[PLUG] Does anyone have experience installing OpenBSD and/or a Live CD I could use?

Bryan Linton plug at shoshoni.info
Thu May 12 08:28:17 UTC 2016


On 2016-05-11 18:59:27, Vedanta Teacher <orevedantateacher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
>   Does anyone have experience installing OpenBSD for civilian use and/or a
> Live CD set?
> 
> I have a relatively new Dell Insperon lap top W/6 gigs RAM and 1 TB HDD .
> 3000 series,
> model 3558., Intel i3-5051U so, I'm 99.9%+ sure its an AMD64 type of chip.
> 
> #0: I don't have a Live CD so I tried to download the 5.9 version from a
> HTTP mirror
> in San Francisco ( http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/5.9/amd64/ ). I
> burned it to
> a CD but it didn't work. I've gone all of the way from just trying :
> install59.iso
> to burning and trying all of the images on the:
> Index of/pub/OpenBSD/5.9/amd64
> but nothing worked.
> 
> #1: I do have other live CD's so I popped the one for OpenSUSE in and the
> message
> "Welcome to Grub" popped up. So I have the UEFI/BIOS configured correctly.
> (Blessings to Dell for having such awesome support pages & BIOS settings-
> IMHO they are much better that ASUS or HP .)
> 
> #2: I'm thinking that I'm pulling & burning the wrong images from HTTP but
> I just
> don't have enough experience on pulling things off of mirror sites and
> making them
> work.
> 
> #3: I will be at the clinic Sunday with the machine & an extra machine to
> burn
> images. I'm open to ideas. *But, Don't Do It For Me *, just show me how. If
> you
> do it for me I'll never learn.
> 
> Finally, before everybody flames me just remember. Unlike people that sit on
> a distro for years and never change, I'm always willing to push the limits
> of my
> knowledge, take chances and learn new things. And everybody was a newbie
> at some point, I'm just a newbie @ OpenBSD.
> 

I wish I could come in person to help you with this, but sadly I'm
currently living on the other side of the International Date Line.

However, as a long-time user of OpenBSD I'd like to offer some
advice.

* Always use the latest version of OpenBSD, which is currently 5.9.
OpenBSD can change very drastically between versions, such as when Apache
was moved from the base system to ports, having been replaced with
OpenBSD's own httpd.

* OpenBSD has changed A LOT since Absolute OpenBSD was released.
Much of the information should still be relevant, but OpenBSD
prides itself on having extremely detailed yet concise manpages.
The FAQ is also very well written.  Don't be afraid to check the
FAQ and/or the manpages.

* OpenBSD now has an auto-partition feature, which removes what
was once one of the biggest stumbling blocks for new users when
installing OpenBSD.  I'd recommend you use it unless you really
have a good reason to stray from the defaults.

* Speaking of which, OpenBSD prides itself on having defaults that
are safe, sane, and work for most everyone.  It's doubtful you'd
need to change anything unless you have good reason to.
E.g.  If you're running out of mbufs on an extremely busy server, you
would want to increase them.  Preemptively increasing them
because, "I want my network to be faster" will probably not end up
doing what you would expect it to.

* You may already know this, but the BSDs name their networking
card's device after the chipset it uses.  I.e. There's no "eth0"
in OpenBSD.  "em0" is what most all Intel cards attach as, "bge0"
is what many Broadcom cards will attach as.

* You can install sudo from ports, but give OpenBSD's new
replacement for it called "doas" a try.

* Here are some files/manpages you would probably want to read:
/etc/hostname.(em0|bge0|etc.)
man hostname.if

/etc/doas.conf
man doas.conf

/etc/sysctl.conf	
man sysctl.conf		(Be careful with these, the only one
			you'll probably want is:
				machdep.lidsuspend=0      
				# laptop lid closes cause a suspend
/etc/examples/
man afterboot
man pkg_add
man ifconfig


* Assuming you have PKG_PATH set up to point to a local mirror,
type the following command to get some basic packages installed on
your system (feel free to omit any you know you won't use, this is
just an example).

pkg_add -i firefox iridium libreoffice thunderbird xfce

* Fetch and install a copy of the ports tree (the FAQ has details)
and just "cd /usr/ports; make search keyword=<type_keyword_here>
to find any packages that contain that keyword.

Use "make search name=<type_keyword_here> to search only package
names if "keyword" gives you too many results.

* Use pkg_add to install things.  Don't build from ports
unless you need a flavor or option that isn't provided as a
package.  If you build from ports, the package you build will be
identical to the one you would've fetched, so it'll save time to
just install the package.  Unlike other BSDs or Linux distros,
OpenBSD aims for the *binary packages* to be the final result, not
the *ports* themselves.


If you have any other questions, please feel free to send them to
the list.  I'm subscribed to it, so odds are I'll see it.  Also,
don't be afraid to use the OpenBSD mailing lists too.  While they
have a reputation of being hostile, I think that's somewhat
undeserved.  It's really more that if a question can be answered
by reading a manpage or the FAQ, people will just say that instead
of spoon-feeding people.  If you have a genuine question or issue,
people are usually more than willing to help out.

One final thing to note, your machine seems like it's very new, so
it may not be supported well by OpenBSD 5.9.  Please try
installing a snapshot if 5.9 doesn't work.  There have been many
improvements to UEFI and ACPI since 5.9 was released.  OpenBSD
snapshots are *much* more stable than most other project's
development branches are.  They're expected to work with only minor
issues arising, since they will eventually become the next stable
release.  A fun note, most all of the OpenBSD releases are just a
snapshot that went through some extra testing to make sure it was
extra-stable.

I've been running OpenBSD snapshots as my main OS on several
systems for about eleven years now.  I can count the number of
times I've been hit with bugs from doing so on one hand.  The
releases are meant more for people to save time and energy when
installing servers that they don't want to bring down regularly.

For a laptop or desktop, oftentimes installing a new snapshot
every 2-4 weeks is the best course of action.  It takes me less
than 5 minutes to upgrade the base OS.  Updating packages takes
far longer since the base OS is only about 250 MB whereas I have
about 8 GB of packages installed.  The system is functional at
least after the base OS is updated though, since it's only in
extremely rare cases that packages are broken entirely by an
upgrade.  When they are, messages will be posted on the mailing
lists and at http://www.openbsd.org/faq/current.html .

I'd recommend having some basic knowledge of the command line
before deciding to run -current, but if your machine is too new to
run on 5.9 then the snapshots will be a better option regardless
of anything.

Let me (and the list!) know it goes!  OpenBSD isn't for everyone,
but it's great at what it does.  I hope you end up liking it as
much as I do!  :)

-- 
Bryan




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