Re: need help choosing appropriate BSD distro

t2000kw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 22 Jun 2007 17:31:15 GMT, "Joachim Schipper"
<jdNoOtSPAMschipper@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As noted, PC-BSD is not OpenBSD. But yes, that complaint would be valid.

Speaking of OpenBSD, is there an installation iso file to burn on a
CD? I see lots of files, some iso files, but nothing very large.

In this directory (or do BSD users call them folders?) on one of the
US mirrors :

/pub/OpenBSD/4.1/i386

the largest file is under 100 MB.

I call that a directory, and yes - as already noted, the CDs are not
available for download. You can do a net install with the floppy or
various CD-ish things in that directory, though, and you'll end up with
the same system.

Is this an OS that you have to boot with one disk, piece things
together from another disk or two, etc.?

No, using some mechanism for booting an install disk (either one of the
CD images in the directory above, or a floppy) and doing a net install
works just fine. It does give you time to make lunch, though.

Or is there a simple way to install it? I don't need a live CD (would
be nice, though) but would prefer to not have to learn a lot of things
just to install it. From the installation instructions on the web
site, it does not look easy and it looks like it might wipe out
everything on the hard drive if I understand the wording of the
instructions:

"Install: load OpenBSD onto the system, overwriting whatever may have
been there. Note that it is possible to leave some partitions
untouched in this process, such as a /home, but otherwise, assume
everything else is overwritten."

On i386, and some other architectures, the disk is divided into parts
twice. First, you have the division into what DOS, Windows or Linux
would call partitions; and then, in the chosen DOS-partition, OpenBSD
writes a so-called disklabel, which divides up that DOS-partition into
what I will, for the sake of this discussion, call BSD-partitions [1].

It takes some work to install without doing bad things to the
BSD-partitions, but unless you answer yes to 'use *all* of wd0 for
OpenBSD' or do something obviously stupid there is no real danger to
your DOS-partitions.

By the way, things like wd0a, wd0d refer to BSD-partitions. To help with
interoperability, non-disklabel partions (DOS-partitions) might show up
in the disklabel, typically as BSD-partition 'i'. For instance, a USB
key will usually be mounted as sd0i (umass(4), the USB mass storage
driver, uses the scsi(4) layer, hence 's').

I'll hold off on doing anything with this until I hear about how to do
this properly without overwriting everything on the disk. All I want
to destroy is my second (/) and third partition (/swap) on the drive.

See above - OpenBSD will use only one DOS-partition, and divide that up
on it's own. So you'll want to delete one of those partitions and
allocate the rest to OpenBSD.

The above is broadly applicable to Free- and NetBSD too, but details
might differ; I'm not familiar enough with either system to be sure.

Joachim

[1] Which should not be misinterpreted to mean that all BSDs use the
same disk label; the idea is of course very similar, but OpenBSD cannot
read FreeBSD disk labels (and will do really strange things if you try),
&c.
.

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