That grumpy BSD guy: You Have Installed OpenBSD. Now For The Daily Tasks.

Field notes and occasional musings by Peter on Stuff that happens, from a free software perspective, mainly OpenBSD, FreeBSD.

Despite some persistent rumors, installing OpenBSD on most hardware is both quick and easy on most not too exotic hardware. But once the thing is installed, what is daily life with the most secure free operating system like?

Welcome to OpenBSD! I assume you are reading this as a new user who has just completed installing the system. If you are more experienced with the system and reading because you want to see what they're teaching the young ones these days, you are welcome here, too. And at any rate, input such as corrections and comments are always welcome.

TL;DR: Supported Releases and Four Commands You Need To Know OpenBSD has two releases per year, May 1st and November 1st (roughly). Only the two most recent releases are supported. The first command to run after a new install is syspatch, which pulls in any security updates and installs them. If the output indicates a reboot or other action is needed, do as the program says. OpenBSD's sudo replacement doas is in base, is easy to set up and use and likely fills your needs for privilege elevation. Third party software comes in packages. Use pkg_add to install packages. For finding packages openbsd.app might help. When you need to upgrade to a new release, sysupgrade does the job well in almost all cases. Please keep yourself up to date on developments, and keep the length or limit of the support period for your release in mind. Also, we will offer some insight on running -current at the end.

Installing OpenBSD is quite straightforward on most hardware (possibly excluding some true antiques and, occasionally. the newest of the new). In the rest of this article we will assume that you have completed a basic install, following the OpenBSD Installation Guide in the OpenBSD FAQ, possibly supplemented by other sources.

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