The probably underwhelming diary of a new OpenBSD user

[nibori]

Without much structure or thought, might serve as a record, for me or others.

Installer: from usb stick, the install experience is nice! Just hardcore enough that I feel the system assumes I have some idea about computery things, but not brew to the point of confusion. For example, at one point it asks which install target, and prompts "sd0 sr1 ?" (or such.. maybe a b... don't take my word). On pressing ? it gives a brief oneliner of each device. Just enough to make the choice, just brew enough I'm amazed.

At one point install prints "relinking to make unique kernel". Wow.

Booting: after entering passphrase, it gives me "boot>". Okay... Boot you say? So I type "boot", half-expecting based on past grub experience I will see some arcane message. But instead it actually boots! Neat.

On login to system, there's a welcome mail with instructions. The man pages indeed work! Could connect to wifi with just using ifconfig. Well, needed fw_update first to get the wifi driver. Where are the logs though? Linux would spray dmesg with link state foo bar, or wpa auth so and so.. here I didn't notice similar.

(Sidenote: the feeling when you adjust ifconfig and route, it still doesn't work, and it turns out be a flaky cable... flood ping for the rescue)

Looking at the filesystem. Looks clean! Hm, no /proc, /sys? Where do I get some stats about the battery? Will discover later.

Consoles... multiple consoles anyone? Alt+F2 doesn't work. Maybe it is the key mapping, or maybe it is not supposed to have multiple consoles by default?

Hm, what could be the equivalent of "loadkeys"? Well, can work with en layout for now.

startx gives me xterm and xclock, with a blue-red colorscheme. Wicked.

pkg_add works. pkg_info executed plainly gives a list of explicitly installed packages!

To be continued, eventually...

[izder456]

Responding to clear up some confusion and to give you general hints as you discover more about the system. Feel free to ignore if you wanna discover in your own time via man and info pages.

Keybind notation in this post uses emacs notation.

Ex:
C-A-d means: Control + Alt/Meta + The literal letter d

@nibori said:

Without much structure or thought, might serve as a record, for me or others.

Installer: from usb stick, the install experience is nice! Just hardcore enough that I feel the system assumes I have some idea about computery things, but not brew to the point of confusion. For example, at one point it asks which install target, and prompts "sd0 sr1 ?" (or such.. maybe a b... don't take my word). On pressing ? it gives a brief oneliner of each device. Just enough to make the choice, just brew enough I'm amazed.

At one point install prints "relinking to make unique kernel". Wow.

Booting: after entering passphrase, it gives me "boot>". Okay... Boot you say? So I type "boot", half-expecting based on past grub experience I will see some arcane message. But instead it actually boots! Neat.

You can also just wait it out, IIRC after some timeout (can't remember how long), it'll automatically run that command for you. OFC you can interrupt this timer by typing anything. This is particularly useful if you wanna boot a different kernel such as bsd.rd (which is a ramdisk kernel that contains the upgrade/install stuff and a basic shell environment for emergencies):

boot> boot bsd.rd

or to boot the single processor kernel rather than a muliprocessor kernel on a multiprocessor machine while troubleshooting:

boot> boot bsd.sp

You can also get a list of commands available at this boot prompt which may prove useful in some scenarios:

boot> help

On login to system, there's a welcome mail with instructions. The man pages indeed work! Could connect to wifi with just using ifconfig. Well, needed fw_update first to get the wifi driver. Where are the logs though? Linux would spray dmesg with link state foo bar, or wpa auth so and so.. here I didn't notice similar.

Minor correction. Like the name suggests, fw_update just updates/installs missing firmware needed by drivers. Since OpenBSD's kernel is non-modular, all this command does is let some particularly non-free devices behave correctly by letting the built-in kernel drivers load the needed firmware. This fw_update utility doesn't "install" drivers.

You can preserve ifconfig settings across reboots with hostname.if files too btw.

man hostname.if

As for logs, for the whole system (with some exceptions), usually they go into some subdirectory/subfile of /var/log. Plaintext OFC for sanity. For ifconfig specific information, just run ifconfig against your interface name. Eg:

~ $ ifconfig em0
em0: flags=8802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        lladdr 34:17:eb:ac:6d:bf
        index 1 priority 0 llprio 3
        media: Ethernet autoselect (none)
        status: no carrier

(Sidenote: the feeling when you adjust ifconfig and route, it still doesn't work, and it turns out be a flaky cable... flood ping for the rescue)

Congrats! ifconfig is one of my favorite features of OpenBSD's configuration.

Looking at the filesystem. Looks clean! Hm, no /proc, /sys? Where do I get some stats about the battery? Will discover later.

man apm
man apmd
man sysctl
man sysctl.conf

Consoles... multiple consoles anyone? Alt+F2 doesn't work. Maybe it is the key mapping, or maybe it is not supposed to have multiple consoles by default?

Just like Linux, which you may be already familiar with, you use C-A-Fn, where n is the tty number you want to navigate to, corresponding to a "Function" key on your keyboard. By default X11 launches on tty5 and kernel messages are on tty1. The rest are login(1) prompts. You can inspect /etc/ttys to learn about the default tty config.

man ttys

Hm, what could be the equivalent of "loadkeys"? Well, can work with en layout for now.

man wscons
man wsconsctl
man wsconsctl.conf
man kbd

startx gives me xterm and xclock, with a blue-red colorscheme. Wicked.

I'd suggest using the XenoDM rc script and login manager. It is more secure. Just using xinitrc/startx doesn't lock the tty that X11 runs in so a passerby can just C-A-Fn then C-d/C-z to fork to the x11 process to bg and get a free shell in your name. With XenoDM, it dedicates a tty for X11 only (tty5 by default) so you can't use anything other than x11 in that tty. It also correctly handles privsep/privdrop whereas startx/xinitrc does not which can fix some quirks you may come upon.

man rcctl
man xenodm
man xsession
man rc.subr

pkg_add works. pkg_info executed plainly gives a list of explicitly installed packages!

I love the OpenBSD package system. Super simple and easy to use. Fun fact! They're just perl scripts.

To be continued, eventually...

Godspeed. Enjoy OpenBSD!

Happy Hacking!