OpenBSD 7.1 Released With Apple Silicon Support | 5 Things To Do Immediately About OPENBSD OS Type: BSD Based on: Independent Origin: Canada...
OpenBSD 7.1 Released With Apple Silicon Support | 5 Things To Do Immediately About OPENBSD
- OS Type: BSD
- Based on: Independent
- Origin: Canada
- Architecture: alpha, armish, aviion, hppa, i386, landisk, loongson, luna88k, octeon, powerpc, powerpc64, risc64, sgi, socppc, sparc, sparc64, x86_64, zaurus
- Desktop: AfterStep, Awesome, Blackbox, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, GNOME, IceWM, KDE, Openbox, WMaker, Xfce
- Category: Security, Server
The OpenBSD project produces a free, multi-platform BSD 4.4-based UNIX-like operating system. Its efforts emphasize portability, standardisation, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. The project also develops the widely-used and popular OpenSSH (OpenBSD Secure Shell) software, which provides encrypted communication sessions over a computer network using the SSH protocol.
About OpenBSD
The OpenBSD project produces a freely available, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. Our goals place emphasis on correctness, security, standardization, and portability.
Why might I want to use it?
Some reasons why we think OpenBSD is a useful operating system:
OpenBSD runs on many different hardware platforms.
OpenBSD is thought of as the most secure UNIX-like operating system by many security professionals, as a result of the never-ending comprehensive source code audit.
OpenBSD is a full-featured UNIX-like operating system available in source and binary form at no charge.
OpenBSD integrates cutting-edge security technology suitable for building firewalls and private network services in a distributed environment.
OpenBSD benefits from strong ongoing development in many areas, offering opportunities to work with emerging technologies and an international community of developers and end users.
OpenBSD attempts to minimize the need for customization and tweaking. For the vast majority of users, OpenBSD just works on their hardware for their application.
Is OpenBSD really free?
OpenBSD is all free. The binaries are free. The source is free. All parts of OpenBSD have reasonable copyright terms permitting free redistribution. More about OpenBSD's copyright policy can be found here.
The maintainers of OpenBSD support the project largely from their own pockets. This includes the time spent programming for the project, equipment used to support the many ports, network resources used to distribute OpenBSD to you, and the time spent answering questions and investigating users' bug reports. The OpenBSD developers are not independently wealthy, and even small contributions of time, equipment and resources make a big difference.
What's included in the base system?
OpenBSD is distributed with a number of third-party software products, including:
- X.org
- LLVM/Clang
- GCC
- Perl
- NSD and Unbound
- ncurses
- binutils
- gdb
- libfido2
- Expat
- zlib
The OpenBSD team often patches third party products, typically to improve the security or quality of the code. Much home-grown software is also included. Additional applications are available as packages.
Why is/isn't ProductX included?
People often ask why a particular product is or isn't included with OpenBSD. The answer is based on two things: the wishes of the developers and compatibility with the goals of the project. Licensing is often the biggest problem: we want OpenBSD to remain usable by any person anywhere in the world for any purpose.
When is the next release?
The OpenBSD team makes a new release approximately every six months, with the target release dates in May and November. More information on the development cycle can be found here.
Hardware Support
OpenBSD runs on the following platforms:
- alpha
- amd64
- arm64
- armv7
- hppa
- i386
- landisk
- luna88k
- macppc
- octeon
- powerpc64
- riscv64
- sparc64
Specific hardware support details are on the respective platform pages.
Manual Pages
- OpenBSD comes with extensive documentation in the form of man pages. They are the authoritative source of information for OpenBSD, and considerable effort is made to ensure they're up to date and accurate. Developers making a change to the system are expected to update the man pages along with their change to the system code. It is expected that users will check the man pages before asking for help.
- Here is a list of some useful manual pages for new users:
- afterboot(8) - things to check after the first complete boot
- help(1) - help for new users and administrators
- hier(7) - layout of filesystems
- man(1) - display the manual pages
- adduser(8) and rmuser(8) - add or remove new users
- reboot(8), halt(8) and shutdown(8) - stop and restart the system
- syspatch(8) - apply security and reliability updates
- sysupgrade(8) - upgrade to the next OpenBSD release or a newer snapshot
- dmesg(8) - redisplay the kernel boot messages
- doas(1) - run commands as another user
- tmux(1) - terminal multiplexer
- ifconfig(8) - configure network interface parameters
- ftp(1) - download files from the internet (supports FTP/HTTP/HTTPS)
- login.conf(5) - format of the login class configuration file
- sendbug(1) - report a bug you've found
- All of the OpenBSD man pages can be found on the web at man.openbsd.org as well as in the man71.tgz file set.
In general, if you know the name of a command or a manual page, you can read it by executing man command. If you don't know the name of the command, or if man command doesn't find the manual page, you can search the manual page database by executing apropos something or man -k something, where something is a likely word that might appear in the title of the manual page you're looking for.
$ apropos "time zone"
tzfile(5) - time zone information
zdump(8) - time zone dumper
zic(8) - time zone compiler
The parenthetical numbers indicate the section of the manual in which that page can be found. In some cases, you may find manual pages with identical names living in separate sections of the manual. For example, assume that you want to know the format of the configuration files for the cron daemon. Once you know the section of the manual for the page you want, you would execute man n command, where n is the manual section number.
$ man -k cron
cron(8) - clock daemon
crontab(1) - maintain crontab files for individual users
crontab(5) - tables for driving cron
$ man 5 crontab
Mailing Lists
The OpenBSD project maintains several mailing lists that users can subscribe to and follow. Some of the more popular lists are:
announce - announcements and security advisories
bugs - bugs received via sendbug(1) and discussion about them
misc - general user questions and answers
ports - discussion of the ports tree
source-changes - automated mailing of CVS source tree changes
tech - discussion of technical topics for OpenBSD developers and advanced users
Before posting a question on any mailing list, please check the archives for most common questions have been asked repeatedly. While it might be the first time you have encountered the problem or question, others on the mailing lists may have seen the same question several times in the last week, and may not appreciate seeing it again. If asking a question possibly related to hardware, always include a full dmesg(8).
You can find several archives, other guidelines and more information on the mailing list page. Subscriptions can be easily managed via the web interface.
Migrating to OpenBSD
If you learned Unix from any of the good books on general Unix, understanding the Unix philosophy and then extending your knowledge to a particular platform, you will find OpenBSD to be familiar.
Here are some of the commonly encountered differences between OpenBSD and other Unix variants.
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