Just some random problems/suggestions/ideas

[chris lalor <lalor_(_at_)_davinci_(_dot_)_netaxis_(_dot_)_com>]

First of all, I just want to say that I was blown away by the improvements
made in every part of this release. I've been using OpenBSD on and off
for about a year, and while it has always had potential, until now I kept
going back to FreeBSD for the mere sake of functionality and compatibility
- but this release changed all of that. Indeed, a round of applause is
deserved for all who contributed.

Despite my adoration for the OS, I have had some problems with various
things, and had some ideas and suggestions I thought I might bounce off
you guys.

Problems:
1. During install with the new disklabel, I hit a dead end. Although all
of my partitions were set up correctly, disklabel kept telling me that
although I hadn't defined any partition labels, there was no room in my
OpenBSD partition to do so. I got around this by using disklabel from
floppy21.fs and throwing the 2.2 install floppy back in to finish the
installation process. Despite this install was flawless.

2. xdm takes over ttyC1 no matter what. If I set it to ttyC7 in my
/etc/ttys, it still reverts to ttyC1. The problem with this is that
unbeknownst to me while I was switching among terminals, the getty from
ttyC1 kept thinking I was trying to log in - xdm was passing some sort of
garbage to it - and 5 minutes later it would cancel the login and kil xdm.
I got around this by disabling getty on ttyC1 and enabling xdm on ttyC1,
but why is it doing this - I mean defaulting to ttyC1?

3. I use netscape for bsdi2.1, and it runs beautifully, until I try to use
usenet. Has anyone else had this problem, or does anyone know of a
netscape version that runs fine on OpenBSD - albeit a little slower?

4. The NE2000 PCI driver just won't recognize my linksys generic piece of
crap card. I am now using a real ethernet card, but if anyone else has run
into this problem I found the FreeBSD driver worked fine, and was thinking
of working on seeing what might be causing this problem, and adapting the
FreeBSD code if necessary.

Suggestions/Ideas:

1. Let's make the X11 .tgz's into packages, so the install script will
install them.

2. An install option for ppp might be a good idea. ie: open up the
chatscript with vi, and when the user's done editing it, connect. This
would help a lot of people who want to do an ftp install, but only have a
modem and it would also prevent doing what I had to do - downloading the
files in WinNT, and saving them to a zip disk (shudder).

3. I was entertaining the idea of writing a OpenBSD "Handbook" a la
FreeBSD, except of course significantly cleaner and better organized, but
then again I guess I don't have to say that, just look at the source code.
Anyway, I really thought It might be a good idea to take the Newuser FAQ,
revamp it, and tack it onto a sort of biblical reference piece. If anyone
would be interested in helping, or taking the lead even, I would love to
see the formation of a documentation team - because no matter how much I
love aprapos and man, a well written manaul is very often the easiest way
to find what you need.

		Thanks
		-Chris Lalor