9front is supported by this repo. If you are using the old Bell Labs distribution, use the older "plan9ants" bitbucket repository. Overview: A full ANTS install includes a kernel (9ants for 9front) and tools.tgz placed in 9fat. Hubfs, grio, utility scripts, and manpages are installed to your main filesystem. The 9fat plan9.ini needs a few additional variables for configuration. The 9front /rc/bin/termrc needs one line added to the end. Building and installing is mostly done by the build script in the root of the ANTS directory. This script has multiple modes. 9front Install -------------- build 9front # compiles everything, but does not install anything. build fronthost # installs the userspace components copy the new 9ants kernel and tools.tgz to the 9fat partition edit plan9.ini add the following line to /rc/bin/termrc: home=/usr/$user; cd; . $home/lib/profile The minimal change to plan9.ini is setting "bootfile=9ants" To change to using the main ANTS boot script, add "bootcmd=plan9rc" To set a password for remote access on systems not using an auth server: add "privpassword=SOMEPASSWORD" There are many optional plan9.ini variables which affect the plan9rc script. Please see its documentation for a comprehensive list. 9front build script modes ------------------------- build 9front - this builds a 9ants kernel and tools.tgz and copies them to the root of the ants directory build fronthost - builds and installs the userspace components (hubfs, grio, contents of the scripts directory, manpages) build 9frontinstall - installs kernel and tools to 9fat, then installs userspace programs and prompts for a privpassword. Requires "build 9front" be run first. It is necessary to edit and change the new plan9.ini as needed build frontkernel - builds the 9ants kernel but does not create a tools.tgz build vultr - installs to a clean vultr install (hjfs recommended) build vultrfossil - installs to a custom-partitioned 9front vultr install changes system to use venti+fossil Additional notes ---------------- set interactive= in plan9.ini to control bootup prompting. interactive=traditional (or unset) gives only standard boot prompts interactive=yes gives fully interactive configurable boot interactive=no will boot with no prompts unless info is missing tgzfs= if you wish to load a tgz of tools other than tools.tgz, set this to the name of the .tgz in 9fat, or set to "no" to skip loading fatpath= if the correct 9fat partition isn't auto-detected, set this to supply the correct pathname full explanation of all new plan9.ini possibilities and their defaults is found within the doc subdirectory. 9front version/ANTS version coordination (approximate, different revisions may work as well, these were tested during the development process) hg up -r427 builds vs 9front 7512 # ants 5.64 hg up -r411 builds vs 9front 7292 hg up -r398 builds vs 9front 7099 # ants 5.23 hg up -r301 builds vs 9front 6967 # ants 4.99 hg up -r145 builds vs 9front 6855 hg up -r123 builds vs 9front 6384 hg up -r83 builds vs 9front release 6350 hg up -r5 builds vs 9front r6299