OpenBSD Journal

Notes on Modifying the OpenBSD Boot Floppy

Contributed by jose on from the build-your-own dept.

RC forwards:
"O'Reillynet has a good article on how to make modifications to the OpenBSD boot floppy: http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/2909

It specifically covers making your serial port the tty (so you don't need a keyboard/monitor attached), but mentions that the same method works for any other configuration changes you might want to make."

Some people like to have mini-systems on a floppy, or they like to be able to adjust things for install time settings. This is a pretty good introduction to building boot floppies, and definitely worth pairing up with similar articles we have run here in the past.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    What would be even better would be to have some sort of kickstart for OpenBSD, I've worked with a homebrewed one, and it was ugly. Doing something with pxegrub would be really nice. It's a project that I would like to work on, but it would get obsoleted really fast with each release and would thus be a pain to maintain.

    -E

    Comments

    1. By RC () on

      Hmm, what am I missing here? What is it that you would like to do that you can't already do easilly?

      OpenBSD is just like any other Unix, so you can really configure *anything* with a text file/shell script. (eg. FDisk, Disklabel...)

      Because the installer is text-only, you should be able to just write a text file with the answers to all the question the installer asks, and give that as the input for 'install'. (eg. install
      OpenBSD makes things even easier since the release is just a few tgzs. You could trivially make your own installer that extracts them.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        >>>
        Hmm, what am I missing here? What is it that you would like to do that you can't already do easilly?
        <<<

        If your definition of "easy" is 10mins worth of work, then you haven't looked at the install code. The question is never whether it could be done, it's how cleanly it could be done (based on my orig. note that it was an ugly solution). Doing a hack-job is a non-issue, but having a really elegant solution is what I am aiming for (which is something that could *not* be done "easily").

        -E

  2. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Here I thought that someone had created a step by step guide on creating a custom boot image (kernel, binaries, scripts, etc). Doh!

    Comments

    1. By Erik () on

      man release contains a step by step guide.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        Sorry, but the release man page doesnt have anything about creating a custom boot floppy/cd.

    2. By pixel fairy () yes on mailto:yes

    3. By pixel fairy () pixel at that org domain about the gimp on mailto:pixel at that org domain about the gimp

      look in /usr/src/distrib/
      and release(8)

  3. By Anonymous Coward () on

    That's excellent, I needed something like this and wasn't too sure how to go about it.
    Great to see articles like this!

  4. By littletmix () on


  5. By littletmix () on


    I mean, if you follow mount the floppy you can see only the
    boot file and the kernel. How can I see the install script
    code?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      The kernel is a compressed image that contains the RAM disk based file system and its contents. You have to boot the kernel to have it uncompress and populate the RAM disk, and see the install script.

      Alternatively, you could follow the source and look at what the install script has.

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