Successful Plan 9 Installation

2010/8/17

Playing with the Plan 9 operating system (or Inferno, Plan 9's virtual
machine-based offspring) has been a long-time low priority project for
me that I had high hopes of finally moving forward when I adopted my
father-in-law's old PC (rechristened 'jii').

However, experiments with several distributions showed the old Fujitsu
desktop machine seemed finicky about the operating systems it would
run. Plan 9 itself froze in the middle of booting from the live CD. On
those OS's I could get to 'take' on the PC (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Ubuntu
Server (MS Windows would presumably also run again if I wanted to
bother with it, though I don't want to play with Plan 9/Inferno THAT
badly)), I couldn't get any more of Inferno running than the rc
command line.

I'd almost given up and settled on running Ubuntu Server on jii, but
decided there wasn't enough fun in having Ubuntu on both my PCs and
yesterday decided to give Plan 9 one more chance. Surfing the
Internet, I discovered the magic words for starting the live CD (and
installer) with a generic video driver. This did the trick, so now I
have jii humming along as a Plan 9 box.