Bell Labs’ Plan 9
A new day, a new virtual OS. Last week when I was surfing over the net, I eventually ended on Bell Labs’ site about the Plan 9 Operating System. This is a Unix-like OS, which saw the daylight at the end of the eighties and is being developed until present day. An ISO image can be downloaded from the website, and so I did. Time for a new OS on Microsoft Virtual PC.
After having downloaded the image, you first have to extract the .bz2 archive to make it a usable CD image. Another option is to download the bootfloppy image also, which can use the .bz2 image during installation without having to extract it first. Well, I extracted the .bz2 archive and mounted, euhhrr…. “captured” (as Virtual PC calls it) it as the cd-rom drive.
After the POST massages you are presented with the first screen of the text-based portion of the installation.
As you want to install Plan 9, you select option 1. After that, PLan 9 boots and your hardware scrolls over the screen. What I found amusing was the fact that my Core 2 Dual processor was being identified as a “GenuineIntel Xeon5000-series” CPU:
After this, installation is quite straightforward. Most questions can be accepted with the default suggested value. When being asked for your screen resolution, the default value is 640×400x8 and I thought “That’s quite small! Let’s try something bigger.” And so I entered 1024×768x256, but it didn’t like that and wanted to contiune in text-mode. Ok, let’s accept the default value then.
Graphic mode looks quite nice, especially all the analyzers in the bottom-left corner (I’m a fan of things like that!). The rest of the installation questions I all accepted the default values.
Installation finished, so let’s reboot and see what it is. Unfortunately it doesn’t want to boot, during the boot process I get an error message:
I don’t yet know how to solve this, and in the upcoming days I won’t be having much time to look closer at the problem because of Christmas and so, but as soon as I know how to fix it, I will post it here.
Merry Christmas everybody!