move to OpenBSD from FreeBSD

Sevendogsbsd, the OpenBSD installer is in principle nothing special. It is a kernel with a ram-disk in a file: bsd.rd. It contains some few unix/BSD commands, among them ed, fdisk, disklabel, and enough also to get OpenBSD from the internet, but also scripts for installing and upgrading. The process in the script is what you expect: recognizing disks, formatting them, downloading the distribution, etc. If you manage to boot this bsd.rd, for example with pxe or putting it in the disk and calling it with the boot
loader, you can install, upgrade or start a shell and do some work before installing/upgrading.
The upgrade is, as an installation, a question of minutes, not like the hours I wasted yesterday
with freebsd-update.

In some way the whole OpenBSD is as such, very coherent. In the third posting in this thread
seems that wolffnx got what I mean. OpenBSD is more cathedral, FreeBSD is more bazaar. They are different, but I like both.
 
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My confusion with the OpenBSD installer is the UI: I found it to be unintuitive. That's my only complaint with the installer. The performance of the system once installed was dismal, but I run on a workstation with a very large 4K monitor and experienced screen draws that were the equivalent of an older modem slowly displaying a web page. Not acceptable to me. The performance may be fine for a 13-15 inch laptop screen but not for an enormous 4K monitor. The system did install and boot to a login manager so that was good.

My preference is FreeBSD, which is why I am on these forums.
 
Sevendogsbsd said:
Not my experience at all: I found the OpenBSD installer to be terrible: hard to use, confusing and convoluted.
Click to expand...

Really? Are we using the same installer? You just hammer the enter button about 6 times ;)

Possibly my preference is based on the fact that I really do prefer text-based installers. That said the bsdinstall is much nicer than the sysinstall of old.

Both are lightyears ahead of Windows and most Linux. In this world of "cloud". I find GUI installers old-fashioned.
 
Yes, I found it terrible. I don't mind text installers at all: I have a Slackware install and that installer is dead simple. FreeBSD's installer is dead simple. I have installed stage one Gentoo too many times to count so am not at all afraid of diving into an install of any OS. I just found OpenBSDs to be unintuitive, that's all.

When installing a new OS on bare metal, I am certainly not going hammer enter 6 times without carefully reading each and every dialog. The partitioning tool also would not let me use 2 block devices so I had to leave my second disk with /home on it out and just use my normal "/" disk. That was OK since I didn't get any further than the initial install and opening of Firefox.

No worries, this is why we have choices!

I may revisit the install in a VM when I have some time though - walk through each step, out of curiosity sake. I have no use really for the OS, but VMs allow for experimentation without destruction 🤣
 
I installed OpenBSD in a VM. The biggest problem was the default partitioning because it leaves not enough room to install packages. I reinstalled it with manual partioning and it's all but intuitive. Add to that a bug in the tool (it apparently didn't understand suffixes like G or M for the size) and you can evaluate the time I spent to install this OS.

After that, with some more time, I successfully installed Gnome.

From my point of view, the documentation is somewhat hard to find and there are too many lockings for security reasons. OpenBSD is probably better in making a robust server.
 
Emrion said:
I installed OpenBSD in a VM. The biggest problem was the default partitioning because it leaves not enough room to install packages. I reinstalled it with manual partioning and it's all but intuitive. Add to that a bug in the tool (it apparently didn't understand suffixes like G or M for the size) and you can evaluate the time I spent to install this OS.
Click to expand...

Once you select [edit] and it opens disklabel, you resize the /usr/local partition to something more appropriate for your uses (i.e R h 20G) and it automatically reduces the size of the /home partition to make space. I actually find that fairly ideal!

If you are saying that you would rather disklabel not be used during the installer, you will still need to encounter it again when you partition memory sticks, etc. Its worth learning! ;)

The only thing I found easier to partition disks was in the older FreeBSD sysinstall but that was removed. I believe it was later made standalone called sade (https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sade&sektion=8)
 
Hrrm, I find it pretty easy to install. I found their pages to make it seem more difficult than it is, especially about multibooting. Oddly enough, I have this vague memory of much clearer instructions from years ago, but perhaps that's just a hallucination. :)
I have my own page on multibooting with it, for people who just want to play with it, at http://srobb.net/openbsdmultiboot.html

If you're playing with it on a laptop running Linux, it will even go in an extended partition. I'm sure someone as knowledgeable (judging from their posts) as Sevendogsbsd installed it once for each dog they have, they'd quickly get used to it. :) (Assuming your forum nick is based on reality.)
 
scottro said:
I found their pages to make it seem more difficult than it is
Click to expand...

Compare an Addison-Wesley, Pearson or Wiley textbook to a Houghton-Mifflin or McGraw-Hill textbook for math or science. The latter make it many times more difficult than it is for these subjects. For other subjects that only need basic understanding and don't require knowing how to do complex problems, they're all ok.

For the better textbooks, sure the subject itself is bit difficult, but they have clear examples, and sufficient explanations that you can go through a few chapters in a day and start working on their problems, instead of dissecting the few rare details from examples they do have for hours or days to solve each different problem. The better textbooks are helpful, and don't make things harder than they are.

I don't know if that's by design, from the belief that certain subjects should be made many times more difficult than they really are.
 
scottro said:
Hrrm, I find it pretty easy to install. I found their pages to make it seem more difficult than it is, especially about multibooting. Oddly enough, I have this vague memory of much clearer instructions from years ago, but perhaps that's just a hallucination. :)
I have my own page on multibooting with it, for people who just want to play with it, at http://srobb.net/openbsdmultiboot.html

If you're playing with it on a laptop running Linux, it will even go in an extended partition. I'm sure someone as knowledgeable (judging from their posts) as Sevendogsbsd installed it once for each dog they have, they'd quickly get used to it. :) (Assuming your forum nick is based on reality.)
Click to expand...
Ha! It was, alas they are all old and we’ve lost 2.
 
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