Frequently Asked Questions

A mostly unmodified OpenBSD kernel and userland, combined with useful, graphical as well as console-based applications. This allows for complete hardware testing, including X, as well as systems recovery and mobile usage in murky environments.

The BSDanywhere Live CD is designed to run off a read-only media only and is not meant to be installed on a hard disk. Use OpenBSD instead.

Mostly CRT screens as well as VGA connected screens may not be detected properly and the resolution is wrongly chosen (this is not a problem of OpenBSD or BSDanywhere, but of X).

Start an xterm and execute 'xrandr'. It shows you which output is currently connected. If it shows something like "VGA connected ..." you can execute 'xrandr --output VGA --auto". This should fix it.

In order to help ICEwm's background image to adjust, execute 'icewmgb &'.

Not at all. Our entire work is based on OpenBSD. Actually, BSDanywhere *is* OpenBSD - just wrapped up and packaged on a bootable Live CD. By providing BSDanywhere, we even hope more people become interested in OpenBSD and eventually buy an OpenBSD release set and install it on their machines. Furthermore, BSDanywhere is not meant to be a production system installed on a hard disk - you really want OpenBSD for that.

We believe so! When we looked around, we've found only two sources that offered an OpenBSD Live CD: OliveBSD and the OpenBSD Live-CD Firewall project. Both are quite out of date and have, in the latter case, a different focus.

After our first beta release, we've learnded there is also jggimi OpenBSD Live-CD/DVDs.

BSDanywhere is designed for running off CD, simply because most people have CD-ROM drives in servers as well as workstations.

While making a USB image would be quite simple, we deliberately do not want to offer one because it is out of our domain of providing a test and rescue platform only. A system running off a USB stick is much more comparable to a 'real' operating system like OpenBSD that has full write access to its local disk. Please consider getting OpenBSD and install it on a USB stick instead.

Simply because we haven't done it yet! Seriously, it is all a matter of resources. Currently, all developers are happy with having a CD-ROM image only. If you're not, roll up your sleeves and get to work! ;)

By default, BSDanywhere boots a multi processor kernel since most of current desktop PCs have multiple cores. To boot the uniprocessor kernel, hold down the control keys while booting the CD. You will find yourself at the OpenBSD boot prompt. Type 'bsd' and press 'Enter'.

We also think it would be very handy to not only produce images based on RELEASE but also on OpenBSD snapshots. However, we are currently limited in our resources and thus are not able to do it. Once our build infrastructure is mature, we may add this 'feature', though.