On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 04:54:24PM -0500, Graham Toal wrote: > > > The disk formatting is a major pain. > > > > Why? > > I don't know why, I just know that both myself (experienced in BSD and BSDI > from days gone by, and linux in recent years, but not OpenBSD at all) > plus a colleague at work who has a fair bit of OpenBSD experience both > have wasted literally days with formatting problems. So having found > a working recipe that seems easy, I thought it was worth pointing out > to folks that if you do something else, you might hit the hassles we > did. I had tried to reuse an old partition table and failed even though > it sure looked OK to me - the install program wouldn't progress past > the formatting section; my friend had problems when he formatted the > swap partition before the data partition.
never had any such problems. really, the FAQ covers disk setup quite extensively! > > Writing down passwords, are you serious? > > To each his own :-) I generally find that if you create a 'strong' > password, you pretty much have to write it down until you remember it. that sounds really funny. have you really written down everything that is now "stored" in your brain? :) > > Try CTRL+ALT+F2/F3... it's in the FAQ. > > So I've been told :-/ Unless you know something is there to go look > for it, you don't come across it well, the FAQ index is really not that long to have a quick look. > > Also, I don't see the need for a ports tree on this type of system, > > and your installation of the "screen" application looks horrible. > > Problem with 3.6 boot CD and 3.7 installation I think. The Jove > ports install was smooth, but for some reason screen screamed. you can just skip "screen" since you now know you can use multiple terminals with ctrl+alt+F2 etc. > > Wouldn't it be better to skip the installation part, and point people to > > the OpenBSD FAQ (especially faq4.html), and to the afterboot(8) manual page? > > No, but I'll certainly add those pointers. And it *is* a wiki page. If > you feel that what I've said is just plain wrong or misleading, please > feel free to go in there yourself and correct it. Just bear in mind > it was written by someone who needed to use OpenBSD to support a > specific tool and who before this had no OpenBSD experience, for an > audience who are in the same boat. It's definitely not a proper > it's a "How I managed to make it work after two weeks of > struggling, so that hopefully you can make it work in two hours > of slavishly typing exactly what I say" :-) Well... that will encourage people to not think, which is an evil thing! If you take a look at the OpenBSD documentation (manuals and FAQ), you will see it has been written very carefully, and it never just lists a bunch of commands that people can blindly copy. Instead it explains what is happening, so people _understand_. I'm not sure people will really save time with this document. You fetch the ports tree (the wrong one, even if it worked for you it is the wrong one) from CVS, while you do not need it. No need to make coffee then, either. :) Using pkg_add and PKG_PATH will work fine. People also don't need bash, ksh is fine. If you're really worried about Linux users, point them to faq9.html. Where you point people to lynx, it's easier to use ftp(1), and it's also useless since your next line is saying pkg_add. Instead of releasing "this worked for me" type of documents, maybe your efforts would be better spent writing a clean document that does not suffer factual inaccuracies, does not deviate too much from the actual topic, adds explanations where appropriate, etc. Yes, it's not an easy task. :) -- steven Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm
