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-Selecting appropriate hardware to run your 9front system on is important, as it can mean the difference between success and failure of a project.

+Selecting appropriate hardware to run your 9front system on is important, as it can mean the difference between success and failure of a project. Fortunately, most common PC hardware is at least minimally functional in Plan 9 (excluding certain exotic audio, VGA, and WiFi devices). Nowadays, thanks to

+.ihtml a <a href="http://man.9front.org/8/9boot">

+.CW 9boot (8),

+.ihtml a

+.ihtml a <a href="http://man.9front.org/8/realemu">

+.CW realemu (8),

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+and the VESA driver, it is at least very likely that your PC will boot. In addition, most popular virtualization platforms are reasonably well supported.

-If you are shopping for a new PC, whether you are buying it piece by piece or completely pre-built, you want to make sure first that you are buying reliable parts. In the PC world, this is not easy.

-.B

-Bad or otherwise unreliable or mismatched parts can make 9front run poorly and crash often.

-.R

-The best advice we can give is to be careful, and buy brands and parts that have been reviewed by an authority you trust. Sometimes, a higher-price machine is a better quality machine. Other times, it is simply more expensive.

-There are certain things that will help bring out the maximum performance of your system:

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-.IP

-.B

-Let the application choose the hardware:

-.R

-It is usually better to make an adjustment to the hardware you were planning on using rather than compromising on your application design because you have something you "really wanted to use."

-.B

-Identify your bottlenecks:

-.R

-Don't pay extra for the cutting-edge processor if your application is restricted by disk I/O. Don't pay for fast disk if your system is restricted by network speed. Don't pay for much of anything if your bottleneck is a 300bps dial-up line.

-.B

-Keep it simple:

-.R

-Simple hardware usually has simple problems. Complex hardware that isn't supposed to ever break may take you a long time to repair when it breaks anyway.

-.B

-Use hardware you understand, or learn the new hardware before you implement a production system:

-.R

-Regardless of the technical merits of the hardware, committing to use a particular type of hardware before you have become familiar with it, both how it works and how it fails, is foolish.

-.B

-Avoid cheap network adapters:

-.R

-9front supports a plethora of cheap network adapters. These adapters work great in home systems, and low or moderate throughput business and research environments. But, if you need high throughput and low impact on your server, you are better off buying a quality network adapter. Unfortunately, some name-brand adapters are not much better than the cheap adapters, and some potentially good adapters do not have accurate documentation available to write good drivers. Gigabit adapters often perform better than 10Mbps/100Mbps adapters, even when used on slower speed networks, due to superior buffering.

-.LP

-.ihtml ul

 Check

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 FQA 1.3.1.2 - New Hardware Support

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-for information about new hardware drivers in 9front.

+for information about hardware drivers that are new in 9front.

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+Almost any PS/2 or USB mouse is going to work. The following are preferred for use with Plan 9.

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+Almost any AT, PS/2, or USB keyboard is going to work. The following are preferred for use with Plan 9.

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 3.2.1 - Audio

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+Audio support is much improved in 9front, with added support for AC97, Intel HDA, and (ha!) Soundblaster 16.

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 3.2.2 - Graphics

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+Many video cards for which there exists no native VGA driver can be made to work with the generic VESA driver. Examples are provided below.

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+Ethernet is well supported across many vendors and chipsets. 9front introduces a "medium-to-low quality" driver for Broadcom BCM57xx cards, previously unsupported by Plan 9.

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+9front adds support for several WiFi adapters from Ralink and Intel, as well as support for WPA and WPA2.

+Read:

+.ihtml a <a href="http://man.9front.org/8/wpa">

+.CW wpa (8),

+.ihtml a

+and

+.ihtml a <a href="http://man.9front.org/8/plan9.ini">

+.CW plan9.ini (8)

+.ihtml a

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+Support for Wacom serial tablets was added in 2012. The touchscreen digitizers in some Lenovo ThinkPads (notably, the X230) also seem to function without need of any drivers (presumably, controlled by the BIOS).

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 3.2.5.2.1 - ThinkPad

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+ThinkPads are the best supported laptops in 9front because ThinkPads are what the developers use.

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code: fqa.9front.org