As of April 20, 2017, the information in this article has been deprecated. It may or may not be relevant for contemporary usage. Handle with care!

This guide contains old installation instructions for Gentoo OpenBSD.

Introduction to OpenBSD

What is OpenBSD?

The OpenBSD project produces a freely available, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. Our goals place emphasis on correctness, security, standardization, and portability. OpenBSD supports binary emulation of most binaries from SVR4 (Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, BSDI, SunOS, and HPUX.

It was forked from NetBSD, a previous open source operating system based on BSD, by project leader Theo de Raadt in 1994, and is widely known for the developers' insistence on open source and documentation, uncompromising position on software licensing, and focus on security and code correctness.

Installation

The Gentoo OpenBSD project currently has official installation media, so you can download an ISO image from here.

Burn this image to a CD and use it boot your computer. Please log in as user 'root', using blank password. Once logged in, you have to create and format partitions for your Gentoo OpenBSD installation. If you're unsure how to do this, please consult the section "Setting up disks" of the OpenBSD FAQ.

Partitioning the disk:

root # fdisk -e wdX

Substitute X to reflect the setup:

root # disklabel -E wdX

Substitute X and Y to reflect the correct disk/partition:

root # newfs /dev/wdXY

When done partitioning the disk, create a mount point to the previously created partition(s). Replace X and Y with the correct values for the hard disk(s):

root # mkdir /var/gentoo root # mount /dev/wdXY /var/gentoo

After mounting the target partition, it is time to fetch and unpack a stage3 tarball and sync with the main Gentoo repository:

root # cd /var/gentoo root # ftp http://dev.gentoo.org/~reb/obsd/stage/gentoo-openbsd-stage3-211105.tar.bz2 root # ftp http://dev.gentoo.org/~slyfox/historical/gentoo-openbsd-stage3-211105.tar.bz2 root # tar xjpfv gentoo-openbsd-stage3-211105.tar.bz2

Congratulations, it should now be possible to update the Gentoo OpenBSD installation using Portage! In order to be able to boot your new system later on, be sure to install a bootloader or add Gentoo OpenBSD to the current boot loader's configuration. Additionally remember to populate the /dev directory with the necessary device nodes. Finally edit /etc/fstab to reflect the partition layout.

root # cd /var/gentoo/dev root # ./MAKEDEV all root # chroot /var/gentoo /bin/bash root # cd /usr/mdec; ./installboot boot biosboot wdX root # vim /etc/fstab

Note

Replace X in the command above with the appropriate partition.