Re: [Sheflug] Re: Suggestions of distro?

["Chris J" <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Will wrote:
> 
> I have to disagree on that - OpenBSD is a very harsh install. IMO
> most Linux users would not have seen anything quite like it before.
> 

Then Richard scribbled:
>
> No, it's easy to install. The instructions are on the inside of every 
> CD that you buy from the Open BSD people. 

It's a half and half. If the user is technically minded, then OpenBSD will 
install quite straight-fowardly. The difficult part with OpenBSD is the disk 
partitioning as on x86 architecture you have to partition the disk with a 
*single* partition (well you can use two or more, but that gets interesting), 
and within that one partition you create a disklabel - it doesn't use 
"standard" partitions, per se.

On other UNIX boxen however (alpha, Sparc) you go straight into the disklabel 
editing as they have no concept of partition tables ... on x86, its a BIOS 
nesscesity (aka limitation).

But the fact that you have to set up your partitions within a partition may 
be confusing to start with (think of it in terms of physical partition and 
logical partitions and it will then make a bit more sense). Confused me when 
I first installed Open, but once I knew what it wanted, it all clicked into 
place.

The rest of the install is a doddle though. "Enter hostname" ... "Enter IP" 
... "What timezone are you in" ... questions.

> I had to read a BSD book and all the 
> BSD sites to get to the point where I could get Open BSD to work with 
> ISDN and then come the day of installation of the ISDN drivers I 
> found out that I was being told that it they just don't work.
> 

Patches do exist for OpenBSD to use ISDN ... but only if you want to use 2.8 
or lower. The ISDN maintainer got no feedback from people, and there seemed 
to be a general apathy towards the feature. They probably /were/ being used, 
but he wasn't getting any interest from the OBSD mailing list, thus dropped 
support as no-one seemed to be interested.

> This is in contrast with Net BSD and Free BSD which are quite a good 
> bit friendlier.
> 

The OBSD ISDN drivers were/are ports from NetBSD. Open actually nabs a lot of 
code from Net ... although Open has now dropped ipf from its source tree as 
it came from Net originally and the license terms aren't particularly 
brilliant. Thus, there's a fair change under the hood to the firewalling for 
Open 3.0, and some grammer changes needed to the filter and NAT rulesets you 
have.

And before anyone asks what the changes are, I'm still running 2.9 on my 
firewall ... but I'm looking at 3.0 on the Sparcs and one Alpha box I have 
here. I will know more about the grammer changes a couple of months down the 
line maybe :)

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson           \ NP: The Mission - 01. Beyond The Pale
 \ cej [at] nccnet.co.uk        \    
  \ www.nccnet.co.uk/~cej/  ~-----------------------------------------, 
   \ Redclaw chat - http://redclaw.org.uk - telnet redclaw.org.uk 2000 \____


___________________________________________________________________

Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk . 
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to 
shef-lug-request@list.sheflug.org.uk with the word
"unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.