On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 07:18:05AM -0400, Nick Holland wrote:
> did anyone notice that this thread was accidentally brought back
> from almost a year ago?
>
Nope :-)
> 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.
Ouch!
> 2) I really think it would be excessively awkward to be trying
> to read docs on the same machine you are installing to.
Yes. But not impossible :-)
> 3) the CD set provides much of this in printed form.
But not any good disk partitioning examples.
>
> 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.
>
Well, it is hard to know beforehand for the beginner which
documents are worth printing, and for a long while I did not
have a printer. To print the installation guide is unfortunately
not enough. Selected parts of the FAQ or some of the documents
the installation guide points to is also necessary.
> > 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. :-/
>
Yes, it is excellent. But the whole FAQ is too much to print.
> > 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.
Perhaps a bit better FAQ coverage would be sufficient.
See new suggestions below.
>
> 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 guess many new users have very good reasons to why they want
to test OpenBSD on a certain machine, and to why it must have
other OSes too. If you have a spare machine you can take to
install an unknown OS (OpenBSD) just for fun, it is probably
because the machine is too old or to broken to be usable.
>
> 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.
Oh yes! Automatic tools shoot you in both feet and give you no
way to figure out how to repair.
To conclude, what still might be valid suggestions:
* How about a section early in the installation guide (FAQ 4)
that hints about printing the installation guide and the
platform specific file INSTALL.xxx. Also make the INSTALL.xxx
files browsable so you can print them from a browser.
The installation guide and the INSTALL.xxx file should
be sufficient for most installations.
* Add a few technical notes to the installation guide,
section "4.5.2 - Setting up disks":
+ Point out that the MBR machine code will not be affected
unless you use an fdisk command to explicitly do it.
+ Just before "4.5.3 - Setting the system hostname",
explain that the installer not only formats all filesystems
but also makes the OpenBSD partition a bootable one.
These clarifications to rule out the possibility that the
OpenBSD installation might do something ugly like installing
GRUB into the MBR totally messing up anything that was
there before.
--
/ Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
