Why would you buy an official CD in the 21st century?

The OpenBSD project is funded largely by sales of official CDs, along with related books, clothing, and so on. You can download a disk image from the Internet and burn your own installation disk, but purchasing an official set helps improve OpenBSD. The OpenBSD team tries to make the official CD sets interesting pieces in and of themselves, and usually packages them in some sort of geek-themed art. To get an official CD, go to the OpenBSD website and look for the Getting OpenBSD link. You can also find a whole bunch of OpenBSD-related merchandise.

You can download installation images from the Internet, but they’re not the same as the official CD set. The downloaded disk images don’t contain any packages, lack the fancy physical packaging, and work on only one hardware architecture. You cannot download the images used for the official disks.

The main OpenBSD distribution point is in Canada, which increases delivery costs for those living on other continents. The OpenBSD website lists a variety of resellers that offer official OpenBSD CDs. Pick a vendor in your country and save on customs duties. If that option isn’t available to you, you can at least pick a vendor on your same continent and save on shipping.

The other OpenBSD installation methods require network access, either to download a complete image or to download files during the installation. Start by selecting an OpenBSD mirror site close to you. You can find a full list of mirrors at http://www.OpenBSD.org/ftp.html.

You can install the operating system files from an ISO image, FTP, HTTP, rsync, or even the Andrew File System (AFS) or Network File System (NFS) on some platforms. We will break the task into two parts: getting the target system to boot and getting the operating system files on the machine.

All of the OpenBSD mirrors contain files and directories much like these:

Look within any given release directory on an OpenBSD FTP site or on a CD, and you’ll see the following:

Look through your CD or the mirror site and find the directory for your hardware architecture. The architecture directories contain fairly similar files for every hardware platform.

First, find the installation instructions for your hardware. These are named INSTALL followed by the platform name (such as INSTALL.i386, INSTALL.amd64, and so on). Always read the installation instructions for your platform. While I’ve made every effort for accuracy in this book, OpenBSD continually changes, and the install document for your release is the last word on installation instructions.

The OpenBSD boot media varies by hardware platform, and each hardware item has its own boot media requirements. You can’t expect to boot a Zaurus or a VAX from a CD.

To easily boot the OpenBSD installer on i386 or amd64 hardware, use either a floppy disk or a CD (I usually recommend the latter). You can boot the installer from a USB disk, but the standard method requires bootstrapping from an OpenBSD machine, and nonstandard methods vary widely depending on available equipment.

If you cannot boot from a CD, use a floppy disk. OpenBSD provides one amd64 floppy image and three different i386 floppy disk images. If you’re booting i386 from a floppy, I suggest downloading all floppy images.

If you cannot boot using either method, you must use the Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) diskless booting method, as described in Chapter 23. This method works well but requires a bit more preparation.

The boot disk can format your hard drive, configure your network, and copy installation files to disk. Boot media don’t include those installation files, however. Installation files for i386 and amd64 machines come on an ISO image and over the network via FTP or HTTP.

If you intend to install this release on multiple OpenBSD machines, you might download the CD image that includes the installation files. It’s much larger than the boot-only installer ISO image, however, so downloading it will require some sort of broadband connection.

If you’re doing a single OpenBSD installation, or you don’t have a CD drive, I recommend an HTTP installation. If you install from a reasonably close mirror site and have sufficient bandwidth, OpenBSD installs from HTTP quickly and reliably, and uses only about half as much bandwidth as downloading the installation ISO image. If you prefer, you can install from FTP as well.

Advanced users can install OpenBSD via the PXE method, as mentioned in the previous section and covered in detail in Chapter 23.

One reason CDs are so popular is that you need to download files from the Internet only once, but can reuse your downloads to install OpenBSD on many machines. But CDs are physically fragile, and not every machine has a CD drive. If you want to install OpenBSD on several machines without using up bandwidth for each installation, download all of the installation files for your architecture. If you copy these files to a local FTP or web server, you can install OpenBSD on any number of machines from these files. To install from the local FTP server, you’ll need a username and password for the FTP server.

To help save the OpenBSD Project on bandwidth costs, download only the directories for the architectures you need. If you know exactly what you want to install, download just those file sets. You might have no respect for your own bandwidth, but please respect others’ bandwidth.