Nick Holland wrote:
If you can't neboot the best way of getting it going is using the hdd in
one chassis for install and then move it to the desired machine
afterwards. This is way easier in openbsd than in linux.
This is what I will do right now on a 16MB machine just for the
experience.
It seems partition magic only creates linux partitions AFAICT.
Good. Do it. :)
It's basically done.. just waiting for the ftp to finish. I chose FTP
install and yes my 3c589c works fine. I shouldn't have chose ftp
because I'm putting load on Theo's servers and I'll have to send him or
the foundation at least 50 bucks or a pizza with stacked upon stacks of
toppings worth that.
The only thing that ticked me off was my silly laptop that I'm using as
the bootstrap install chassis required I go into the bios settings and
set the PCMCIA card to PCIC compatible. The other available setting,
caused the PCMCIA card not to be detected. I guess Winblows somehow
works around this when it boots up.. setting PCIC mode once it is
booted. No big deal though.
Has anyone made a cute ncurses style installer for openbsd, BTW? I don't
need one personally.. the script did its job well. But it might make
OpenBSD more popular if some cute newbieish TUI (text user interface)
installer was available.
As Marco and others pointed out, 8M doesn't even come close today. Last
I tried 16M, you were into swap just sitting at a shell prompt on a
default
install, so actually DOING anything with it will be unpleasant.
Well maybe I'll download BSD 3.X too or research a BSD that will work
better on such a minimal system..
32M will be far less frustrating. I'd not recommend a smaller amount of
memory to a new user.
I will not be installing X.. I will uninstall or not install as much as
possible and only will be placing a 50KB web server on it handwritten by
me and my BSD buddy from Brazil ;-) No perl or awk if at all possible..
hopefully no apps require that bloat in the default openbsd
installation. Not even apache will be used and I will even uninstall vi
and whatever editors are on it since I can edit everything using the
webserver and a few cgi progs of mine.
But later when I get a clue and admit reality, I'll throw it on a
pentium 600mhz box with 500MB of ram.
IF you can put an IDE drive in a machine, you can almost certainly work
a CDROM onto it, if not in it, by using spare cables, though a 486-class
machine will probably not boot from CD. I'd be surprised if there
wasn't a floppy disk interface in there someplace, too.
There is a floppy interface.. but it requires a port replicator... I
could solder one of my own up (been there before..) but don't have the
patience this weekend. It's actually a laptop style hard drive, I guess
that is not called IDE..
There are these converter cables you can buy that makes regular IDE hard
drives work as laptop IDE's which is cool (and vice versa is more common
which you probably know about..) and you have to have a 12V power
adapter ... which I happen to have.. I just don't have the cable
conversion thing that makes the regular IDE style drive become laptop
capable. That I suppose could be crimped myself but ebay has them too.
However, for now, the laptop with a floppy drive as the bootstrap
chassis is working great.. still waiting on the FTP ;-)
L505
