First Steps with OpenBSD
| April 5th, 2010I’m using the acer aspire one D250, and as mentioned before the current snapshot is the only which detects the network card fine, but along with that even the Wireless card and Display card are detected fine. OpenBSD installs fvwm as the window manager for X, which is good not enough to get started and install stuff like firefox, let me show you how to do the same.
you start X by typing startx, and you are brought on to fvwm window manager, which already has a xterm window open. In the xterm window become root by typing su and then your password. Now we will use the pkg_add command to download and install firefox from openbsd ftp server’s, for this you need to set up the PKG_PATH variable, type in the following in the same xterm window.
export PKG_PATH=”http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/i386″
If you are going to downloading via a proxy then setup the proxy variables in the following manner in the same xterm window
export ftp_proxy=”http://your.proxy.ip.here:port”
export http_proxy=”http://your.proxy.ip.here:port”
and now you should be good to go, type in
pkg_add -r firefox35
this will download firefox version 3.5 and install for you on your machine. to start using firefox just type in firefox35 in any xterm window and your good to go, i.e if you dont use a proxy server to access the internet. If you you will face the problem i had, i clicked on edit–preferences and found that i could not go to the advanced section as the window was larger than this tiny laptop’s screen. So i knew i had to change the window manager, ( i was too lazy to reboot into slitaz and search how to solve this problem in fvwm), and i did not want any gnome.kde,xfce as i wanted to keep the base very small. also i was not looking for lxde. I just wanted something to firefox and xterm and be able to access then easily, and for that best description fit was xmonad and dmenu, i had just tried the same combination a few days back on freebsd and was ok with it. So next step was
pkg_add -r xmonad
& then
pkg_add -r dmenu
then i added nano editor as i’m not comfortable with vi ( i hate it )
pkg_add -r nano
Now to see to it that startx begin’s xmonad, exit from root in your xterm window, or just open another xterm window and type in
nano .xinitrc
dont forget the dot, in this file type in
exec xmonad
type in ctrl-o to save the file and ctrl-x to exit , and then reboot, you will become root again to reboot. I could exited fvwm and then done a startx , and in fact i did it, but was not cleanly shutting down, i did’nt think too much about it, just went to another console, by pressing ctrl-alt-f2 logging in and then rebooting. Once rebooted type in
startx
and xmonad will start, to start a xterm window, type alt-shift-enter . to start dmenu type in alt-p, this time you can firefox using dmenu, just type fire and it will auto-complete to firefox35 and press enter and firefox starts. If you don’t like the tiled window option, keep pressing alt-space till one window takes up the whole screen and then shift windows with alt-tab. For me as of now this setup is enough, ill be reading now the spacebugs.nl website for further trying out mpls on openbsd. Don’t know how long that will take. but i am going to keep updating.