On 2/12/99 Kenneth Scharf wrote:
OpenBSD in particular was highly
regarded in this (though it was said to be a RPITA to
install). Any thoughts on this out there?
I installed OpenBSD and its not that bad, there is no pretty curses
UI for the installer no, but its really quite simple (in some ways
simpler then debian even) the only thing that can be hard is when you
are trying to preserve partitions from another OS on the same disk,
especially if the disk has extended partitions, I found it was
simpler to create the OpenBSD partition with Linux fdisk and just let
BSD fdisk do nothing and disklabel automatically found the A6
partition.
what is a pain is trying to access regular BIOS partitions in
OpenBSD, if disklabel decides not to add fake entries for them to the
disklabel well then its a RPITA (that i have not worked around yet
becuase of BSD's insistence on using LBA translation which is
uneccessary and problematic on my machine) I personally find it
annoying that BSD insists on pretending that nothing exists outside
its disklabel. (if there are any BSD folks listening i know i am
going to get flamed to hell over that... :-) )
if its a BSD only box then non of that is a problem at all just let
fdisk set up the disk how it likes and disklabel is not much harder
then the linux fdisk.
OpenBSD at least is more `traditional' in how things should be done,
for example configure your kernel with vi (unless you go to the ports
tree and install another editor), and install updates with patch -p0
; make ; make install.
the ports tree is really cool too.
really the thing about bsd being hard to install is a myth IMO. (of
course all installations will have the ones that go well and the ones
that go to hell) as usual YMMV flames to /dev/null :-)
as this is a GNU/Linux list I will stop now.
Ethan Benson
To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/
