L wrote: > Marco Peereboom wrote: >> If you can't neboot the best way of getting it going is using the hdd in >> one chassis for install and then move it to the desired machine >> afterwards. This is way easier in openbsd than in linux. >> >> > This is what I will do right now on a 16MB machine just for the experience. > It seems partition magic only creates linux partitions AFAICT. > >> 8mb won't work for openbsd without trickery that you want to get near. >> I believe these days 24 is about the lower limit. Nick correct me if I >> am wrong. >> >> > I'm in luck.. 16MB is what I have on the machine I'm currently working with. > > I do have some machines with 8MB but the good news is that those > machines i can upgrade since I have plenty of 16MB addon modules, and > since they can hold two extra modules that means total of about 40mb. > > L505
Good. Do it. :) As Marco and others pointed out, 8M doesn't even come close today. Last I tried 16M, you were into swap just sitting at a shell prompt on a default install, so actually DOING anything with it will be unpleasant. 32M will be far less frustrating. I'd not recommend a smaller amount of memory to a new user. As for the install, the Linux process you described was a relative nightmare. With OpenBSD, assuming non-stupid BIOSs on both ends, you just install on machine X and move disk to Y, and it boots fully multi-user. The only thing left to do is reconfigure your network, IF NEEDED. If you plan ahead and put a compatible NIC in the "load" machine, you don't even have to do that. Do that a couple times after a hardware failure, you will have trouble believing that any OS you can't do that on is taken seriously. (of cource, if you are running DHCP, your machines probably have different MAC addresses and thus, will probably get different IP addresses.) (back when we were testing the new boot loader which is so wonderfully indifferent to drive geometry or translation, that's one of the things I did: load up a disk, then move it from machine to machine. Not only does it Just Work by design, but also in practice. About the only time I found that WASN'T the case was working with some really old Soekris boxes. A BIOS update on the Soekris fixed the problem nicely, I'm not sure that Soekris box was even capable of booting the device I gave it even if it was "natively" loaded). IF you can put an IDE drive in a machine, you can almost certainly work a CDROM onto it, if not in it, by using spare cables, though a 486-class machine will probably not boot from CD. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a floppy disk interface in there someplace, too. Nick.
