I decided to migrate form Alpine Linux to openBSD after an update of the Alpine Linux completely broke my initrd and when trying to reinstall following my previous notes only half of the things worked. The just for fun I tried openBSD and i got hooked by the lightness, sleekness. I liked it clear structure and simplicity to use, also the command line at the beginning has a nice looking and readable (big enough) font. so here we start the journey, hoping that it ends better than Alpine (which I loved a lot). I installed on a Samsung N900X3D New series 9 notebook.
I had an interesting glitch. after I installed openBSD for a second time from by USB stick I started getting the infamous acpitz bug where the system tells me that the temperature of the system is above the 144°C limit and the it shuts down the system. you could disable acpitz (acpi temperature zone) in the kernel at startup. at the boot> prompt don't way but enter
˜ boot -c
and enter. this will bring you in the kernel configuration. there type
˜ disable acpitz ˜ quit
the system will the boot without the shutdown. although this helps it is totally inconvenient, also you loos many acpi readouts like the battery levels etc (with the preinstalled apm command, neat eh!). I tried many recipes fond on the net bit nothing worked. until I remembered at at the first install I did not have this issue. also some choices from the previous installation were somehow saved and proposed as in the next installation (such as the repository mirror), thus this meant that the USB installation media was changed during the install... so before giving up on openBSD I copied the installation image freshly on the USB stick and installed from there...and the acpitz bug was gone!
The installation for USB is quite straight forward. In my case when I set up the network I first choose to setup only the Ethernet (re0) as the drivers for the wireless (iwn0) were not yet loaded. OpenBSD comes without proprietary drives at first as their distribution is in the legal gray zone. we will setup wireless later. I choose disk as installation media not HTTP, I can update later. Also I installed an additional user beside root. I also choose not to start X11 with xenodm (the desktop manager) yet, but go with startx, for debugging reasons
Similarly to Alpine openBSD uses doas to perform superuser tasks, only that you need to setup it up. you can enter root with
˜ su
the form there copy the example configuration file for doas
˜ cp /etc/examples/doas.conf /etc/
and you are done. X11 and some (three) window managers are already. I use and love cwm. to launch cwm at startx create a .xinitrc file in you home directory and add
˜ exec cwm
than when you do a startx it launches cwm. you can adapt with the window manager of you choice and also set a things like general background of X11 to black (before executing the window manager)
˜ xsettoot -solid black &
the ampersand is to run the command in background and don't stop the execution of the window manager. BTW openBSD has a screensaver/blanker already installed! working both in X11 and in the only command line environment. one good thing to do after installation is a patching the newest security updates with
˜ doas syspatch
it will prompt you to do it twice. also update the firmware form time to time
˜ doas fw_update
be careful as this will recompile the kernel, and might break the system (it should not, but you know...)
to install software from the repository first update the repository
˜ doas pkg_add -Uu
the install you package
˜ doas pkg_add yourpackagehere
to search for a package use
˜ doas pkg_info -Q
this will display several versions available for the package and also tell you if one of them is already installed. to show the installed packages simply do
˜ doas pkg_info
by the way if you wan to see you battery status
˜ apm
cool! right out of the box, hopefully. Now lets setup the wireless network for this make a new file
˜ doas nano /etc/hostname.iwn0
much like hostname.re0 for the ethernet. now enter your network connection
˜ nwid YourSSID wpakey YouWPAKey ˜ inet autoconf ˜ inet6 autoconf
if you just set the connection up you need to run
˜ doas sh /etc/netstart iwn0
it will be run automatically at the next restart. the to start the interface you need to switch in the wireless card
˜ doas ifconfig iwn0 up
e voila. now you should see a inet or inet6 sdress when you
˜ ifconfig iwn0
to scan for networks you can
˜ ifconfig iwn0 scan
all simple neat and already out of the box. it is also possible to save multiple access points to connect to with a different syntax in the hostname.iwn0
˜ join YourSSID1 wpakey YouWPAKey ˜ join YourSSID2 wpakey YouWPAKey ˜ join YourSSID3 wpakey YouWPAKey ˜ dhcp
the higher the SSID in the list the higher the priority to connect in case there are two or more access points available. the connection can also be done manually by scanning the network with
˜ ifconfig iwn0 scan
choose an network and connect to it with
˜ doas idconfig iwn0 down ˜ doas ifconfig iwn0 join YourSSID wpakey YouWPAKey ˜ doas idconfig iwn0 up
setting the display brightness of a laptop LCD panels is as easy as
˜ xbacklight -set 50
for setting to 50%. you can also use -inc or -dec to increase or decrease the percentage respectively if you want to do this with a script or button in a tool or your window manager key combo. isn't that great? again all already out f the box.