience with plan9 via p9p - went to
try out the real thing today but ran into some issues.
 I have a USB keyboard[1] and USB mouse[2]. My BIOS doesn't have any
explicit PS/2 emulation option for USB keyboards, but it does have a
"USB Keyboard support via" option for which I can select OS or BIOS. I
have it set to BIOS so that I can type stuff at the LILO prompt
(otherwise the keyboard is unresponsive until linux boots).
 If I choose install when booting off the iso (which I downloaded 2
hours ago), rio loads up with three windows visible, the top one
suggesting that I go onto fsconfig, but I can't move the mouse or type
anything. The display isn't locked up - the graphs in the lower left
continue to update, but not even ctrl-alt-del gets a response so I
just have to hard reboot.
 If I boot off the iso, it's a different story - the keyboard works
fine. I still can't get the mouse going, but I don't exactly know what
I'm doing - I just tried usb/usbd followed by usb/usbmouse with no
arguments (when that didn't help I tried "cat /dev/mousein", which
returned immediately...).
 Any thoughts?

[1] Happy hacking keyboard lite 2
[2] Logitech trackman wheel

Re: [9fans] Installation keyboard troubles

[erik quanstrom]

yes,

perhaps this demonstrates that i don't understand what i was
supposed to do, but i had trouble with a usb mouse when i got
a new machine in october.  my solution was to set
	mouseport=usb
in plan9.ini and modify termrc to use this for mouse startup
rather than the traditional code:

[...]
	if(test -f /dev/mousectl && ~ $mouseport ps2 ps2intellimouse 0 1 2 usb){
		if(~ $mouseport usb)
			usbstart
		if not
			aux/mouse $mouseport
		# parse vgasize into fields
		vgasize=`{echo $vgasize}
		if(! ~ $"monitor '' && ! ~ `{cat /dev/user} none)
			aux/vga -l $vgasize
		if(~ $accupoint 1)
			pipefile -dr /bin/aux/accupoint /dev/mouse
	}


- erik

Re: [9fans] Installation keyboard troubles

[sqweek]

On 1/28/07, erik quanstrom <quanstro@coraid.com> wrote:
>         if(test -f /dev/mousectl && ~ $mouseport ps2 ps2intellimouse 0 1 2 usb){
>                 if(~ $mouseport usb)
>                         usbstart
>                 if not
>                         aux/mouse $mouseport

 Inspired by this code, I tried entering some gibberish at the
mouseport prompt instead of just hitting enter, and suddenly the
keyboard worked for the install.
 So, two hours and one recovery from having my partition table crapped
on (thank you testdisk) later, I have plan9 installed. Tomorrow I'll
see if I can convince lilo to boot it and check out the usb stuff.

 But OK, the partition thing deserves some attention. I'm actually
somewhat impressed and somewhat horrified at the same time... Here was
my setup prior to the plan9 install (9039 cylinders total):
PRI1  0001-8633 Extended
PRI2  8634-8756 Linux swap
LOG5 0001-0032 Linux /boot
LOG6 0033-2465 Linux /home
LOG7 2466-4333 Linux /usr
LOG8 4334-4956 Linux /var
LOG9 4957-5081 Linux /
LOG10 5082-5144 Linux /tmp

 So I went to give plan9 about 5G of logical partition at 5145-5775
(IIRC I entered p8 as the partition name in plan9's fdisk, which may
have marked the start of my problems). This is what I ended up with:
PRI1  0001-5144 Extended
PRI2  5145-5775 Plan9
PRI3  8634-8756 Linux swap
LOG5 0001-0032 Linux /boot
LOG6 0033-2465 Linux /home

 And that's it, logical partitions 7-10 where nowhere to be found
(linux wasn't to happy when it couldn't find its root device). So
plan9 shoved the swap partition out of the way and made a new primary
for itself (this is the impressive part). Fortunately, after restoring
the missing partitions and booting back into linux it hasn't mounted
/dev/sda2 as swap and pissed all over the plan9 install. I think that
makes the score Linux: 1 Plan9: 0 sqweek: -1.

 I'm not sure whether it's the partitioning step that did me in or the
boot setup. Since I don't have windows and couldn't be assed looking
for a floppy, I hit plan9 at that step, which may have been what
motivated it to put itself on a primary partition.

Re: [9fans] Installation keyboard troubles

[erik quanstrom]

with a complicated partition arrangement, i would run the partitioning
part of the installation by hand.  (you can always open a new rio window
during install.)  i've never attempted to dual boot plan 9 -- it
has always seemed an unnecessiary complication to me.

prep(8) should have information you'll need to (sub)partition things
by hand.

another option, if you have a spare disk is to put the plan 9 boot
partition (you only need <100MB) on one disk and put all the other
plan 9 stuff on a raw disk -- that is, one with no dos partition table.

as outlined in the manual pages, the plan 9 boot partition needs to
contain a pbs, 9load, plan9.ini, and your kernel.

also, you could create a boot cd image to boot into plan 9.  i've
built such a beast, but it's painful and i don't have the details
handy.

- erik