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what is the easiest way to get up and running with plan 9 right now? A virtual machine? It seems based on it's architecture it really benefits from multiple machines connected at once

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A virtual machine + drawterm is a good way to dip your toes in, we distribute a amd64 qcow2 image that should be ready to go in QEMU. If you want to try on hardware an old thinkpad is probably the easiest, but we should run on most sensible PCs (but perhaps without wifi). I also wrote a nix flake (https://github.com/majiru/9front-in-a-box/) for setting up stuff a bit more automatically if that happens to jive with your system. The system is capable of networking a bunch of systems together, but doing so is not a requirement to experience a lot of what the system has to offer.

Run it in a VM and then setup a CPU server so you can drawterm in.

If you have issues you can go onto the 9fans discord or ##9fans on oftc.net which are more casual channels and newby friendly or #cat-v on oftc which is pretty much the official 9front channel where the devs mainly gather.

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