OpenBSD Newbies
Installation for the Toshiba Portege 3110CT

Portege 3110CT running OpenBSD 2.6

I'm a newbie when it comes to UNIX and I am learning my way around OpenBSD at the moment. I've started this page and the associated messageboard so that I can make notes of things that I have learned so that, hopefully, it will help others and also so that some people might be able to help me with some things.

The HTML on this page is rather basic, I'm afriad. I haven't really bothered to learn any HTML for many years. I hope, perhaps, to have some sort of cascading menu on the left so that the documents can be laid out better, but I don't know how to do this yet.

Disclaimer: I am new to UNIX and if you follow blindly what I say here, not only are you a fool, you could easily damage your machine. I take no responsibility for any damage resulting from information on this page. While I have taken reasonable steps to ensure that information here is correct, mistakes are possible.

Note: Some of the info here is quite terse at the moment. If you have any questions, please ask in my OpenBSD Forum. I hope that comments/suggestions will lead to some improvement on this page. I know some of the info below needs a lot more detail, I'll add to this when I get the time.

Greets: Thanks to all the guys in the HCU-Linux forum for all the help (you know who you are ;) and also to ArthaXerxes who first got me into OpenBSD.

Making a Bootable OpenBSD CDROM

Since OpenBSD don't offer a downloadable ISO, I decided to create my own. Some people have asked me how to do this (this is one of the things that motivated me to create this page) and so I shall explain here how I did this. Firstly, we download via FTP the files we want. We need all of /i386 and the Packages directory, we might also be able to fit some or all of the source code on (in some ways our disk will be superior to the one OpenBSD sell since it will not have any non-x86 stuff on it and thus we can fit more useful stuff on).

I used Nero Burning Rom to create the bootable CD. This is a win32 program. We choose 'Floppy Disk Emulation' for the boot option (those not familiar with bootable CDs might like to read the El Torito standard). We can either go for 1.44 and choose one of the standard floppies, or go for 2.88 and go for the bigger floppy image which has more drivers on. At first, it seems a good idea to go for the 2.88, but remember that not all computers support 2.88 floppy drives - in particular laptops. My Toshiba 3110ct didn't and I had to make a second CD. Once we have selected our boot disk options, we construct the remainder of the CD as usual. See the figures below for more details.

Fig1: Bootable CD Options

Fig2: Filesystem Options

First Steps

You first need to enter the BIOS (press ESC during boot up) and change a few settings. Make set PCMCIA to PCIC compabible (this will allow you to boot from CDROM) and set DISPLAY/SCREEN STRETCHING to OFF (this is to prevent you from blowing up your video card/screen. It may be possible to do the install entirely from CD, but I don't know how (if somebody figures this out, let me know). The problem is getting the PCMCIA CDROM recognised. Instead, I copied the base files to a partition on the hard disk. I used the bootable CDROM to boot instead of a floppy disk since it is faster and I can't be bothered to make a boot floppy. The install should go without a hitch except that disklabel may read your hard disk parameters incorrectly. This will result in the installation failing. To resolve this, when in disklabel, do a command 'g d'. This will load disk geometry from the disk itself. Apart from this, the installation goes according to plan.

MultiBooting with Windows 2000

I am running 3 operating systems on my laptop: Win98 (which came with the laptop), Win2k (which I am migrating too) and OpenBSD. I decided to use Win2k's bootloader, although you can use another one if you require more features. To use the bootloader, you need to extract a sector from the OpenBSD partition. I assume that you have installed OpenBSD on a hidden partition. You need to reboot from the CDROM and instead of selecting 'install' select 'shell'. From the shell do 'mount /dev/???? /mnt' where ???? is a valid FAT or FAT32 partition (e.g. wd0j). Then do 'dd if=/dev/???? of=/mnt/openbsd.pbr bs=512 count=1' where ???? is the partition you installed OpenBSD on (e.g. wd0a). This will copy the bootinfo you need to the file openbsd.pbr on the FAT/FAT32 partition. You can then add the line 'C:\OPENBSD.PBR="OpenBSD 2.6"' in your boot.ini file.

Basic Configuration

Once you reboot into OpenBSD, you will get an email from the system with further instructions on configuring your new installation. After you have completed these, you will want to make a few extra changes to get a more comfortable working environment.

Keyboard and Shell Configuration

The first thing I did was to install 'zsh' so that I had command history and command line completion. I also added 'kcon -m g1' and 'kcon -d 0 -r 0' to /etc/rc to set the keyboard layout and to set keyboard repeat rates to fastest. These two changes did a lot to save my sanity during the first stages!

Clearing the Terminal after logout

These little things irritate me. The OpenBSD FAQ gave a way of doing this, unfortunately it didn't work. You need to append the following onto the 'default' terminal in /etc/gettytab ":cl=\E[H\E[2J:c2=cl:".

Recompiling and Patching the Kernel

Setting up the LAN

Modem Drivers and Dialup Connections

Sound Drivers

X Windows

A few words of warning, the video chip and screen are supposedly quite fragile and you can easily blow them up with incorrect settings/probes etc. I went to Toshiba's website and downloaded their ready-made XF86Config file that worked perfectly.

BlackBox Window Manager


This page was fumbled together using vi... badly ;)