If you are having trouble, you may find the answer here. If you run into a strange problem that you can't figure out, feel free to email me as there may be a bug in flashdist that needs to be fixed.
On a large flash, flashdist still works fine! You can use the extra space for a variety of software, data, logs, or just leave it alone. When I originally wrote flashdist in 2002, flash was less reliable, and anything larger than 32MB was too expensive to purchase in large volume (especially for sites deploying dozens or hundreds of systems.) As well, many old boxes still have 32MB and 64MB flash, which we can still use! Finally, OpenBSD has infrastructure to run several MIPS and ARM architectures now. These often come with small, soldered on-board flash. With proper driver support, (and maybe trimming of the distribution list) it would be trivial to target flashdist towards these systems.
I still use flashdist, as I've had several ATA flash (mounted in read-write mode) get scrambled for no apparent reason (under multiple operating systems!) The issues that did not appear to be wear related (no bad sectors on read), and these systems did not often write to flash. Read-only mounts avoid some corruption that could otherwise happen. (It's also a basic preventitive measure to avoid dirty filesystems that fsck -p can't fix) My goal is to create a system that runs reliably for many years, with a minimal chance of failure.
Now that OpenBSD's boot blocks use LBA, geometry is much less critical than it used to be. You can use any geometry that represents an equal or lesser number of sectors than your physical media provides. To use the full capacity of your media, you must use a geometry that represents all of the sectors available from your media (use growimg.sh if you want to expand an existing disk image.)
You don't, if you are using the -d flag. However, this mode fails if you are installing to a media that doesn't support the kernel's geometry probe (media such as vnd.) Before OpenBSD incorporated LBA boot blocks, flashdist's -d mode didn't work in certain (common) cases, so it was not advertised.
You were't root when you ran tar to extract your OpenBSD base.tgz, etc.tgz and man.tgz archives. Try again as root (make sure to use the 'p' flag as in tar xzpf to preserve permissions and ownership) and then run flashdist again.
You are trying to get disk geometry (-d mode) on a device that doesn't support this function. You need to manually specify a disk geometry.
You need to upgrade the BIOS. Go to pcengines.ch and find the latest BIOS image. And, if you install the wrong image, you will notice that interrupt mappings don't get setup to certain PCI devices.
Older Soekris BIOS have trouble with certain CF cards. Try updating with the latest BIOS from soekris.com.
You need to edit /etc/rc on the destination flash. Or, do it on the disk image with the instructions on the images page. You can also use nsh to manage networking settings without touching /etc/rc.
Copy your preferred time description file to /etc/localtime. Either look in /usr/share/zoneinfo for the right file or just copy /etc/localtime over from a box that already has the right timezone.
Copy them to the appropriate /usr/local paths on the flash. You may also need to copy specific libraries from /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib. Run 'ldd binary' to see what libraries binary depends on.
In many cases, I've added various requested tools to the distribution list because they were small and useful. In some cases, you should manually add it to flashsmall.txt to serve your own needs. Let me know what you want to see added and I'll work on it.
Bug me. Seriously, let me know. There are two motivating factors for new releases: 1. User interest and 2. My own need. If I haven't updated flashdist in a while, I probably didn't need it... Actually, you may not need to bug me. In the distant past, flashdist required frequent updates because it only worked with specific snapshots and release versions of OpenBSD. Now that it automatically detects which libraries to install, this is not a concern. I suspect flashdist won't need any work to support new OpenBSD versions for some time, except for adding the usual new daemons and tools that keep getting added to OpenBSD itself!
I maintain a variety of systems for my own personal or business use. Each system typically runs for 2 to 4 years between updates. Updates are driven by the need for security patches or new features (or performance updates or driver bugfixes or ...)