Title: Introduction to the OpenBSD operating system | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 01 October 2023 | |
Tags: openbsd bsd octopenbsd | |
Description: In this article, you will learn about the OpenBSD project, | |
how to try it and some hints about its usage | |
# Introduction | |
I often see a lot of confusion with regard to OpenBSD, either | |
assimilate as a Linux distribution or mixed up with FreeBSD. | |
Let's be clear, OpenBSD is a stand alone operating system. It came as | |
a fork of NetBSD in 1994, there isn't much things in common between the | |
two nowadays. | |
While OpenBSD and the other BSDs are independant projects, they share | |
some very old roots in their core, and regularly see source code | |
changes in one being imported to another, but this is really a very | |
small amount of the daily code changes though. | |
# OpenBSD features in 60 seconds | |
Let's do it quick, what can you find in OpenBSD? | |
* a complete operating system with X, network services, compilers, all | |
out of the box | |
* 100% community driven | |
* more than 11000 packages with stuff like GNOME, Xfce, LibreOffice, | |
Chromium, Firefox, KDE applications, GHC etc... (and KDE Plasma SOON!) | |
* a release every 6 months | |
* sandboxed web browsers | |
* stack smash memory protection | |
* where OpenSSH is developped | |
* accurate manual pages for everything | |
It's used with success on workstations, either for personal or | |
professional use. It's also widely used as a server, being for network | |
services or just routing/filtering network! | |
All the innovations that happened in OpenBSD | |
# Give it a try? | |
## On a Live-CD | |
If you never used OpenBSD, you can easily give it a try using the | |
community made LiveCD/LiveUSB FuguIta! | |
FuguIta project page | |
Older blog page about FuguIta | |
## In a virtual machine | |
Another way to easily try OpenBSD is to run it in a virtual machine. | |
Complete installation guide of OpenBSD | |
Please note that the VirtualBox additions are not available as their | |
drivers never got written for OpenBSD. | |
## On a real system | |
You can install OpenBSD on your system, or a spare computers you don't | |
use anymore. You need at least 48 MB of memory for it to work, and | |
many architectures are supported like arm64, amd64, i386, sparc64, | |
powerpc, riscv... | |
Complete installation guide of OpenBSD | |
## On a VPS | |
You can rent an OpenBSD VM on OpenBSD Amsterdam, a company doing | |
OpenBSD hosting on OpenBSD servers using the OpenBSD hypervisor! And | |
they give money to the OpenBSD project for each VM they host! | |
OpenBSD Amsterdam hosting | |
# Installing GNOME | |
I made a tutorial showing how to install GNOME, it's fairly easy! | |
How to install GNOME on OpenBSD (video tutorial) | |
# We play video games on OpenBSD! | |
This is actually possible, and always running native code to run video | |
games. | |
OpenBSD Gaming video channel (peertube) | |
PlayOnBSD Games compatibility list | |
OpenBSD_gaming subreddit community | |
# Going further | |
The OpenBSD project website | |
OpenBSD on Wikipedia |