did anyone notice that this thread was accidentally brought back from almost a year ago?
Raimo Niskanen wrote: > A lot of people has praised the current OpenBSD installer. > I too. I think it is at the right level and does the right > things, without unneccesary hazzle. > > But... > > There are a few things that I remember really missing when I was > a beginner, and being nice to beginners is a good thing: > > 1) Not every time did I have another machine to go to the > OpenBSD web site and read the install guide and related docs > online. It is almost necessary in order to succeed as a beginner, > and it could be improved upon. > > Why not put the install guide and disk partitioning guide on > the CD (maybe it is), and give very visible hints on how to > mount and read them during the installation from a parallel > console (i386) or how to exit to a shell to read during > installation. 1) there are no multiple consoles on the install kernel. 2) I really think it would be excessively awkward to be trying to read docs on the same machine you are installing to. 3) the CD set provides much of this in printed form. Granted, I may be an extreme case, but I really can't imagine there are a lot of people installing OpenBSD on their one-and- only computer who couldn't have at least printed out some docs before hand. > 1b)Having the partitioning guide available while installing > is maybe good enough, but it would also be nice if there > was a disklabel template for large enough disks that > created / swap /var /tmp /usr sufficient for a potent > desktop install capable of kernel and ports tree compilation, > and the rest on /home. actually, the FAQ provides a pretty good example for this (if I do say so myself! :) I've actually been wanting to add some other partitioning examples (for 1G, 4G, 20G hds with some specific apps), but obviously it isn't there yet. :-/ > 2) Make it more obvious during the installation when the MBR > gets modified, how and when the MBR code gets modified, > and how and when the PBR gets written. I was always > scared to destroy the MBR code and ruin my Windows > boot (company necessity) - I had to use the NT boot loader. > This is one of those things that you can't win on. People who understand the process closely will have no problem seeing where this is happening (covered in the FAQ moderately well, I think). However, the vast majority of the users don't understand this, and won't care until AFTER something they didn't want to happen happens. No amount of red-flag warnings is going to change this, I suspect. The best advice there is in the section about multi-booting which warns that this is very difficult and easy to mess up and should be done on a "practice" machine first. Unfortunately, many new users want to start on a non-dedicated machine in spite of all the warnings that this is a really bad idea (regardless of OS you are a new user on). I understand disk partitioning pretty darned well, I think. I have had the "interesting" experience of trying to multi-boot with an OS that claimed to be very multi-boot friendly. The pretty graphical user interface slowly chewed through the four or five(!!?) CDs of the install, recognized the other OSs on the disk...and proceeded to give me a completely non-bootable disk when I was done. Fortunately, it wasn't too difficult to fix...with the OpenBSD install CD. :) Nick.
