Installing an OpenBSD VirtualPC on a Mac

by on Jan.22, 2006, under Mac OSX, OpenBSD

The following directions are for OpenBSD and Virtual PC on the Macintosh, and assume familiarity with the installation and use of both. Note that if you have OpenBSD CDs, you may boot off the i386 CD to perform the installation. Please refer to either the OpenBSD/i386 installation documentation or the Virtual PC documentation in case of questions, as documenting the installation of either is beyond the scope of this document.

  1. Grab(buy) the latest OpenBSD release. (there’s a link on the Links page)
  2. Create a Virtual PC hard disk image file of the size you want your OpenBSD hard disk to be, at least a gigabyte if you want to unpack the source tree and have a usable system. However, you can get away with a hard disk as small as 300MB or so for a complete installation.
  3. Change the VirtualPC partition to use a fixed file size on your local disk. You *CANNOT* use a dynamically re-sizable partition. The only drawback to this is that a 10gb partition takes up 10gb, even if most of it is empty space. OpenBSD does not like dynamically resizing partitions, and installing OpenBSD on one of these will hang while extracting base3x.tgz. (or it will hang on misc3x.tgz if it makes it through base3x.tgz)
  4. Capture your OpenBSD CD or the cd38.iso image to the VirtualPC’s cdrom drive.
  5. Start up the VirtualPC, and boot to the captured CD image.
  6. Perform OpenBSD install as usual.
  7. Shut down the virtual machine with halt… Welcome to OpenBSD: The proactively secure Unix-like operating system.
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