Complete noob...

[Nick Guenther]

On 8/7/06, Nick Guenther <kousue at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/7/06, Woodchuck <djv at bedford.net> wrote:
> > On Sun, 6 Aug 2006, Allie Daneman wrote:
> On the other hand, reinstalling
> doesn't really matter; the official docs even say "be prepared to
> throw away your first system". I'm planning on scrubbing this machine
> this week anyway now that I've figured out a pretty nice set up (and
> one that doesn't require the bloat of KDE):
> ratpoison
> mozilla
> gaim
>

I forgot to say that I've figured out a pretty good setup with this
(very long) test run and so now I can start fresh with a clean disk
with everything set up more or less properly (including knowing how to
turn things like apmd(8) on and off), and that reinstalling is an Okay
Thing with OpenBSD. It takes 5 minutes to do the base install, 1 or 2
to set up PKG_PATH and some users, and then a wait for packages to
install (from 1 minute to hours, depending on how many and their
sizes). It will take you longer to calculate what size you want your
partitions (and also where to place them; disklabel(8) and fdisk(8)
are not too user-friendly in this respect, but that is also a feature
because it should scare away people who don't know what they are
doing) and what packages to get, but that's *exactly why* you should
be prepared to reinstall a bunch of times until you get it. It's like
practice. I've installed OpenBSD about 10 times now; the first time
through fdisk was tough but now it's a breeze.

Oh, and to the newbie, MEMORIZE this url:
<http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi> (make sure the www is there).
When you are at windows for whatever reason this is a highly useful
resource for OpenBSD. For the last 6 months I would hop over to it
whenever any command I was unfamiliar with was mentioned in postings
to misc at openbsd.org, even if I wasn't involved in the thread.

-Nick