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