So instead of doing something useful and needed (like gardening!) during a few hours off last week I decided that what I really needed to do was install plan9!
A few months back I got various Windows NT VMs and OS/2 VMs running. Then Haiku (a port of BeOs) the other week and now this….!
I started with the last “official” build of Plan 9. This was difficult and I had to abandon it as I just could not get it sufficiently configured to launch Rio (the window manager). However, further googling shows that there is a port of plan9 called 9front. This is under continual development and the build I installed was just a few months old. Under QEMU (using libvirtd) it was a pretty hassle free install.
Once installed I found that there is also a recent port of NetSurf, as the two existing browsers are a few decades behind. Downloading the sources from Git, compiling and installing was quite straightforward. The only hurdle was that text does not auto scroll in terminals. Not a significant hurdle you may think. But I guess due to “everything is a file” when the text reaches the end of the terminal then the process stops working. Here as soon as the build script got to the bottom of the terminal it just stopped compiling. Luckily there is an auto scroll option.
Incidentally you really need a three button mouse. For example to open a new terminal:
I have no idea what I will do with it. But that goes for more or less all the VMs I have. Install, fire up a few times, then never again.