Installing Gentoo/OpenBSD

1.  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.

2.  Installing Gentoo/OpenBSD

Installation instructions

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.

# fdisk -e wdX
Creating a partition.
# disklabel -E wdX
Substitute X to reflect your setup.
#  newfs /dev/wdXY
Substitute X and Y to reflect the correct disk/slice.

When you are done with setting up your disk, create a mount point where you mount the previously created partitions.

# mkdir /var/gentoo
# mount /dev/wdXY /var/gentoo
(Replace X and Y with the correct numbers for your hard disk.)

Now that you have mounted the target partition, it is time to fetch and unpack a stage3 tarball and syncing your portage tree.

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

Congrats, you now should be able to update your Gentoo/OpenBSD installation using Portage! But in order to be able to boot your new system later on, you will have to install a boot manager or add Gentoo/OpenBSD to your current boot loader's configuration. Additionally you will have to populate your /dev dirctory with the necessary device nodes. Finally you'll have to edit your /etc/fstab to reflect your partition layout.

# cd /var/gentoo/dev
# ./MAKEDEV all
# chroot /var/gentoo /bin/bash
# cd /usr/mdec; ./installboot boot biosboot wdX 
Where wdX is your disc.
# vi /etc/fstab

3.  Contact

A list of Gentoo/OpenBSD developers can be found at the project page. Other ways to contact Gentoo/FreeBSD developers include our IRC Channel #gentoo-bsd on Freenode, as well as the gentoo-bsd mailing list.

The contents of this document, unless otherwise expressly stated, are licensed under the CC-BY-SA-2.5 license. The Gentoo Name and Logo Usage Guidelines apply.