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I had not yet picked up the habit of reading the manual. https://man.openbsd.org/boot.8#EXAMPLES https://man.openbsd.org/boot.8#EXAMPLES Being able to reach th
by milcron 9y ago
I had not yet picked up the habit of reading the manual. https://man.openbsd.org/boot.8#EXAMPLES 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.
- jancsika 9y agoAt 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.)
- Narishma 9y agoOT but why do you keep saying 'click' instead of 'press'?
- jancsika 9y agoOh, 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".