I love the OpenBSD mascot - the puffer fish. Maybe as cute as a penguin, but definitely not as cuddly!
I'm back to have a play with my new OpenBSD installation. I now have two major problems: a) I can no longer boot into any other OS on the machine, and b) the network card is not being recognised.
Unfortunately, b) makes a) harder to solve...
When I did the install, I accepted defaults whereever possible (and sensible). Part of that must have been to nuke my MBR, so now I can only boot into BSD. I think I'm going to have to install Grub or LILO. If I can boot into the RedHat partition somehow, I can rerun LILO and get that going. Otherwise I need some sort of rescue disk with Grub (or LILO) on it.
Ok, after a bit of fiddling - I used the fantastic Tom's Root/Boot Disk, the rescue floppy with the most - Thanks Tom!! - to mount my old Linux install and rerun LILO. Now NT won't boot (I still have some old files there I haven't backed up) but at least I have some more room to move. I booted back into RedHat, and double-checked that the NE2000 driver loaded correctly. It does; the IRQ and the IO port are the same as in BSD. There's something fishy about the bsd ne driver then... which is surprising, since it is such an old an established card. Hmmm...
Another gripe: when I log in, why on earth should it ask me the termcap type? Surely the enlightened system that it is could at least infer that since I was logging in on the console, that it could make a reasonable assumption as to what would be the most appropriate terminal type?
Well, after a bit more googling, it would appear that I am the victim of a "not quite 100% real" NE2000 card. Apparently not all NE2000 cards are created equal, and while other OSes seem to fudge their way through and work fine, OpenBSD doesn't seem to want to. I know the IO and IRQ are correct from booting into other working systems, and I'm fairly sure I've set the config (and media selection) in the network card SETUP. But apparently it is often a problem where the media selection is not assumed by BSD and if not set explicitly in the card, will not work. Now all I have to do is find that old driver disk... (And if any of you had seen my office, you would feel sorry for me about now...)
More ramblings when I don't have training material to write.
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