So...what does that mean?
Many OS providers bitch liberally about a lack of market share. It's often attributed to unfair practices on the part of the competition. The fact is that most couldn't get the market share represented by the "Home PC" owned by Aunt Gertie simply because Aunt Gertie, if you handed her a CD set, could not install the software. Lacking that, one would have to rely on OEMs to install the software on new machines. This is hard to accomplish if one doesn't already have market share. Vicious circle, but there you have it.
My original goal was to determine if Aunt Gertie could install this OS. To that end, I was only going to refer to enough documentation to know what I needed in advance, the equivalent of being able to bop into Wal-Mart and pick up the CDs. Then I could pop them into the CD drive and "Next" my heart out, having only to know my name, phone number, and time zone. Rather early in the documentation, one encounters this statement:
Quote:
"Installing OpenBSD is a relatively complex process, but if you have this
document in hand and are careful to read and remember the information which
is presented to you by the install program, it shouldn't be too much trouble.
"Before you begin, you should know the geometry of your hard disk..." (emphasis mine).
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Now, Aunt Gertie can check her email, play online games, surf, and possibly is even a whiz with an office suite. She does not know the geometry of her hard disk.
Question: what about Aunt Gertie's geeky friend? This person can walk up to a PC, boot to a floppy, scrub the HD, fdisk it, format it, and reinstall the OS using the dreaded "Next" button and Aunt Gertie's name. Maybe, maybe not.
INSTALLATION
The system I installed on was a run-of-the-mill PC with a floppy drive, a CD drive, and a scrubbed HD. I did not scrub the HD in advance because I wanted to see what BSD would make of a drive with a couple of MS-DOS (Windows) partitions on it.
The installation is performed by making a bootable CD with a mini-kernel on it. One can also make a bootable floppy or set up a network boot. The latter is, of course, a techno-weenie option, not suitable for Aunt Gertie or her geeky friend. The bootable CD will perform the initial parts of the installation and then look elsewhere for the remainder of the files to install. This elsewhere may be CD, http, ftp, local server, or whatever. I decided to use ftp and not penalize Open BSD's ease of installation for any online penalties that might incur. To that end, I downloaded cd39.iso (on my working system) and burned a bootable CD.
I booted to the CD and watched as all the devices were discovered (apparently correctly). This was encouraging. The current partitioning of the HD was then presented to me. Satisfactorily, this included the MS-DOS partitions. I wanted this to be okay, because I intend, eventually, to see how effectively a dual-boot situation can be set up. There is one minor UI glitch here. The partitions are presented with numerical IDs (0, 1, 2, ...). Partitioning must be done with alphabetic IDs (a, b, c ... p). When this partitioning step is encountered, one is popped into fdisk (BSD's fdisk, not MS-DOS/Windows fdisk). Command help is available by typing '?'. Comprehensive help is available by pulling up the man page. Aunt Gertie's geeky friend may or may not be able to cope with this. Even techno-weenies may be in trouble. There is some presumption that the installer is willing and able to read and comprehend. We all know, from our forum adventures, that this is not a universal characteristic.
At this point, satisfied, I powered down the system, booted to a tool floppy, scrubbed the hard drive, and rebooted to the installation CD. When I reached the partition stage, I partitioned as recommended (for multiple file systems): a: root, b: swap, c: unused, d: usr, e: tmp, f: var, g: home. Other OS partitions will reside above g. The unused partition, c, must span the entire disk (including partitions for any other OS).
When you get this right (you may piddle to your heart's content), the next stage is to set up the network. If you're not installing from the network, you may defer this step. Since I was going to use ftp, I chose to set it up. Since I'm behind a router, I chose to enter DHCP rather than a specific IP. I provided the mask, a gateway IP and a DNS IP. A connection was established to ftp.openbsd.org and a list of sites containing the software to install was presented. A couple of glitches arose here. If one chooses a site from the list, the domain value is the domain plus a partial path. The next step asks for the path; the default is the complete path. If one accepts this, the total address has part of the path duplicated. One has to pick up on this and either manually enter the domain, less the path part, or manually enter the path, not including the part already attached to the domain name. Why the writer of this part would not test his/her code by walking through and accepting all the defaults (to see if they actually work) is beyond me.
The second glitch was a tad more serious: the DNS didn't work. I could connect to domains for which I knew the numerical IP, by I could not connect by name. At this point, I had to decide whether to chase this, or to use another approach. I chose the latter. I went to my other system, accessed the ftp site, and downloaded all the installation files. I blew these to another CD.
I restarted the installation, skipped over the disk initialization part and the network setup part, and chose CD (rather than ftp) as my source. The installation proceeded without a glitch and eventually told me to reboot. This brought me right up into BSD (command line, naturally). I fiddled around a little bit, readjusting to UN*X style commands (I haven't used BSD since the mid-80s, at version 4.2). I then executed xinit and was rewarded with a bare-bones X-Windows (grayscale, and just a graphic command-line). At this point, I shut 'er down.
Additional episodes for this exercise will involve getting a 'good' GUI (something Aunt Gertie can live with) and evaluating how acceptable the available "normal person's tools" are. The latter will come about by installing ports or packages.
This material, in its entirety, will eventually be presented as material on my site. Stay tuned.