Launching the VM or VMs

Linux Users using gridtools or gridtoolsplus

Install the Qemu emulator from your distro's repositories. We recommend installing plan9port from source from swtch.com/plan9port and downloading drawterm from swtch.com/drawterm. If you dont want to install the full plan9port, make sure the get the gridtoolsplus version of the image and tools. If you have plan9port and drawterm installed, just get the gridtools version. After downloading, start a shell and find your download and

tar xzf gridtoolsplus.tgz

cd gridtoolsplus

sudo iptablescript

./gridlord

Choose option 1 in gridlord to start your venti server. Then choose option 2 to start a standalone VM. You can wait for the VM to complete its boot process,or press enter at the boot menu inside the VM to speed up the wait. If you are using gridtoolsplus with included binaries, you can just press 'g' or 'b' to start up drawterm and enter 'gridpass' for password. Bootes is the hostowner/administrative user. If you have the resources and want an even more 'distributed' setup, instead of option 2, you can choose option 3 to launch a fossil file server, allow it to complete its default boot process, and then use option 4 to start a CPU server that will tcp boot using the fossil server's file system. After it completes its bootup process, you can drawterm in as usual, and enjoy running a 'fully distributed' plan9 architecture with separate venti (plan9port version running in host os), file server (the fossil1 vm), cpu server (the cpu1 vm), and terminal (the drawterm window in host os).

Windows Users

Download qemu and drawterm. We recommend qemu version 0.9.0 for widest compatibility with windows versions according to our testing. Download the standalone version of the image and extract it (it is both tarred and gzipped, so a utility such as 7zip will need to be run twice) and place a copy inside the qemu folder. Start a cmd.exe shell and cd to inside the qemu directory. Start qemu with

qemu -L . -hda ventigridserver.qcow2.img -redir tcp:567::567 -redir tcp:17010::17010 -m 256

You may choose to boot in terminal mode with option 1 or 2 at the menu inside the VM, or if you prefer drawterm access (recommended) allow the machine to boot to its default cpu server mode, and then start a new cmd.exe and cd to the directory containing your drawterm executable, and

drawterm -a localhost -c localhost

and choose to be bootes, glenda, or gridna at the prompt, and enter 'gridpass' as the password.