Fishy swims!

I think I've now got everything up and going with my new OpenBSD install.

There are a few gotchas that I predictably tripped over. Note to self: write up doc patches or FAQ entries and submit to Theo...

So having mostly solved the booting problem, I then needed to sort out the network card problem.

As it happened, my good friend and sometime BSD fiddler Michael had come over for a bbq dinner. Never missing the opportunity to engage in some geek talk, I regailed him with my fascinating stories of installing operating systems, and the ensuing driver problems.

Moved as he was by my tales of woe, he took pity and sat down in front of the newly christened but slightly ill BSD install, and went to town. Before too long, he wandered in to the kitchen shaking his head, mumbling something about me being a moron. Not again, I thought - what had I done?

Apparently a brief review of 'dmesg' revealed that IRQ 5, allegedly allocated to the NE2000 card, was also being surreptitiously acquired by the SoundBlaster card. So the plug-n-pray config had failed to avoid the statically allocated IRQ for the NIC and thus I had a fairly simple case of IRQ conflict. Eureka! Don't you just love the ISA architecture? :-/

So away he toddled, while I quickly got into UKC and did a 'disable isapnp0' faster than you can type the first half of War and Peace, and booted. Lo and behold! - it worked, and my ne0 was humming once more.

The only other thing I had to do (apart from switching to ksh instead of the horrible sh shell) was set /etc/mygate to the IP address of my home gateway, and it was F-A-B Scott!

Now I can start adding some packages, and have a real play. First stop, Emacs...!

So I guess, my thoughts thus far on OpenBSD...

It is very small, very fast, and solid. There are a few issues that make installation a little bumpy, but the documentation is generally pretty good. A default install is a bit bare for my liking; it takes a bit of tweaking and extra packages to get what I would call a comfortable base system. But so far, I quite like it.

And it is always good to learn new tricks...