INSTALL(1)

NAME
install - notes about Plan 9 from User Space installation

SYNOPSIS
cd ; ./INSTALL [ -b | -c ] [ -r path ]

DESCRIPTION
To obtain the Plan 9 tree, use Mercurial (see hg(1)) or download a tar file from

The tree can be unpacked anywhere, but the usual place is /usr/local/plan9. In the root of the tree, run ./INSTALL. This script builds the Plan 9 build program mk(1) if necessary, cleans all previously built object files and libraries out of the tree, rebuilds and installs everything, and then cleans up.

There are a few files in tree which have the root hard-coded in them. After the build, INSTALL edits these files to replace the string /usr/local/plan9 with the name of the root of the current tree.

Finally, INSTALL builds an HTML version of the manual and installs it in /man.

The installation can be thought of as two steps: build all the binaries, and then edit files as necessary to fix the references to the installation root. If necessary, these can be run separately. Given the -b flag, INSTALL performs only the first step. Given the -c flag, INSTALL performs only the second step. The first step can be done with the tree in a temporary work directory, but the second step must be done once the tree is in its final location. If you want to build the project in one location and then install into another location, use -r path to specify the final location of Plan9 tree. These flags are only necessary when trying to conform to the expectations of certain package management systems.

At the end of the installation, INSTALL prints suggested settings for the environment variables $PLAN9 and $PATH.

Plan 9 from User Space uses different threading implementations on Linux 2.6 and later kernels than on 2.4 and earlier; and on FreeBSD 5 and later kernels than on FreeBSD 4 and earlier. Running binaries from one class on another will not work.

Some Linux 2.6 systems (e.g., Gentoo) do not use the new NPTL pthread library even though the kernel supports them. On these systems, plan9port must fall back on the threading code intended for Linux 2.4. To accomplish this, INSTALL checks whether the running system uses NPTL and sets SYSVERSION in /config accordingly. The file /LOCAL.config is appended to config after this auto-detection and can be used to override the choices. If LOCAL.config contains a line WSYSTYPE=nowsys then the system is built without using X11.

On most Linux systems, the X11 header packages need to be installed to build using X11. On Debian. the required packages are libx11-dev, libxext-dev, and libxt-dev. On Ubuntu, it suffices to install xorg-dev.

INSTALL can safely be repeated to rebuild the system from scratch.

Once the system is built for the first time, it can be maintained and rebuilt using mk(1). To rebuild individual commands or libraries, run mk install and mk clean in the appropriate source directory (see src(1)).

FILES

/lib/moveplan9.files
    the list of files that need to have /usr/local/plan9 edited out of them

/lib/moveplan9.sh
    the script that edits the files

/src/mkmk.sh
    the shell script used to build mk(1)

/dist/manweb
    the shell script that builds the HTML manual

/man/index.html
    the top-level page in the HTML version of the manual

/install.log
    logged output from the last run of INSTALL

/install.sum
    a summary of install.log

SEE ALSO
intro(1), hg(1)