Virtual machines

Plan 9 can be installed on a variety of virtual machines. For the moment, this page collects links to the various pages related to the subject.

9VX

XEN

QEMU/KVM

For installation instructions, see

If you configure a cpu server (Configuring a standalone CPU server), you can run it from a terminal by adding a line

console=0
to plan9.ini and invoking the virtual machine with option -nographic. Note that you need to configure Qemu networking to allow connections to the virtual machine.

PARALLELS

See Installing in Parallels Desktop on Mac OS X for installation instructions. There are also some possibly outdated instructions at Plan 9 on Parallels.

Note that <Del> is <fn>+<Bksp>.

VMWARE

VIRTUAL BOX

Note, in particular, the warning about VirtualBox being often broken, with behavior very dependent on exact versions of things. If at all possible, you are advised to use a different VM.

VIRTUAL BOX on OS X

I used VirtualBox 4.1.6 (with a matching extension pack). This is the latest version at present(2011/11/24). Installed a stock plan9.iso (made on 2011/11/12).

Settings:

Other settings may also work.

During installation choose Fossil only (I had lot of trouble with fossil + venti, where it dies very early during distcopy). Everything else was basically defaulted.

Even with just fossil I see fossil write errors once in a while but fossil/flchk doesn't show any errors.

Don't forget to turn on venti on reboot (Yon can use p9p venti -- unless you have a physical machine running plan9, running venti natively on the host is faster). For venti add the following to plan9.ini

venti=tcp!<venti-server-ip-addr>!17034

Use the numeric ip-address for your venti-server. and telling fossil to use venti & set up a regular snapshots

fossil/conf /dev/sdC0/fossil > fs.cfg
ed fs.cfg <<EOF
/open/s/-V/-AWP/p
a
fsys main snaptime -a hhmm -s 1440
.
EOF
fossil/conf -w /dev/sdC0/fossil fs.cfg

Replace hhmm with the time you want to take a snapshot.