Not ready for prime time: Open BSD
 

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:
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.

The only thing I can think of that you're missing is sound compliance, and possibly accelerated video.

I'd argue that Aunt Gertie is likely to download an MP3 or at the very minimum pop in a music CD, actually having sound isn't always trivial on *nix systems.

One might argue Aunt Gertie would want to watch a video online and video drivers might be desired. I don't know how standard drivers handle videos on most computers, however now I'm starting to expect quite a bit from Gertie in her old age.

-MBirchmeier

And sound, (at least for me) is a pain to get configured in *nix. Also, Auntie Gertie and/or her geek friend might wish to make a phone call on her computer, can phone support be configured in the installation of OpenBSD, or do you do that later?

yeah i have an old SUN with SOlaris 10 and it doesnt have sound...but its so old i dont use it a lot,...i mean it has a 400MHz SPARC CPU lol my 5th rig is better with its P3 550

C'mon, guys. I'm at OS installation. Applications come later. I certainly don't expect miracles, but that all remains to be seen. I'm in the process of moving, so I'm not sure when the next installment comes around. I AM looking forward to seeing just how far away "prime time" is.

That was an interesting read. I'll be interested to see the later parts as well.

I was thinkign about *nix and how it can't be installed by non-techno-weenies and I thought about Fedora Core, thats the "next clicking" installation that you mentioned, also a lot of other distrobutions of Linux use this style. I'm not sure about *BSD as I have never used it, but there may be a version with the simple clicking next.

Also I think that if people want non-techno-weenies to try out Linux, trying it out should be a case of ordering the Cds, booting it up, seeign a graphical interface and pressing next a few times similar to Windows XP installation. Instead of configuring network connections and extra programs/packages during install time it could install a basica operating system, then when working, it should prompt the user to set things up in an easy manor. Like the apt-get interface that Ubuntu has (forgot the name of it) for installing programs.

</rant>

I'd argue that sound is somewhat OS related, if the drivers are supported by the OS you're fine if not you're SOL.

Without recruiting the geek from nextdoor Gertie's not going to know how to download alternate drivers.

On the other hand no sound might be a good thing, now that ads are starting to incorporate sounds.

-MBirchmeier

OK, dump your sound accumulators and stick with your OS. The silence will be golden (except for the clicks). ;)

Something I forgot to mention: it took less than 30 minutes to make the install. Preparation (downloading the files and blowing the CDs) took maybe another 30. I spent maybe an hour reading the installation document, including re-reading the partitioning scheme and the network setup portion. The only notes I made regarding my hardware were to print the output of ipconfig /all. I played with it, afterwards, for maybe 15 minutes. Consider it an installation-only evaluation, at this point. I can't speak for Linux distros today, but it beat the hell out of Debian as it was a couple years ago.

It sounds like the initial installation went quite well actually (especially since normal users, as you mentioned, will more than likely stick with the CD as the install-medium). The FreeBSD installation, although quite simple and well organized, is certainly not as 'serialized', making it both faster for those already acquainted, and much less foolproof for Gertie.

Speaking of which, did you already do the write up on FreeBSD?