ok, thats a bunch of information. However, for me, its the same as rocket science as I am totally blind and would require sighted assistance just to get it to either install a network card, or port to USB/Serial. Unlike the rest of you, using a computer with little or no accessibility on boot-up is immeasurably harder. even porting to a braille display device is not straight forward. all I want is a way to make/execute a script to do the installation unattended or port to an interface that can be read with another machine with speech/braille already running.
then again, it appears that it may be easier to get a $200 interface device that acts as the screen to the machine and outputs to either a network interface or a serial port. unfortunately, most blind folks cannot afford this, so having a stand-alone installer with speech or braille would be very helpful. -eric On May 13, 2012, at 8:14 AM, Geoff Steckel wrote: > [lots of text snipped] > I was looking at laptops recently. I took 2 linux CDs, an OpenBSD install CD, > and a USB stick with OpenBSD on it. > > I got a lot more useful information about hardware compatibility from > the OpenBSDs than the Linux CDs because OpenBSD didn't try to bring up > anything graphical at the beginning. > > The tools on the OpenBSD install disk were (just barely) sufficient > to do what I needed. I didn't use the stick because the USB ports on the > store systems weren't easily accessible. > > I've also rescued unbootable systems with the OpenBSD install disk. > > "Live CDs" take forever to boot and run because seeking on a CD is very slow. > The install CD came up a great deal faster because it didn't try to set up > a fancy environment. > > If one really wanted to make an OpenBSD live DVD, one might (this has *not* been tested): > > Install onto a clean disk with everything on one partition. > Add 2 entries to / (/mem_var, /mem_etc) > Add 3 entries to /dev for memory file systems. > Edit /etc/fstab to point /tmp, /var, and /etc to those. > Add some code to the beginning of /etc/rc to: > create the 3 memory file systems > mount /mem_etc and /mem_var > copy /etc to one and /var to another > unmount the copies > > Create a DVD with a boot sector from the above. > > Presumably one could write a script to do this procedure and apply it to any release. > > I don't intend to write such a script. Someone who wanted to do this would > need to know the purpose of /etc/rc and shell programming. > That person would not need to know any kernel internals. > All the necessary tools have sufficient manual pages. > > I'm quite sure I missed something. init should continue to read the buried > /etc/rc... or at least about 40 releases ago that's what would happen. > > This begs the questions of networking, setting up X, etc. > > This doesn't rate a FAQ entry. It does show "you can do this with the tools > supplied and it's not rocket science".
