The Virtual Plan 9 Cook Book

David L. Craig,
document originator

Abstract

A cookbook to install a current Bell Labs Plan 9 system into a fully-virtualized machine running in an X86 GNU / Linux environment, including cpu, auth, and fs services with real network connectivity via a virtual (bridged) Ethernet interface. Some experience with Linux system administration is expected, as well as some exposure to the concepts of virtualization, but no familiarity with Plan 9 or virtual networking is necessary. The goal is to quickly provide a full Plan 9 environment for someone to explore to learn just what Plan 9 is.

Except where otherwise noted, content in this document is licensed under the standard Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Source code (scripts) are licensed under GPLv2.
Glenda image courtesy of Lucent / Bell Labs.
Tux image courtesy of Georgi D. Georgiev, aka "hip0" in his penguins subdirectory – copyright uncertain.

The Virtual Plan 9 Cookbook

You are reading the development version of this document as of September 24, 2014.

The most recent formally released version (alpha) of this document is officially offered at http://dlc.casita.net/~dlc/vp9cb/ while http://dlc.casita.net/~dlc/vp9cb-dev/ is the place to view the under-development version (beta).

You can download the entire directory tarball, current (~25MB) or dev (~36MB) and use a file:///... URL if you want to tweak anything (like the colors—look inside the vp9cb.css file for that stuff).

If the green on black style of the alpha distribution is unconfortable for you like it was for Scott Elcomb, click over to http://projects.psema4.com/plan9/vp9cb/ where he graciously put up a modified mirror that changes the rendition of HTML text to black on white. As you can see, though, the beta version hopefully makes that unnecessary.

Revisons and current document maintainers will be described in the appropriate subsections. Please email any comments or questions about this document to any of the active maintainers so this document can be improved and kept current for the benefit of others. Likewise, if you modify this document yourself, kindly conform to the terms of the licenses. In addition, the favor of a notification of your modifications to the current maintainers is requested so they can document and link that derivation herein, again, for the benefit of others.

Errata

This is a development release, which means it is not yet ready for prime time and will probably be obsolete within a week—updates will be uploaded when that makes sense regardless of how long it's been since the last one. When the development version is ready for formal release, it will lose this Errata item.
This is a beta release—it resolves all issues detected with the alpha release and has no known typos, let alone any that impact the instruction outcomes. Unremediated defects will be noted here and/or in the 9fans mailing list.

Click on the lines following to view their content:

1-3: Intellectual Property Considerations

1-4: Conventions

Section 2: GNU/Linux Host Preparation