Introduction to the OpenBSD operating system

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Introduction

I often see a lot of confusion with regard to OpenBSD, either assimilate as a Linux distribution or mixed up with FreeBSD.

Let's be clear, OpenBSD is a stand alone operating system. It came as a fork of NetBSD in 1994, there isn't much things in common between the two nowadays.

While OpenBSD and the other BSDs are independant projects, they share some very old roots in their core, and regularly see source code changes in one being imported to another, but this is really a very small amount of the daily code changes though.

OpenBSD features in 60 seconds

Let's do it quick, what can you find in OpenBSD?

It's used with success on workstations, either for personal or professional use. It's also widely used as a server, being for network services or just routing/filtering network!

All the innovations that happened in OpenBSD

Give it a try?

On a Live-CD

If you never used OpenBSD, you can easily give it a try using the community made LiveCD/LiveUSB FuguIta!

FuguIta project page

Older blog page about FuguIta

In a virtual machine

Another way to easily try OpenBSD is to run it in a virtual machine.

Complete installation guide of OpenBSD

Please note that the VirtualBox additions are not available as their drivers never got written for OpenBSD.

On a real system

You can install OpenBSD on your system, or a spare computers you don't use anymore. You need at least 48 MB of memory for it to work, and many architectures are supported like arm64, amd64, i386, sparc64, powerpc, riscv...

Complete installation guide of OpenBSD

On a VPS

You can rent an OpenBSD VM on OpenBSD Amsterdam, a company doing OpenBSD hosting on OpenBSD servers using the OpenBSD hypervisor! And they give money to the OpenBSD project for each VM they host!

OpenBSD Amsterdam hosting

Installing GNOME

I made a tutorial showing how to install GNOME, it's fairly easy!

How to install GNOME on OpenBSD (video tutorial)

We play video games on OpenBSD!

This is actually possible, and always running native code to run video games.

OpenBSD Gaming video channel (peertube)

PlayOnBSD Games compatibility list

OpenBSD_gaming subreddit community

Going further

The OpenBSD project website

OpenBSD on Wikipedia