Connecting from other OSes
DRAWTERM
drawterm(8) is a program that non-Plan 9 systems users can use to establish graphical cpu(1) connections with Plan 9 CPU servers. Just as a real Plan 9 terminal does, drawterm serves its local name space as well as some devices (the keyboard, mouse, and screen) to a remote CPU server, which mounts this name space on /mnt/term and starts a shell. Typically, either explicitly or via the profile, one uses the shell to start rio(1).
Xfree86 drivers for some video cards assume that masks (stipples) have height equal to a multiple of 8. This causes drawterm to display blanks instead of glyphs with some fonts. Try the -b argument to drawterm if you see this problem.
The sourcecode and precompiled binaries for various OS's can be downloaded from http://swtch.com/drawterm/
V9FS
See v9fs for further details.
9PFUSE
9pfuse provides a userspace fuse driver for mounting 9p filesystems. It is available in many unix-related operating systems. A typical command to mount a fs via 9pfuse:
9pfuse 192.168.1.199:20000 /home/linda/9pimport
For authentication and support for protocols like import plan9port provides versions of factotum(4) and other utilities.
HUBFS
hubfs is a 9p fs which can be used in combination with 9pfuse or other ways of accessing 9p. It provides functionality like screen/tmux to allow persistent shells from both Plan 9 and another operating system to be shared back and forth.
9VX
See 9vx for details. In 9vx you can use the standard utilities like cpu(1) or import(4)