Welcome To The Zaurus Openbsd Forum!, Who's running openBSD on their Z? Options

[obscurite]

Well, maybe this will be a good resource for folks who want to try the new Zaurus support in the OpenBSD 3.7 arm port!

Thanks offroadgeek!

LINKS:
Project page - http://www.openbsd.org/zaurus.html
Install docs - ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.7/zaurus/INSTALL.zaurus

P.S. I had difficulty subscribing to the arm port mailing list via gmail. If anyone is already a member, please post a link to this forum on the mailing list.

[terryleung83]

I want to ask if there is really anyone having openBSD on their Z..
if so, can those tell me if it is stable or not?
and it seems that the installation instructions are so complicated

[plarusa]

I want to ask if there is really anyone having openBSD on their Z..
if so, can those tell me if it is stable or not?
and it seems that the installation instructions are so complicated

I installed 3.8 beta, and it is stable. No crashes so far. The installation instructions are indeed complicated and inacurate in places, but they make more sense once you installed successfully.

[barryg]

Good Day!

        <SNIP>

The installation instructions are indeed complicated and inacurate in
places, but they make more sense once you installed successfully.

Can you point out areas/sections that are ambiguous and
inaccurate? I am helping out in editing INSTALL.zaurus[0]. The devs
are *very* much concerned about the documentation as much as the care
about security related bugs.



Mabuhay! barryg

[0]
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapsho.../INSTALL.zaurus

--
Barry Dexter A. Gonzaga, bofh

[plarusa]

Good Day!

        <SNIP>

The installation instructions are indeed complicated and inacurate in
places, but they make more sense once you installed successfully.

Can you point out areas/sections that are ambiguous and
inaccurate? I am helping out in editing INSTALL.zaurus[0]. The devs
are *very* much concerned about the documentation as much as the care
about security related bugs.



Mabuhay! barryg


[0]
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapsho.../INSTALL.zaurus

--
Barry Dexter A. Gonzaga, bofh

1) At the start, the installation procedure states that a DOS partitions can be used to install, but later claims that only fss and ext2 are supported.

2) The openbsd37_arm.ipk for 3.8 beta cannot be installed (either with the GUI or from the command line). Something to do with incorrect permissions while installing (I was root when I tried to install). The only technique which worked was to insmod the zbsdmod.o and running zboot.

3) rc.zboot script was not installed. I had to fetch it from the web and manually install it to get to the bsd boot prompt. This meant remounting the / directory to be writable and copying the file to the expected location.

4) The disk labeling process never stated that the a partition should be at the beginning of the A6 partition. I created the b partition first which prevented bsd from booting (the machine failed to boot with a very obscure error message).

5) Right in the midle of the installation instructions, there is a reference to running newfs to intialize a new dos file system (and shrinking the existing dos partition). This makes no sense to a user who never ran bsd before. The majority of existing Z users are Linux users.

6) The recovery procedure (what to do to restore a corrupted system) should be moved to the end of the instructions (in a separate section). Right now, it is right in the midle of the installation procedure, causing the user to wonder about what to do if recovery is not needed.

There are many other possible variations to the install, I only went through one of them.