Comment by milcron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by milcron | Hacker News Reader

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I am a newer OpenBSD user, so I encounter roadblocks/papercuts quite frequently. What I like about the OS is that the problems are all easy in retrospect. I never struggle with the same issue twice. For instance, the first time I booted OpenBSD, I was met with the following prompt:

    boot>

What am I supposed to do here? Does it require some weird incantation in order to load the kernel? It turns out you just have to hit enter.

The OpenBSD install script really is quite simple. I'm not sure I would call it easy (simple ain't easy), but it's certainly straightforward and setup is usually just hitting enter a bunch of times. You only encountered trouble because you tried to fiddle with it and got frustrated.

Another huge benefit of OpenBSD compared to Linux is the incredible quality of documentation. Missing or outdated docs are considered a serious bug. To address your issue, let's look at the docs: https://man.openbsd.org/disklabel#AUTOMATIC_DISK_ALLOCATION

It looks as though if the installation target is smaller than 8GB, it won't create a separate partition for X11. That's useful to know. Additionally, you can specify your own partition template using the -T option.

It might be cool to see a graphical project like GhostBSD built on top of OpenBSD, but I have to agree with the curmudgeons that the text-based installer is pretty fantastic as-is.

> boot>

> What am I supposed to do here? Does it require some weird incantation in order to load the kernel? It turns out you just have to hit enter.

> [...]

> Another huge benefit of OpenBSD compared to Linux is the incredible quality of documentation.

Where is the documentation that explains a) why you have to click <Enter> to continue the boot process and, b) the reason why this isn't self-documenting at the "boot>" prompt?

The man page for boot(8) explains it.

You don't have to hit enter at the boot> prompt. It pauses for a few seconds to allow you a chance to enter boot commands; you can hit enter to boot immediately, or it will proceed with a default boot after a few seconds if you do nothing.

Ah, I think you're right. In my specific case the default "did nothing" because TTY settings were improperly configured. I actually needed the boot menu to be there.

I had not yet picked up the habit of reading the manual. https://man.openbsd.org/boot.8#EXAMPLES

Being able to reach the boot menu is critical when installing to a range of embedded devices such as routers. I use a null modem cable for input/output with my router, and the TTY settings need to be adjusted in order to see anything.

GUI bootloader alternatives often use the "press ESC really fast" strategy, which is arguably less intuitive if you're trying to figure out where the boot settings are.

Anyway the boot menu rather is self-documenting. It even responds to `help`. I eventually figured out the solution, but I still remember it as my first experience problem-solving on OpenBSD.

At least on my laptop, the grub menu has a list of options plus a sentence saying you can click the arrow keys to choose an item. It also says you can click "e" to edit one of the entries there. Once you've clicked a key there, the timer to automatically boot stops and you can take your time.

On my laptop the default configuration automatically boots too fast to read all of the sentence there. That's bad, but the tradeoff is I wait less time for my system to boot for all the times I don't need to reconfigure the boot.

That's what I mean by self-documenting, which the "boot>" example you gave is not. (Nor do I see any documentation about why it's not self-documenting.)

OT but why do you keep saying 'click' instead of 'press'?

Oh, good catch!

I don't think it's off topic-- for example, if the grub menu actually wrote "click" there would be a number of people who would grab the mouse and try to move a non-existent pointer to the letter "e".

What am I supposed to do here? Does it require some weird incantation in order to load the kernel? It turns out you just have to hit enter.

Did you really think every server running OpenBSD requires someone to hit enter on the console to boot it?

Apparently I was misremembering and it does continue booting after a few seconds without input. I didn't see any output because I needed to configure TTY settings.

Additionally, the manual tells you how to adjust the default boot settings.

After years of dealing with poor documentation, it takes some habit-building in order to check the openbsd manual every time you have a question. On Linux my first impulse is Google/StackOverflow.

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