Installing OpenBSD is a relatively complex process, but if you have this document in hand it shouldn't be too much trouble. There are several ways to install OpenBSD onto a disk. The easiest way in terms of preliminary setup is to use the OpenBSD ramdisk kernel that can be booted off your local MSDOS disk or from the CD-ROM. Installing using the OpenBSD ramdisk kernel. The ramdisk kernel is a self-contained OpenBSD filesystem including all utilities necessary to install OpenBSD on a local disk, embedded in a GENERIC kernel image. It is distributed as a plain ECOFF executable file designed to be loaded into the system by the ARC firmware. Loading the ramdisk kernel into your system is done with the appropriate BIOS Run command on Your system. Usually this is done by typing in the following string at the "Run a program" prompt: scsi()disk()rdisk()partition(1)\bsd.rd to boot from an existing MSDOS FAT partition to which the ramdisk kernel have been copied. Or from the CD-ROM: CD:\2.2\arc\bsd.rd Exact input to describe the device path varies. Consult your ARC-Bios manual for more information about the particular system. This will cause the ramdisk kernel to be booted. After the initial probe messages you'll asked to choose a shell with sh as default. Simply type [Return] here and you are in single user mode. Start the installation script: # install The script will do most of the work of transferring the system from the tar files onto your disk. You will frequently be asked for confirmation before the script proceeds with each phase of the installation process. Occasionally, you'll have to provide a piece of information such as the name of the disk you want to install on or IP addresses and domain names you want to assign. The installation script goes through the following phases: - determination of the disk to install OpenBSD on - checking of the MBR partition information on the disk - checking of the OpenBSD partition information on the disk - creating and mounting the OpenBSD filesystems - setup of IP configuration - extraction of the distribution tar files - installation of kernel and the bootable kernel The installation program will guide you through the installation. There is one area of complexity that you should be very careful about and that is how to install the required MBR (Msdos Boot Record) and MSDOS FAT partition. OpenBSD will coexist with other operating systems with help from the MSDOS partition table. Because the ARC Bios only knows how to boot from a FAT formatted disk there must always exist a small or big (depending on your needs) MSDOS FAT partition on the disk. Install will initialize the install target disk with a proper MBR and an empty 5Mb MSDOS partition it that is desired. Or it will keep the current MBR and partitioning. In the later case you will need to fill in the MBR with a usable OpenBSD partition. Now try a reboot (enter the command "reboot" at the prompt). This will take you back to the ARC Bios. You will now need to set up a boot selection to boot OpenBSD. How to do this varies from system to system and should be described in your systems manual. The process to set up the parameters is almost exactly the same as for Win/NT apart from the name of the OSLOADER which should be set to 'bsd'. You may also set the OSLOADOPTIONS parameter to any of the following characters: n = Ask for root device Name. N = Don't as for root device Name. a = Autoboot to Multiuser mode. A = Boot to single user mode. So to boot the system to multiuser mode set: OSLOADOPTIONS=Na Congratulations, you have successfully installed OpenBSD 2.2. When you reboot into OpenBSD, you should log in as "root" at the login prompt. There is no initial password, but if you're using the machine in a networked environment, you should create yourself an account and protect it and the "root" account with good passwords. Some of the files in the OpenBSD 2.2 distribution might need to be tailored for your site. In particular, the /etc/sendmail.cf file will almost definitely need to be adjusted, and other files in /etc will probably need to be modified. If you are unfamiliar with UN*X-like system administration, it's recommended that you buy a book that discusses it.