Installing OpenBSD on a VM

I am of the opinion, that in order to learn how to use an operating system, you have to use it often. Since I am madly in love with Guix System, but have an interest in the GNU/Hurd and OpenBSD, I might as well install those OSs on a virtual machine! I have already done that with the GNU/Hurd, and today I also did it for OpenBSD.

I was not that hard to do. I used this guide to install OpenBSD on a vm.

First let’s create a qemu img for OpenBSD.

qemu-img create -f qcow2 hd0.qcow2.img 100G

Now, let's create an install script.

cat install-bsd.sh

#!/bin/sh

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2048 \
  -no-reboot \
  -cdrom cd71.iso \
  -drive if=virtio,file=hd0.qcow2.img,format=qcow2 \
  -enable-kvm \
  -netdev user,id=mynet0,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:7922-:22 \
  -device virtio-net,netdev=mynet0 \
  -smp 2

As always installing OpenBSD is an absolute breeze. I do not know how to manually partition things, so I just chose the auto install. Also OpenBSD supports a us.swapcaps.dvorak keyboard layout. That’s my layout! How cool is that!? And it sets up that layout for the console and X by default. Guix System does that, but not so well for wayland.

cat run-bsd.sh

Now let's create a run script.

#!/bin/sh

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 4G \
  -no-reboot \
  -drive if=virtio,file=hd0.qcow2.img,format=qcow2 \
  -enable-kvm \
  -netdev user,id=mynet0,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:7922-:22 \
  -device virtio-net,netdev=mynet0 \
  -smp 2

I find the -no-reboot option helpful, because OpenBSD likes to try to autoreboot itself, even when you give it the command: halt.

I have ran OpenBSD before for about a week before, and it is always a pleasure to read man afterboot. With OpenBSD the man pages are absolutely excelent.

One of the first things I did was:

# cp /etc/examples/doas.conf /etc/

Now my user berno can use doas to install packages! Let’s install Emacs!

doas pkg_add emacs

Also OpenBSD has a habit of printing clues to the console after you type in a command. For examle, after you install a package, OpenBSD tells you that it has installed README files in /usr/local/bsah/blah/README/emacs/. I find it really cool that it reminds you of this. Also, when you run doas syspatch it will tell you that it updated syspatch. It will also say something like:

Please run syspatch again to apply the patches.

That’s a handy tip! And indeed, doas syspatch -c showed that the patches had not yet been applied.

Also whilst searching for the internet for how to install OpenBSD on a vm image, I came accross blog post that describes that you can automate OpenBSD installs. That might be something to play with later!

I would like to also set up my local OpenBSD to set up ssh. That way I could do something like this:

#+BEGIN_SRC shell :dir /ssh:berno@localhost:/home/berno  :exports both
ls | wc -l
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS:
: 9

I also think it would be fabulous if the OpenBSD team started to make a guix-like package manager/distro. I imagine that they could use perl to do it, since it seems like OpenBSD has embraced perl as their scripting language, and I think it their man pages show that perl can use some rather low lever operating system interfaces.