Plan 9 on Raspberry Pi

This is a rough script to install Plan 9 on Raspberry Pi on e.g. a Raspberry Pi.

Obtaining the installation kit

Download the installation kit.

Available partitions

You can run another Linux system and have a USB stick (containing the distribution kit) and an (empty) SD card available. First check the available partitions on your system:

blkid

/dev/sdb1: UUID="E704-D4E9" TYPE="vfat" 
/dev/sdc: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="WEBKIT" UUID="22DA-36EB" TYPE="vfat"

fdisk /dev/sdb

Command (m for help): p

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            8192    61497343    30744576    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Command (m for help): q

Note: Your environment might be different...

Install the Plan 9 on Raspberry Pi system

Now install the Plan 9 on Raspberry Pi operating system on the SD card:

umount /dev/sdb1

mount /dev/sdc /mnt/sdc

ls -l /mnt/sdc

total 598176
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 481976320 Jun 29 22:41 9pi.img

dd bs=1M if=/mnt/sdc/9pi.img of=/dev/sdb

Caveat: all the data from the target SD card will be lost...

Partitions after the installation

fdisk -l /dev/sdb

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1              63      120959       60448+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb2          120960     3782015     1830528   39  Plan 9

Note:

1. Remark that you have plenty of empty space
2. You could create other partitions like Raspbian in a multi-boot environment
3. Other (data) partitions could be added as well

Activating the network

Now you can mount the SD card in a Raspberry Pi, and have a first boot.

To enable DHCP networking you can choose another boot file:

cp /boot/cmdline-demo-net.txt /boot/cmdline.txt

Serial port console access

You might try to have console access. See RPi Serial Connection.

dmesg |tail

screen /dev/ttyUSB0

^az

Unresolved: we would require a getty daemon to get a console prompt...

Internet links

• http://www.quanstro.net/newbie-guide.pdf
• http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Unix_to_Plan_9_command_translation/index.html
• http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/plan_9_wiki/
• http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/