OpenBSD in QEMU

About OpenBSD

OpenBSD is a fork of BSD (Berkley Software Distribution) which is it self a fork from the original UNIX and I've heard a lot of positive things about it. For some time I've played with the idea of installing it and some days ago it popped up in my mind and I decided to give it a try. So I watched some youtube videos and read some articles and dove into it. Especially this video gave me a very good tip/warning: there is a big difference between how to retrieve information about Linux and OpenBSD. Because Linux is relatively wide spread, one can just duckduckgo one's question and find the answer. OpenBSD has a rather rtfm (read the fucking manual) mentality, but on the other hand it is well know for it qualitative manual pages. So I started this journey with a mindset of reading a lot of docu and it was amazing.

Installation

I decided to try it in a virtual machine first. As I am on Linux, my VM of choice is qemu because it can be used from the command line and I find that cool. So the first step was to create the virtual hard disk:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 openbsdbox.qcow2 10G

This command creates a dynamically allocated virtual hard disk with a maximum size of 10GB with the name openbsdbox.qcow2 and the file format qcow2. That means that the file will only be as big as it needs to be. I downloaded the image from openbsd.org:

wget https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.0/amd64/install70.iso

Now I can already boot into the installation live disk:

qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=obsdbox70.qcow2 -enable-kvm -m 4G -cdrom /home/pur/Doc/Computer/Distros/openbsd_install70.iso -boot once=d

The installation process is rather straight forward. I was be prompted with some questions and the answers determined what has been installed. I chose to install a graphical user interface (GUI). Then I rebooted, but I wasn't greeted by a nice OpenBSD display manager (graphical login), but rather the command line interface (CLI). Eventually, I found out that the problem was the video driver. How? I don't remember, but I think dmesg gave me the needed hint. The solution was to use the vmware vga card emulator:

qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=obsdbox.qcow2 -enable-kvm -m 4G -vga vmware 

With this command I managed to arrive at the display manger and I could enter my user name and my password but I couldn't see my mouse.

to be continued ...

After Boot

After booting I read the mail with the mail command did some basic stuff:

mail
man afterboot 
info
su
echo "permit :wheel persist" > /etc/doas.conf
doas pkg_add vim screen

• In the first mail i got a nice intro to the some basic utilities like man, info, and the afterboot manual page. I would have loved to get this rather straight forward introduction when I first started with linux.
• The afterboot manual page gives a short intro to many of the inner workings of the system (conifiguration files in /etc/, users, gorups, su and doas, ssh config, changing passwords passwd, networking, mounting, rc and many more).
• The info command was completely new for me. I only got through the tutorial on how to navigate through the info nodes (pages) because it's nice to have an alternative to the manual pages provided by the man command.
• I used su to get super user (root) privileges, to install some basic tools which I was missing. The first thing I did, though was to activate doas (sudo equivalent) for the wheel group. Finally, I installed (beloved) vim and screen as apparently tmux could not be found.
• Some useful screen commands are (C-a stands for control+a):
  • C-a c create a new tab
  • C-a digit switch to tab 0-9
  • C-a C-a switch to previous tab
  • C-a S split window horizontally
  • C-a | split window vertically
  • C-a X kill current region

Read the Second Part of this Adventure