I am looking forward to the follow up post. Plan 9 is one of those OSes I have been meaning to install and attempt to use since I first read about it years ago. My idea was to install it on a few year old laptop, so I wonder if that would be less hazardous than trying to kick it onto a VM. I guess depending on driver support, it might actually be worse.
Part one reminds me of when I was very excited to have my first home unix install with 386BSD. I think my install came on 5.25" disks. From what I recall, it took me a month to get it running in the most clunky way and found myself returning to OS/2 2.0 for my getting work done system. Was finally glad when I discovered the more (at the time) install friendly Linux.