I accidentally, as they say, the old site, and so the migration to Drupal has been inadvertently accelerated. So here we are. I've been pretty busy lately, for a change, trying to get some things squared away so that I can start on new things. One thing I've recently begun toying with is a new (to me) operating system called Plan 9 From Bell Labs. Touted as one of the most obscure OSes in existence, it struck me as a challenge I was compelled to meet, and I've installed it on a few different platforms in the last couple days. First I installed it in VMware at work. That went quite smoothly, I have to say. However, once I installed it I couldn't seem to get into the default GUI due to some video complaints. I then booted the live CD on my laptop at home (a 500MHz Pentium III - Plan 9 has very low system requirements) and couldn't get the video to not glitch. Regardless of my choice of resolution it just wouldn't display properly. I tried booting the disc on my desktop machine, but it wouldn't even boot there, displaying a sequence of pci routing messages then hanging, floppy drive lit continuously. I installed VirtualBox and started installing it in there on my desktop, a 2.6GHz Pentium 4, and immediately noticed that it progressed much more slowly than it did in VMware on a comparable machine. What took mere minutes before was taking literally hours, but still I persisted. Finally, after over 24 hours with no end in sight, I gave up, killed the VM, and installed QEMU, another virtualization program, having read about good results with Plan 9 there. The difference in speed was breathtaking, perhaps even faster to install than in VMware. In the next few minutes it nearly completed installation, whereupon I had to leave it to its own devices as it formatted the disk image, the longest portion of the installation process. I shall see when I return how it turned out, but am optimistic. When I arrived at work this morning I dumped the Plan 9 installation in VMware and tried installing it using Microsoft Virtual PC, which, while not Open-Source, is free, and I happened to have it installed on my work machine from an earlier endeavor. It installed without a hitch, and after entering the correct monitor type (Plan 9 defaults to XGA but in my experience vesa is a better choice, as it actually works) it went right into the GUI and looked just great - well, as just great as Plan 9 is able to look; many will attest to the interface not being the slickest-looking out there) and I was in business. Now my only obstacle is figuring the darn thing out. It's sufficiently different from every other OS I've tried that I'm actually having to throw out almost everything I've ever known in an OS thus far. However, like I said, it's a challenge, and I'm definitely up to it.