From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:52:05 +0000 To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Can't find CD-ROM From: "Eris Discordia" Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; delsp=yes; charset=iso-8859-15 MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <140e7ec30802062352x26255504ha0d54596b954f8b8@mail.gmail.com> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Opera Mail/9.23 (Win32) Topicbox-Message-UUID: 52945e98-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:52:19 -0000, Chris Saunders wrote: > Tried QEMU but it wouldn't run on my system. I'm running Vista > Ultimate > 64-bit and perhaps QEMU doesn't run on a 64-bit system. > That should not be a problem, I guess. My platform is Windows XP x64 Edition, essentially Windows Server 2003 64-bit Edition, on a P4 with EM64T (similar to AMD64). And the 32-bit QEMU binaries have posed no problem. There have been problems "emulating" Vista on QEMU, but none running QEMU on Vista. Please note that setting up QEMU may take a little bit of effort. The procedure I went through was like this: 1. Install the QEMU 32-bit binaries using this installer: http://www.h6.dion.ne.jp/~kazuw/qemu-win/Qemu-0.9.0-install.exe, no need to install KQEMU drivers as they will not work on 64-bit Windows. 2. QEMU adds itself to your PATH environment variable. To check this, run cmd.exe and type "qemu" (without the quotes, of course). If all is OK, QEMU will run and output a help message. 3. Create a directory to store all your Plan 9 tidbits, with a short name preferably as you are going to type it quite a few times, "C:\Plan9" for example. Make sure you have at least 1 GB of space on the partition you have created the directory in. I will assume you keep both the Plan 9 ISO image and your virtual hard disk image in that directory. 4. Run cmd.exe (the Command Shell) and navigate to the directory you just created. There, create a virtual HD image like this: "qemu-img create -fmt raw mydisk.img 3G" which tells QEMU to create a VHD image in raw format with a size of 3 GBs (I tried larger numbers at first, but they would end up in useless files for no apparent reason). Now you must have the file "mydisk.img" in your current directory. Double check by doing "qemu-img info -fmt raw mydisk.img" and reading the output carefully. 5. Type and execute this at your command line: "qemu -hda "mydisk.img" -cdrom plan9.iso -L "c:\Program Files (x86)\Qemu\pc-bios" -boot d" which will run QEMU with "mydisk.img" as your VHD and the Plan 9 ISO image (plan9.iso) inserted in your virtual CD-ROM drive. It will boot from the ISO image. I have assumed that your QEMU installation is in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Qemu" in which exists the "pc-bios" directory containing the BIOS image necessary for bootstrapping the QEMU virtual machine. 6. If no other problems emerge, you will get to the Plan 9 install/live system and do as you already know. Installation may take up to an hour, because QEMU's disk emulation is (for reasons I do not understand) very slow. When Plan 9 installation is done and the installer tells you it is safe to turn off your computer, press [ctrl]+[alt]+[2] to switch to QEMU's virtual console and therein type "q" to stop its execution. 7. Now, you may run the installed system with this command line: "qemu -hda "mydisk.img" -L "c:\Program Files (x86)\Qemu\pc-bios" -boot c" which boots the VM from the Plan 9 installation on "mydisk.img" and hopefully gives you a working system. 8. To ease the task of running your system, you may want to put the command line in (7) in a batch file and run that instead. For information on QEMU, read the pretaining documentation which tell you all the important things in a very clear manner. Have two things in mind, however, first not to "turn off" the VM without giving an fshalt command to Plan 9, second that all the VM's settigns (barring the most fundamental ones) can be controlled by pressing [ctrl]+[alt]+[2] and getting to QEMU's virtual console, where you may type "help" to get some help (that was obvious, nah?). Pressing [ctrl]+[alt]+[1] takes you back to your running system. 9. Good luck. 10. The commandments are ten. -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/