Good Day!
Thanks for the comments.
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.
Found, submitted a diff upstream. Thanks.
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.
What is the *exact* date of the 3.8 you installed? I installed almost
all the snapshots released and had not encountered this issue.
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.
This should have been taken care of by the ipkg.
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).
Not explicitly yes, but INSTALL.zaurus did state this:
Next the disk label which defines the layout of the OpenBSD file systems
must be set up. The installation script will invoke an interactive
editor allowing you to do this. Note that partition 'c' inside this
disk label should ALWAYS reflect the entire disk, including any
non-OpenBSD portions. If you are labeling a new disk, you will probably
start out with an 'a' partition that spans the disk. In this case you
should delete 'a' before adding new partitions. The root file system
should be in partition 'a', and swap is usually in partition 'b'. If
you have Linux partitions defined on the disk, these will usually show
up as partition 'h', 'i' and so on.
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.
[flamegear engagage]
OpenBSD installation assumes that the reader has thourouly done their
homework *before* installing it. Meaning the audience has already read
and reread the installation documentation, browsed through the openbsd
faq[] for general queries, read though the archives other user
experiences and notes.
OpenBSD was never designed for the majority of linux users and PDA
market in general. It is mainly a product of geeks that enjoy creating
secure code and systems. Hence its appeal usually is strong on the
systems and network administrator types as well as the developer people.
It is *not* aimed at mass market. (This is harsh to a geek exposed
mainly to linux environment but that is reality, browse a few months
worth of the openbsd-misc mailing list).
[/flamegear disengage] ;)
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.
Early OpenBSD users and developers ran onto this issue, hence its
prominence.
Again, thanks for the comments.
Mabuhay! barryg
--
Barry Dexter A. Gonzaga, bofh
