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Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from April 2015. The article has been slightly improved.
Background: ArchBSD really changed its name not too long after I made the joke that it should change its name. It was renamed to PacBSD and went on for a few more years before the project closed down.
It's April fools time! You knew it: There is no _ArchBSD/Open_ in the making (or at least I don't know about it). But this year's April fools actually has some real background - both on the technical and the social side.
Puffy goes Pacman: April fools article
Well, I had the basic idea for this since about the beginning of the year. I wanted to bring _ArchBSD_ (update: The project is dead and gone) to the attention of my readers again since I really like the idea. But there was not too much news about the project. So I had to come up with something. And I thought that the humorous aspect of an April fools was just about the right thing.
There was another reason, however, and a rather strange one actually. A while ago I read somewhere that somebody was to leave Arch Linux (for various and IMO very valid reasons) and wanted to use OpenBSD instead. Right in the next post he was told in a condescending tone to enjoy the visit because he'd be back in no time anyways. I immediately hated that arrogance! Having been a visitor to *BSD land myself (and having liked quite some things there), the idea was born that there could be an Arch-OpenBSD blend like ArchBSD was already for FreeBSD.
There's a lot of bad behavior in the Linux world. On the forums of the now dead distribution CrunchBang I once read that there were also some Archers "creeping around" (there's another distro, ArchBang, which follows the same design ideas but is based on Arch Linux). Obviously the poster didn't have much respect for some of his fellow Linux users because another distribution fits their taste best.
Another member's signature made it quite clear why: UDOD ("Use Debian or die!"). I have no problem with such signatures or statements. In fact I think they are funny to some degree. The only problem here is: You never know if people are actually serious and do mean it (there are such weirdos).
Or have you ever witnessed what happens on the Arch forums if somebody admits to be using Manjaro or any other Arch-based distro? Quite often the reactions are... not exactly friendly. Use a different (even a closely related) distribution and you'll probably not making friends.
Ironically, a somewhat similar thing can happen to you the other way around, too. Just go to the Gentoo forums and dare to ask a beginner's question. Chances are that you are told how Gentoo is not for you and you should find another distro.
You really have to grow a thick skin in some cases! Fortunately there are also a lot of friendly and very helpful people around. And on the other side there's this new trend to replace pronouns with "gender-neutral" ones... This takes every day's imbecility to a whole new level where endless discussions arise not over technical matters but over real or imaginary sensitivities of some minority.
But enough of that. The net is the net and people are... what people are. Anyways: I began to wonder if Pacman could be installed on OpenBSD, too. And since I actually liked the idea, I decided to just give it a try.
I don't have too much experience with OpenBSD, yet, but I've been following the releases for about two years now and in fact I think it's a great OS. So let's install it first! Just like other free operating systems you can download in ISO image for the installation. There's just one thing wrong with it: The name! No, it's not a joke this time; the file is just named 'cd56.iso'. Now I'm all for short names but it should at least be _informative_. And 'cd56.iso' clearly isn't.
I've hated that with Gentoo: They offer images by the name of 'install-x86-minimal-20150407.iso' and the likes. Ok, by now I know that this is a Gentoo image but would it really hurt to state just that somewhere? And with OpenBSD it's even worse: You cannot even tell whether this file is an ISO of a 32-bit or of a 64-bit system! That's pretty bad. Now if you have both older and newer computers to deal with and download both, you'll end up with something like 'cd56 (1).iso' which is just ugly. And to tell which file is which version, you have to take a look at the size as the 64-bit one is slightly bigger (or you have to remember which one you downloaded first).
OpenBSD comes with a simple text-mode installer. _Simple_ in this case means that it's simple to use. It lets you choose how to install and does a lot of things for you then. Want to know what it can do? Just have a look at it! It's a shell script.
Installing the base system actually means fetching and unpacking tarballs. This is a simple and efficient method. And while it means that the files for the base system are not managed by any package manager (the programs we're going to install later of course are!), it seems that the OpenBSD people can live with that pretty well. Upgrading the system means extracting newer tarballs and removing some obsolete files by hand.
Installing OpenBSD 5.6 distribution sets (PNG)
Version 5.7 of OpenBSD is due next month so at the moment 5.6 is the newest version out and I'm going to use that. After the system was installed on the drive I'm prompted for the root password and a few other things.
Some more choices of the OpenBSD installer (PNG)
Now we need the Pacman sources of course. Let's install wget to download it. That program is available as a package for OpenBSD but to get that we need to tell the package system the path to a package mirror first.
Fetching pacman source with wget (PNG)
Ok. After installing some dependencies for Pacman (bash and libarchive) configure is happy. So we're ready to _make_ away!
Oops. Pacman obviously needs GNU make and cannot be built with BSD make. So let's install gmake and try again.
Compilation failed - installing a newer version of GCC next (PNG)
Much better! The compilation begins - but then it fails. Looks like OpenBSD's old GCC is not capable of compiling Pacman... Fortunately there's a newer version (two of them in fact) available as packages. Let's install one, set CC to _egcc_ (this is what the packaged newer GCC versions are called to distinguish them from the system compiler) and re-run configure before we try to build again.
End of the line: OpenBSD does not know the 'blkcnt_t' type used in Pacman's source! (PNG)
Now that's not cool. The compilation failed again! And this time it's not GCC's fault. OpenBSD simply does not know the 'blkcnt_t' type. As there's no way to fix that easily, we're stuck. Aren't we?
Actually we aren't out of luck. The upcoming version 5.7 supports this type! In my next post I'm going to install a snapshot and use pacman on that system. Yes, I can already tell you that it works. I've already taken these screenshots (and the ones for the next post) mid-March. 😉
