Install packages openbsd

The OpenBSD installer asks a series of questions and gives sensible defaults in [square brackets]. There were three points in the installation where I had to provide non-default input in addition to providing a root password and a user account and password Answer Yes to the question about the X Window System being started by xenodm. Xenodm is the OpenBSD fork of the xdm display manager. In the section Let's install the sets!

You just need to answer Yes to the question about the missing SHA See the FAQ for the reason. After the installer completes about five minutes on the X61s you can reboot into the graphical log-in screen and type your user name and password. The default choice is an ancient version of fvwm and this is what should visible now. There should be an xterm terminal window in the top left of the screen. Click on the title bar of that window to give it focus and bring it to the front if there is another window in the way.

That terminal window will enable the completion of the next 4 steps. The fonts might be very small on a modern laptop screen. With the mouse pointer over the window press Ctrl and click the right hand mouse button. A font menu will appear. Select Huge size to get readable characters. If the fvwm desktop in all its 90s glory becomes annoying a console aka tty can be used. Ctrl-Alt F2 will take you to a tty login from where all the commands in the next 4 sections can be run. Ctrl-Alt F5 returns to the X Windows 'shell'.

If the computer must be closed down before the xfce4 desktop environment is installed and configured use these commands as root. For licencing reasons some firmware packages cannot be included on the OpenBSD install media. To apply the binary updates to the base system just become root and issue the syspatch command To find out the name of the WiFi driver, type the ifconfig command as root The output from ifconfig tells me that my Thinkpad X61s has an Atheros wifi card installed and will use the ath driver which is distributed with the base system.

To connect to an authenticated WiFi, you can create a hostname. The commands below will install nano an easy to use command line editor. Occasionally, there is a glitch with the mirror or the internet connection and a package will not be correctly downloaded.

I like the xfce desktop environment. The OpenBSD port of xfce4 is version 4. Dependencies of xfce include consolekit2 and dbus , both needed to enable Xfce to suspend or hibernate from the logout menu. See the next section for details. Option 1 will pull in a large number of Gnome libraries. Option 2 has been provided by the packager for those of us who wish to use Evince to read pdf files with a different desktop or window manager.

The pkg-readmes for the xfce and firefox packages will be essential reading in the next section. A huge range of is ports available e. For example Don't reboot yet. You need to configure the graphical login and set up some daemons. Arch Linux has pacman , Debian has apt , Fedora has dnf , and Alpine has apk.

The different BSD systems also has package managers. Common to all these popular Linux distributions and FreeBSD is that binary packages regularly get updated. The rolling-release distributions like Arch Linux, Void Linux, and the Debian Linux "testing" version, get updated regularly with new features, bug fixes, and security fixes from upstream, whereas the non-rolling release distributions, such as the Debian Linux "stable" version, Fedora, etc.

FreeBSD is also a rolling-release system where you can run the pkg package manager with two different settings. With the setting latest FreeBSD is turned into a rolling release like Arch Linux or Void Linux, providing mostly bleeding edge software, whereas the default option quarterly only gets updated 4 times a year. This option was chosen as the default setting in order to have the software "mature" a bit first kinda like Debian "stable" on steroids. The base system isn't touched by the package manager and you have to use the tool freebsd-update for that.

However that is changing. With OpenBSD you don't get any binary package upgrades for third party packages. You don't get new features, bug fixes, or even security fixes. The reason for this is mainly due to a lack of resources. So to sum up, OpenBSD does not provide regularly security updates for third party packages outside of the "current" branch.

You will need to use the "stable" ports for security fixes. In order for a port to get updated it usually requires a CVE. Packages from the "current" branch will only work on "current". Things must be kept in sync with the base system version so you cannot simply use packages for "current" on the "stable" branch.

The OpenBSD base system always get both security and bug fixes. In the past, before ports and packages, you would need to manually get the source code for the applications you wanted to run.