How to get started with Plan B 3rd edition.

Plan B 3rd edition is a modified Plan 9 system. Therefore, any
experience with Plan 9 will help you to install and use Plan B.
Because Plan 9 inherits from UNIX, any experience with UNIX will
help as well.

Two pieces of advice before starting:
	Remember that Plan 9 is not UNIX, and that Plan B is not Plan 9.
	If you never used Plan 9, and you try now before trying Plan B, you'll
	learn to love the system as soon as you combine several machines.
	In the same way, you'll notice the difference between Plan B and Plan 9
	as you try to build a pervasive environment or introduce dynamicity in
	your computing environment.

	Plan B is still a research platform. We use it daily as our main
	computing system, but the distribution has not been packaged
	to be self-configuring for others. You will have to configure the
	system to do anything useful. See the man pages or ask for help.


The CD at http://lsub.org/ls/export/planb3e.iso.bz2
is a bzip2 of a ISO image. The ISO is a bootable Plan B
CD that can be also used as an starting point to install a system.

Unzip (bzip2!) the CD.

Either insert it into a reader and reboot, or configure a vmware to
use the image as a CD (any blank HD will suffice to just boot the CD).

Once booted, the system would ask several questions. Answer them
as follows:

root is from (local, tcp)[local!#S/sdD0/data]:	PRESS RETURN
user [none]:	mero
(Wait several seconds for a likely dns time out)
mouseport [ps2, ...]:	PRESS RETURN (or choose your own)
vgasize [1024x768x8]:	PRESS RETURN (or choose your own)
monitoror is [xga]:	t23 	PRESS RETURN (or choose your own)
vols... location? [none]	home
omero [local]:		PRESS RETURN

At this point, the window system should start (the interface has
the same look of the terminal screen shown at
http://lsub.org/who/nemo/export/omero.gif ).

If you fall down at some point in the middle of the process, it's likely
that there is no driver for your hardware or some related problem.
Note that Plan B assumes that the network is properly configured and yours
is not likely to be so.

You might be able to workaround the problem by
	1. Installing Plan 9 from Bell Labs
	2. Copying the Plan B system from the CD to your
	    Plan 9 system (and changing the boot and system configuration
	    to match your own).
	Also, drop us a line to lscore@lsub.org and we might be of help.

To learn to use the system, at least to play around, take a look
at http://planb.lsub.org/sys/man
In particular http://planb.lsub.org/maigc/man2html/1/omero can help
you with using omero.

To install Plan B in your HD, you have all you need inside the CD. But might
first learn to install Plan 9 and then try with Plan B. We can help you through
the process, drop us a line.