Setting up Plan9 on Virtual Box

Broken Links (2015-10-28): I’ve noticed that the server I link to is down. I’m not sure why, but it really sucks because that whole website was really interesting. If I notice it back up I’ll update this notice.

Update (2016-01-02): I got a response from the hosts of the server that they had this up a long time ago. Just realized I would say I’d update this bit here if the link worked again.

I’ve always been curious about plan9. I don’t know much about it, but I’m finally much closer to learning about it than before.

I finally downloaded and installed in my MBP into a Virtual Box VM. It uses, wait for it, 64mb of ram and has a 2GB hd and still works great. what.

Yea, it’s also a pretty awesome operating system with all sorts of cool ideas in it.

Also, it has a “Live CD” you can download and play with on the VM. It was hard to find for me, but for you it’ll be easy cause the link is right here: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/download/index.html

One you download and extract the ISO from that page you can just boot from it!

#booting When you’re booting it’ll ask what feels like some weird questions. For the most part just hit enter and it’ll default to normal settings and then you’ll be able to see the plan9 you can see on Wikipedia.

Also about the “weird questions” part: those questions are just revealing some of the power of plan9 in a strange way. For more about plan9 I recommend reading their papers and specifically this one where they explain what plan9 does, how, and why they did it that way http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html

Have fun!