Installing Plan B on Qemu (Plan 9 wiki)

John Floren, 2007-06-19

This document describes my experiences installing Plan B on Qemu, specifically under Windows Vista. Note that, while this will let you run omero and other Plan B applications, not everything seems to be perfect. Most notably, /who and /mail are a little incorrect.

1) Install a standalone Plan 9 terminal under Qemu. Just use fossil, no need for venti.

2) From your new terminal, download the Plan B tarball from http://lsub.org/ls/export/planb4e.tgz using hget. Save it to $home.

3) Run "con /srv/fscons" and type "srv instfs", then hit ^\ and type q to quit.

4) "mount -c /srv/instfs /n/inst" We do this because you can't uncompress things directly into /

5) "cd /n/inst && tar xzvf $home/planb4e.tgz"

6) In my case, the omero that was included in the tarball wanted special fonts that I didn't have, so I recompiled it from source, which can use Plan 9 fonts. Do the following: 9fs sources mkdir $home/omero cp /n/sources/contrib/nemo/sys/src/cmd/omero/* $home/omero/ cd $home/omero mk cp 8.out /bin/omero

6) Okay, here's where I'm not quite sure about the procedure. You need to specify where your root comes from, but it's unclear where the config file goes. I created /lib/ndb/vol/vols with the following line: /srv/vfossil main/active / / To be safe, I copied that file to /lib/ndb/vol/volumes, /lib/ndb/volumes/vols, and /lib/ndb/volumes/volumes. Only one of these files is correct, but I'm not certain which it is--haven't bothered to test.

7) Run "cd $home/tmp && fossil/conf /dev/sdC0/fossil > fossil.conf" to get a copy of your current fossil config.

8) Edit the fossil.conf file to look similar to mine: fsys main config /dev/sdC0/fossil fsys main open -AWP -V -c 1500 srv bfs srv vfossil fsys main srv -p cons srv fossil and write the new configure file with the command "fossil/conf -w /dev/sdC0/fossil $home/tmp/fossil.conf"

9) Run "9fat:" and edit /n/9fat/plan9.ini to look similar to mine (you may need to change some options): bootfile=sdC0!9fat!9pcf bootargs=local!#S/sdC0/fossil bootdisk=local!#S/sdC0/fossil init=/386/bin/bns planb=yes sysname=zaphod #change this to match your config fs=127.0.0.1 auth=127.0.0.1

nomp=1
nodumpstack=1 partition=new dmamode=ask mouseport=ps1 monitor=xga vgasize=1280x1024x8

10) Go ahead and reboot, selecting root from local and user "glenda". You should get a standard rio screen, but if you sweep out a window and run "omero", everything should work properly.

That's all I know! If any of these instructions don't work properly, contact me at slawmaster AT gmail.com.