OpenBSD

[Joseph]

Thanks for the information about the distributions. I purchased the official Mandrake 6.1 release. It was easy to install and very convenient to configure. The only problem I had was setting up my modem, and that was because I don't know what I'm doing. I recently purchased some unofficial distributions to see what they were like. I want to really understand how linux works. Mandrake does a lot of things for you so I figured if I tried a distribution that forced you to do things on your own then I could learn more about linux. I got openbsd yesterday -not exactly linux but close- and it makes you do most things on your own. I need to install setserial so I can get my plug and play modem to work and the major problem is that tar will not work. It says that the device it is reading to (/dev/rst0) is not configured. I don't know how to configure the device. Is there a way to set IRQ's and addresses for serial ports without setserial? Thanks for the help.

[furrycat]

I haven't yet got around to playing with OpenBSD but I've got a bit of experience with FreeBSD. I found setting up an external modem with FreeBSD to be a breeze: it uses /dev/cuaa0 for the first serial port but I would imagine that it's only the name that's different. You might need to do

stty </dev/rst0 crtscts 115200

to get the modem to communicate with the serial port at the right speed... All this is well-documented in the FreeBSD handbook. Perhaps there's an equivalent OpenBSD document?..

Internal ISAPnP modems are a bit more tricky under FreeBSD. You have to look for the PnP ID string on bootup and add that to a list of known IDs in the kernel sources, then recompile. I spent hours trying to do this without any luck. My housemate then chose that moment to inform me that he'd flash upgraded the modem and it didn't work at all any longer...

As for PCI modems: forget it.

Hopefully this information can help you out a bit but if OpenBSD is just too different then I'm afraid I don't know.
Returning to Linux: ditch your kppp and linuxconf etc, and read the HOWTOs. PPP in Linux is easy if you RTFM. Masquerading's better in FreeBSD though, and who could prefer ipchains's syntax over ipfw's?