On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 05:11:56AM -0400, Zachary Uram wrote: > As a long time Linux user I will soon try out OpenBSD, I have been > reading the list emails and contacted 1 OpenBSD top person who was > very rude. There is some of the "RTFM" or "get lost" attitude in > Linux, but if a questioner seems sincere there is usually a certain > level of friendliness in Linux community towards them. Just what I > have briefly observed the OpenBSD community is more abrupt and less > interested in helping newbies, they prefer one find the answer solely > on their own if possible. I must say I detect a certain attitude that > smacks of superiority and even condescension at times. Is this a fair > assessment of 6the OpenBSD culture?
Zach, Theo was much more civil to you than I expected. I've been watching OpenBSD since around 1998, and using it in various projects since around 2001. I came to be using OpenBSD because Linux didn't do some things I wanted, despite much research, FreeBSD didn't do those things either, and NetBSD was a complete and utter PITA to accomplish the same thing. Your question to Theo had to do with stuffing multiple operating systems on one machine. That's been a load of bullshit ever since the value of the time lost screwing with multi-boot exceeded the cost of a second harddrive and a screwdriver. The threshold to stop screwing with multi-boot to evaluate a new operating system is now about 30 minutes. And yes, the BSD communities as a whole do not suffer fools gladly. (I know, I've been a fool often enough). But the BSD communities also rarely have corporate backing that makes big money selling support contracts to fools. And because the BSD kernel development methodologies are tightly coupled to their entire distribution development methodologies documentation tends to be relevant, current, and well written. Unfortunately, you need to tweak the boot loader that ships with Windows or with Linux to do what you want to do and that does not ship with OpenBSD. So in summary. 1) The problem you have created for yourself has nothing to do with OpenBSD. 2) The tool you're using to solve this problem you have created for yourself has nothing to do with OpenBSD. 3) If you'd bothered to look you'd see that use of some of those tools is documented in the OpenBSD FAQ anyways. But my recommendation is to buy another harddrive and a decent screwdriver and heed this paragraph from the start of that section in the FAQ Multibooting is having several operating systems on one computer, and some means of selecting which OS is to boot. It is not a trivial task! If you don't understand what you are doing, you may end up deleting large amounts of data from your computer. New OpenBSD users are strongly encouraged to start with a blank hard drive on a dedicated machine, and then practice your desired configuration on a non-production system before attempting a multiboot configuration on a production machine. FAQ 14 has more information about the OpenBSD boot process. -- Chris Dukes
