Introduction to Plan 9

Plan 9 was once intended as successor to Unix, for which making only takes two minutes. The FQA introduces about its history, installation, use, networking setup, etc.

History

AT&T Bell Lab released the first four editions of Plan 9 FQA 0. 9Front is a community fork and continued development with a free license FQA 1.

Installation

Let’s install it on an x86_64 virtual machine for example. Download the cdrom image 9front-xxxxx.amd64.iso.gz from https://9front.org/iso/. Decompress it. Refer to qemu system invoation for its usage.

# create a 2GB qcow2 disk
qemu-img create -f qcow2 disk.qcow2 2g

# start a x86_64 virtual machine with 2 CPUs and 2GB memory
qemu-system-x86_64 -hda disk.qcow2 -cdrom 9front-xxxxx.amd64.iso -smp 2 -m 2g --enable-kvm

Follow instructions in FQA 4 Installation Guide. After booting of the cdrom, in Plan 9, type inst/start to start installation. At the end, in Plan 9 type fshalt to shut down the virtual machine. Now,

qemu-system-x86_64 -hda disk.qcow2 -smp 2 -m 2g --enable-kvm

Use

Type man in Plan 9 to view manual pages, or search for “man plan 9” online.

In the manual pages, intro (1) gives the overview of everything. rc (1) is the shell.

Refer to UNIX to Plan 9 translation. For example, the equivalent of curl or wget is hget.

There is no localhost in Plan 9. Use $sysname. ls /env to list all environmental variables.

To add a user, refer to FQA 7.3.1 Adding Users.

Plan 9 can set up a machine as file server or diskless terminal FQA 7.1. booting (8) is the overview of the bootstrapping procedure. plan9.ini (8) is the configuration file for the entire system. cpurc (8) or termrc (8) are boot scripts e.g. for setting up resident services.