Re: A guide about running OpenBSD on an usb stick

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Shining <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.

I called it "my OpenBSD guide", because you are the one that indeed
created the guide and post it on your blog.


> 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 wonb t 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.

NO, I Completely disagree. Most rookies on the Unix-like arena,
specifically Linux DO claim that they know how to configure a specific
program, environment or task not because they read the man pages but
because they follow some GUIDE made by another user. They do this as a
SHORTCUT instead of reading the man pages. though in a way I can't
blame them because Linux man pages are somewhat outdated than the
binaries which are constantly being updated on the OS.

If you would humor me, What is your goal exactly on posting this link here?

-beavis




> 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
>
>



--
()  ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail
/\  www.asciiribbon.org   - against proprietary attachments

Disclaimer:
http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/