Building a PC for Plan9front #0

Hello, dear reader! In this series of posts, I will be documenting my journey building and using a PC for Plan9front. In this first post, I will be detailing the hardware I purchased and the initial steps I took to get it up and running.

Hardware List

I bought the following components in one lot from a seller for $18 USD

  • Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L
  • CPU: Core 2 Quad q8400
  • RAM: 8GB DDR-2 600 Mhz

The seller was quite slow and it took a few days for the components to be shipped.

And

  • GPU: Nvidia 8600GT from EVGA

For $9.48 USD.

Testing & Troubleshooting

I already had a case, PSU, and HDD, so I assembled everything and it worked! However, when I tried to boot Plan9front (or anything else) from a USB drive, it didn’t work and I kept getting an error message saying “No O/S”. I then tried to boot from a CD using my only available OS, Windows XP, but even after using it to write Plan9front to another CD, it still didn’t work.

The next day, I had an idea to use my old 32GB SSD and transfer the Plan9front ISO onto it using my ThinkPad. To my surprise, it worked and I was able to successfully install Plan9front.

Problems

Unfortunately, the PSU stopped working. I suspect it was an issue with the cables as it’s quite an old PSU. Sometimes when I touched the cables, it would start working again, but it would stop after a few minutes (not always, sometimes it could work for an hour or more). I will need to purchase a new PSU.

Additionally, I use the case to hide some cables and as a stand for a power strip. Every time I remove the case (to work on something inside), it ruins the cables and I have to start from scratch. So, I disassembled the PC yesterday, removed the motherboard, HDD, CDROM, card reader and PSU.

I plan to buy a new PSU and an old case, so stay tuned for the next post where I will document the progress.

How is Plan9front running?

It’s working, but for some reason I can’t set the resolution to “1600×1080”. The wiki suggests using “1600×1200” but that doesn’t work either. I’m confident I will be able to fix it later, but the broken PSU is preventing me from doing so at the moment.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next post in a few days!

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Please send comments to unixcat (at) anche (dot) no