OpenBSD Journal

Building an OpenBSD Live CD

Contributed by jolan on from the pf-on-a-disc dept.

Thanks to several people for pointing out that O'Reilly's ONlamp website has a new article up which is authored by OpenBSD's very own kevlo@. The article details Building an OpenBSD Live CD which is a process that is rather difficult to complete without some guidance.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward (66.159.249.56) on

    oopse wrong site....

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (66.131.206.50) on

  2. By Niclas Sodergard (141.5.11.5) nickus@gmail.com on

    It would be nice if these patches would be included in the OpenBSD tree so you could just do a "make livecd".

    Comments

    1. By tDk (212.118.59.2) on

      ...and do not forget about amd64 and others non-i386 systems!

    2. By Anonymous Coward (208.252.48.163) on

      It would also be nice if stores would tell me how to steal from them without getting caught. This is stealing from the OpenBSD project in all but name, and I'm very disappointed that Undeadly would run this. Support the OpenBSD project if you want it to be around a year from now!

      Comments

      1. By Josh Grosse (68.43.94.80) on

        I don't quite see it that harshly, myself. 1) A "Live CD" as described in the article is not installable onto HD. 2) Diskless or hardware set R/O disk firewalls are of value to increase security over a firewall with a standard IDE HD. Yes, there are other solutions, but this is certainly a valid option. 3) Modified kernels are, of course, unsupported, so anyone doing this is obviously on their own.

      2. By RC (71.105.32.88) on

        The OpenBSD project doesn't sell a LiveCD, so it's certainly not stealing in even the most incredibly vague sense of the word.

      3. By Anonymous Coward (131.130.1.135) on

        Oh come on. You can't make your software available under a BSD license and afterwards bitch about people using it without "giving something back".

        Comments

        1. By lb008d (129.189.10.254) on

          You *are* able to (and should!) bitch and moan as much as you want - Theo does this all the time when it comes to OpenSSH being used by corps without giving anything back to the project. What you can't do is *expect* something back or, worse, force the user to give back (i.e. GPL or proprietary licensing).

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (141.157.245.213) on

            Actually, in the Slashdot interview posted on his wikipedia entry, he mentions that he _wants_ corporations to use OpenBSD and OpenSSH, but never mentions them paying back...

          2. By Archite (69.238.133.30) on

            If I remember right, Theo also said that the goal of OpenSSH was not to make money but to keep people from using telnet, an insecure protocl. I think that this goal was achieved.

        2. By Anonymous Coward (213.23.141.144) on

          It's all about attitude boy... You know this word?

      4. By phessler (208.201.244.164) on

        Story text: authored by OpenBSD's very own kevlo@
        Your comment: This is stealing from the OpenBSD project in all but name, and I'm very disappointed that Undeadly would run this.

        Is this slashdot now? Do you not even read the story? Good god man, learn how to read.

    3. By SH (82.182.103.172) on

      Probably better to have it as a port like NetBSD : http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/sysutils/mklivecd/

  3. By Jim (71.33.199.215) on

    This is great news. If anyone has seen what the Auditor live CD can do, they can recognize how much better doing it with OpenBSD could be. The possibilities are endless, from PF on a CD to a wireless AP on a CD to a test boot disk to use to check out PCs, to a Time server on a CD.

    Having a complete system that just uses ram on the CD allows one to do things like boot from a Windows machine and ssh to home computers while traveling or at family computers.

    What the article didn't mention was how to add the packages you want before you burn the CD. I guess I'll go back and try it, since I _Use_ OpenBSD, I don't _develop_ it and I rarely ever download the source and compile stuff.

    I would hope that the knowledge and experience of others is collected and posted somewhere

    Comments

    1. By thomasw.xhrl (24.80.39.250) on

      yes a fine walk through indeed. but i do wish he had included some packages in the example. I mean this is kevin lo...a little "lftp lovin'" seems to be in order:P good cheer, thomasw.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (69.3.63.163) on

    Somewhat on the topic of trying out OpenBSD: I used to be an OpenBSD user for a long time, even running it as my only OS on my laptop, etc. Sometime about five years ago, Linux go so far ahead of OpenBSD in terms of ease of installation, support of random PC hardware, and availability of software that I switched. Until just today, I've been a 100% desktop Linux user (no Windows installed) for the past five years or so. I've continued buying OpenBSD disks and t-shirts, even though I didn't have a machine I wanted to install it on.

    Just today, I was fighting with an old machine. It was too old to run Suse 9.3 (which is a great desktop OS) and I couldn't get Minislack to install on it. So I thought, "Ok, time to try out OpenBSD again."

    Installation was just as fast and easy as I remember it. You do need to know how to partition disks, you do need to use the not-very-intuitive text-based installation, but those are really not that hard to do for experienced users and I got the entire system up and running X and TWM very quickly.

    It takes me back to the old old Unix days to see something running X with TWM. I actually like it. I figured out how to use pkg_add to get Firefox installed, and now everything is moving along.

    My problem right now is that I'm trying to get emacs (with X) running and it can't find libungif, and I can't find that in the packages list. Any idea what's going on with that? I could just compile emacs from source but it would be better to use packages, I think.

    I'm also working on getting Kaffe going on it, and I'm going to start testing all my Java apps (I'm a Java developer) on Kaffe/OpenBSD so I can have another platform option.

    Anyway, OpenBSD is cool and I'm going to start using it more, alongside Linux. Maybe I will try it next on a modern machine and try KDE on it.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (66.44.3.54) on

      The default WM is fvwm, not twm.

      As for libungif... If you can't find it on FTP just build it from ports... I haven't really used pkg_add for anything except packages I build myself on other machines.

      As for java... you know you can use sun's JDK in ports after a few patches and EULA click-throughs, right? Just might as well mention that, as it can be more comprehensive than kaffe/classpath.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (69.3.63.163) on

        I will try it out. Any pointers to where I get the patches? Is this for JDK 1.5? I would rather try to get things working under Kaffe, although I know that Sun's JDK 1.5 has many advantages. I might even try to make an OpenBSD package of Kaffe 1.1.5, which is the current version.

        Thanks for the info on that.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (66.44.3.54) on

          For legal reasons OpenBSD cannot include the patches nor the JDK source in the ports tree, but IIRC:

          cd /usr/ports/devel/jdk/1.4
          make

          Should give you instructions and URLs.

          Basically you will need to download both JDK 1.3 and 1.4.2 for Linux to bootstrap the build. Make sure you download 1.4.2, not 1.4.2-8 or whatever the current patchlevel is. Then you will need the source code to JDK 1.4.2 and BSD specific patches. Again, URLs for all of this stuff are in the ports tree and should show up when you type "make" without the proper distfiles.

          It's a long process but in the end you get a native JDK 1.4 for OpenBSD. I'd give you the resulting package file but A. it's large and I have a slow connection and B. it would technically be illegal for me to give it to you. :P

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (69.3.63.163) on

            Thanks for the info on that. I think that rather than fighting through that I'm going to work on Kaffe. That seems like a better way to spend time. I'm pretty sure I can get Kaffe 1.1.5 to run the latest Tomcat on OpenBSD. I'm working with them on the Tomcat list. OpenBSD + Kaffe + Tomcat would be a great combination, and if I can get that working smoothly I might start switching some more Linux machines over. Also it looks like Kaffe is picking up steam and maybe I'll do some work on getting it to compile "out of the box" on OpenBSD.

            Despite the anti-Java attitude that I have detected in many of the *BSD crowd, Java is a great fit with OpenBSD. OpenBSD provides a very secure and stable basic platform and Java provides a heavy layer of isolation for applications. Tomcat is also a great way to develop web applications.

            At some point I'm also going to see how it goes with gij (etc) on OpenBSD. They are all making good progress.

            Comments

            1. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on

              There's lots of free languages that you can legally use on openbsd for commercial purposes, that also provide the same layer of abstraction. Java is a pain in the ass to install, is i386 only and has a restrictive license that says you can't use it commercially on openbsd. And in return you get nothing, any high level language will fill in for java just fine.

              Comments

              1. By Anonymous Coward (68.104.17.51) on

                from /usr/ports/devel/jdk/java.port.mk in -current:

                .if ${MODJAVA_VER:S/+//} == "1.3"
                ONLY_FOR_ARCHS?= arm i386 powerpc
                ...
                .elif ${MODJAVA_VER:S/+//} == "1.4"
                ONLY_FOR_ARCHS?= i386
                ...
                .elif ${MODJAVA_VER:S/+//} == "1.5"
                ONLY_FOR_ARCHS?= i386

                Comments

                1. By Anonymous Coward (66.44.2.39) on

                  Interesting... I wonder what is keeping 1.4+ from working on arm and powerpc?

                  At any rate, I look forward to trying out 1.5 in 3.8 this fall.

              2. By Anonymous Coward (66.44.2.39) on

                I use java because at times, it's not my choice.

                I prefer C, but java is a nice language. It feels like a non-schizophrenic version of C++.

      2. By Anonymous Coward (69.3.180.13) on

        You are correct, the default WM is FVWM, not TWM. I used a left-click to switch over to TWM, giving me memories of using Unix workstations long ago. Very cool to have TWM with Firefox running in it. I love it.

        This hardware is a PII, and Suse 9.3 is really not usable on it, but OpenBSD 3.7 is just fine, and Firefox and everything else runs just fine. In fact, once I put the sets on a web server on the LAN here, I reinstalled, and it takes almost as long to install OpenBSD as it does to boot Linux. Ok, I'm exaggerating just a little, but really not very much. Installation is not intuitive, but it's not difficult for someone who knows what he's doing (a little bit).

        I also did get Kaffe 1.1.5 to compile and I'm making progress in getting Tomcat 5.5 to run with that version of Kaffe. Once I have that set up I'll have a great alternative to Linux for my Java web applications.

        At some point I'm going to try to make a real package of Kaffe 1.1.5 to replace the crusty old Kaffe package that OpenBSD has now. Really, 1.0.6 (or whatever) is several years out of date at this point. And once 1.1.5 is working with Tomcat I may also be able to make a Tomcat package that has no dependencies on Sun's JDK.

        So anyway, my conclusion is that OpenBSD is cool and a good choice to have alongside Linux. It will probably never have an Official Sun JDK release, which means that getting the rest of my Java tools like NetBeans running on OpenBSD may be a huge amount of work. Hopefully I'll have time to undertake that work at some point and then we'll have another great Java development and deployment platform.

    2. By Anonymous (213.184.232.178) on

      I have been using OpenBSD just for about a month and what I have understood so far is that OpenBSD is the only system I ever needed. (I'm a CS postgraduate student). I have already installed it on every machine I have (nearly all of them where running Debian Sarge before - the stuff is really broken and need to be fixed :)).
      Now I am sorry that I have lost about two years not using OpenBSD. Why I haven't used it? Because of stupid rumours that OpenBSD is hard to install - I was afraid!
      It's much easier to install than any of the Linuxes. Of course if you don't mind text-based install process.
      And KDE runs just perfect.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (66.131.206.50) on

        I couldn't agree with you more.

      2. By Anonymous Coward (208.54.95.151) on

        You are a CS Postgrad and you were afraid to install something because it might be difficult? Are they giving CS degrees away where you are? Good grief!

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (66.44.3.54) on

          It could be worse. He could be using Windows.

        2. By Anonymous Coward (80.94.168.50) on

          I was afraid of loosing time. Installing OSes has nothing to do with my research.

  5. By Anonymous Coward (210.6.198.197) on

    after boot up my Live CD, i have a problem with netstat when i type "netstat -anf inet", it show me netstat: no namelist how to solve it??

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (66.131.206.50) on

      I haven't tried this yet, but as a guess, I would think it sounds like /etc/protocols is missing; unlikely /etc/services though. Check that, if so, add it in.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (66.131.206.50) on

        I just tested on my system: sudo mv /etc/protocols /etc/protocols.org ; netstat -anf inet ; sudo mv /etc/protocols.org /etc/protocols ; netstat -anf inet | more. Looks to be the cause to that problem; I do however wonder why /etc/protocols would be missing though? Anyone else have any more insight into this? Can you check this and report back here? please. :-)

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (210.6.198.184) on

          hi, thank your help ...!! i think i find the problem, use this command can solve the problem, "kvm_mkdb /bsd", or edit /etc/rc "perl -i -pe 's,kvm_mkdb,kvm_mkdb /bsd,'" the kvm_mkdb(8) say: If no file is specified, /bsd is used by default but "/usr/src/usr.sbin/kvm_mkdb/kvm_mkdb.c" is use "_PATH_KSYMS"(/dev/ksyms) by default on my harddrive system, both "kvm_mkdb /bsd" and "kvm_mkdb /dev/ksyms" work but on my liveCD system, this work "kvm_mkdb /bsd", but this NOT work "kvm_mkdb /dev/ksyms" (i use root)

        2. By Anonymous Coward (210.6.198.164) on

          hi, thank your help ...!!

          i think i find the problem, use this command can solve the problem,
          "kvm_mkdb /bsd", or edit /etc/rc "perl -i -pe 's,kvm_mkdb,kvm_mkdb /bsd,'"

          the kvm_mkdb(8) say:
          If no file is specified, /bsd is used by default

          but "/usr/src/usr.sbin/kvm_mkdb/kvm_mkdb.c" is use "_PATH_KSYMS"(/dev/ksyms) by default

          on my harddrive system, both "kvm_mkdb /bsd" and "kvm_mkdb /dev/ksyms" work

          but on my liveCD system, this work "kvm_mkdb /bsd",
          but this NOT work "kvm_mkdb /dev/ksyms" (i use root)

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (66.131.206.50) on

            Awesome! Thanks for letting us know! How'd you find this out? :)

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