OpenBSD is best known as a server operating system, but it can be a very effective and powerful desktop system. The X Window System is the standard graphic desktop software for Unix-like operating systems, and OpenBSD includes tools for using it. As this book assumes that you have some Unix experience, I won’t cover all the applications that make X Windows comfortable. You’ll need to experiment to find your preferred mail client, web browser, and text editors—most of which aren’t OpenBSD-specific. Instead, this chapter covers items that are unique to OpenBSD, originated with OpenBSD, or require specific configuration.

OpenBSD includes the Xenocara framework for modifying and building X.Org in a manner tightly integrated with OpenBSD. We’ll discuss making OpenBSD boot into a graphical desktop using the cwm desktop environment, as well as a text console using the tmux terminal multiplexer. But we’ll start by customizing the console.