The VmWare links below are a little old but should still work, however we now use VESA to access the VmWare framestore, and this does not support hardware acceleration. Thus you will need to disable this as soon as you have booted plan9, ideally put the command below in /rc/bin/termrc so it will be done for you.

echo hwaccel off > /dev/vgactl

In VMWare Server (and possibly other versions), although the installation can be done using either IDE or SCSI cdrom drives for the hosted OS, it is necessary to switch the virtual machine's cdrom type to SCSI prior to actually booting Plan 9 from the hard drive.

See Vmware_playground_for_plan9 and vmware4

AUDIO for VmWARE Server

VmWare Server was made to bring up sb16 emulation; however not without some extraneous artifacts in the audio. There seem to be timing problems. Perhaps someone knows a better setting to implement. Here is my setup:

Find your vmx file where the Vmware Guest files are stored: (e.g. /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/plan9/plan9.vmx)

Make sure the configuration does not have a sound card installed by the Vmware wizard.

Then edit your vmx configuration file with your favorite text editor, and add the following lines:

sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "sb16"
sound.baseAddr = "0x220"
sound.dma16 = "5"
sound.dma8 = "1"
sound.irq = "5"
sound.mpu401baseAddr = "0x330"
sound.Opl3BaseAddr = "0x388"
sound.smallBlockSize = 1024
sound.maxLength = 2048
sound.buffering = "10000000000.0"
sound.copyDelayFactor = "1000000.0"
sound.directSound = "false" 
sound.highPriority = "true"
sound.ignoreOverflows = "true"
sound.virtualrealcorrection ="10000000000.0"
pciSound.priorityBoost = "true"

Then boot your Plan 9 guest and add the following to plan9.ini:

audio0=type=sb16 port=0x220 irq=5 dma=5

Before trying the audio feature, you must reboot your Plan 9 guest and once logged in, do:

term% bind -a '#A' /dev

Make sure the rio window covers a significant area of the screen, or otherwise the audio driver seems to give garbage beeps and groans instead of the audio you want.

term % cat a000 > /dev/audio

The audio that comes out is interrupted by short and frequent timing jitters. When you resize the rio window while the audio is playing, the artifacts go away for awhile, but there is a more pronounced interruption during the resizing operation.

Otto Schulze

American Conservatory of Music http://www.americanconservatory.edu