I bring OpenBSD and Linux together

I've been trying to mount a Linux filesystem in OpenBSD 4.2 for awhile, and finally I figured out how to do it (and do it automatically at boot) without screwing up either my OpenBSD or Linux partitions.

I have a tutorial on this about 1/2 of the way done, but this was another situation where the excellent OpenBSD FAQ and man pages, as well as a couple of good general Linux/Unix online tutorials gave me all the help I needed. (I can never remember quite how to make chmod do what I want without looking it up.)

Since I installed OpenBSD on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt's hard drive without fully setting up the Linux partitions (all I have is swap and an ext2 partition for my live CD files), OpenBSD didn't know how to properly mount the ext2 partition.

Briefly, I needed to run fdisk in OpenBSD, transfer the Linux information to the OpenBSD disklabel, create a directory in which to mount the Linux filesystem, give the wheel group write access to that directory, then edit /etc/fstab to properly mount the ext2 filesystem at boot.

Once I was sure the Linux filesystem was properly mounting and was writable from OpenBSD, I booted Puppy Linux without mounting the partition and then ran e2fsck to clean up any errors (there were some).

Since then, the filesystem has been error-free, and I can easily exchange files between my OpenBSD and Linux installs on this laptop.

It's nice to solve a problem for a change.