Re: A guide about running OpenBSD on an usb stick

On Friday, April 22, 2011 04:15:00 pm Beavis wrote:

> As for your OpenBSD guide, I like the fonts :)

Beavis, thank you so much. I carefully selected the fonts and tried to
format the document for its best readability. :-)


The worst thing in my guide is a maybe misguiding title. You addressed
it as "my OpenBSD guide" and, well, actually it's not.
So why did I send the post to the attention of this list?
First of all because you, pure OpenBSD guys, can give me the best
advice about a OpenBSD-related guide. I made no attempt to claim my work
as a substitution to official OpenBSD documentation.
Further, I don't document anything about OpenBSD except the
compatibility with some of qemu network interface cards when running as
a guest.
In chapter "Step 4 b booting from installation cdrom", I wrote:
B+Now you are ready to install the operating system. I wonbt lead you
during this task, because you must take your own responsibility about
the computer that should be the most secure in your net. There is a
clear and understandable (--link--) installation guide on OpenBSD websiteB;.
(Tomas, please, see I don't want to help in "creating another hackable
machine available on the Internet".)

The focus of the guide is: "how to run OpenBSD i386 on an usb stick, when the
computer can't boot from usb and the cdrom unit is broken and the only
way to boot the system is from a floppy drive and all you've got at home
is a x86_64 GNU/Linux box". Changing only one of these conditions leads
to a different solution: if I had had a working cdrom, following the
official FAQ as suggested my Nick Holland would had been enough.

Replies from Nick Holland and Tomas Bodzar showed me some of the
mistakes I made writing the article. First of all, I must repeat again
and again to the reader the guide is not intended to skip reading
manuals. In a private email Tomas Bodzar made me realize that I forgot
to include the links to chapters "Flash memory as bootable storage" and
"How do I create a bootable 'Live' USB device?" of the official OpenBSD
documentation.  Thanks to Nick Holland's goodwill now they are included
in the first comment of the article.
I'm going to rewrite soon part of the post to repair this damage.
Another "disclaimer" to be included is what I wrote is not The Way, but
the way I took on that morning. I think the article is provided of
several tips and a robust logic path. I hope the reader is smart enough
to receive the hints he or she actually needs to solve his or her real
problem, that surely will be sligthly different from the one I described.

Last thing, Beavis: surely guides can't substitute manpages, but
manpages (try to) describe a single program, not a whole (real) scenario.
Nor descriptions of the options and arguments of a program may be enough
to understand how to suit your needs in a particular situation. Eg:
Tomas wrote I explained dd(1) arguments; actually I explained what values
to pass to the arguments and how to evaluate them. You can't find this
on the manual.


Regards.

-Shining