Download the image

Download for example 9front-<build>.amd64.iso.gz from https://9front.org/iso/, then decompress with

gzip -d 9front-<build>.amd64.iso.gz

Start Plan 9 in qemu

Simply do

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -drive format=raw,file=9front-11091.amd64.iso

If installing Plan 9 remotely, the graphical user interface will be served over the vnc protocol. By default the vnc in qemu listens on IPv6, but many home routers do not work on IPv6 yet. We re-configure vnc to listen on IPv4. For the <ipv4> below, the private IPv4 address (of the virtual machine in AWS) or 0.0.0.0 would suffice.

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -drive format=raw,file=9front-11091.amd64.iso -vnc <ipv4>:0,password=on -monitor stdio
QEMU 8.0.5 monitor - type 'help' for more information
(qemu) set_password vnc <password>
(qemu) q

The <ipv4>:0 would map to port 5900, <ipv4>:1 port 5901, so on and so forth.

With a VNC client connect to vnc://<public_ipv4>:5900. The <public_ipv4> is the public IPv4 address of the machine running Plan 9. Type in the password configured in qemu monitor.

To install Plan 9

The installation disk is read-only. One has to install it in order to do and save work. The next post has more on that. Note we will start the installation disk with more CPU and memory.