I had left some part of the hard disk free to try installing OpenBSD on my IBM Thinkpad R52 later. The later is now. I had some respect for trying the dual boot as last time I tried it was a mess. I now have working OpenBSD on sixth partition. That means if you read this I can confirm you can boot OpenBSD starts also from an extended partition. So my layout seen from Linux was a sda1(Ubuntu /boot)-sda5(Ubuntu SWAP). sda4 was the extended partition. I now did this:
- Add a sixth and seventh partition from Ubuntu (/dev/sda6) – sda7 is OpenBSD SWAP.
- Mark the sda6 as partition type “a6″ for OpenBSD.
- Download a fresh OpenBSD install CD from snapshots.
- Start (I)nstalling but do not use the whole disk.
- OpenBSD thinks the partition name should be wd0a.
- Ok, go through the setup steps – I very much use all file sets as I think installing them later would be more troublesome. OpenBSD already is small (228 MB install CD)
- When all is finished you can reboot. I do not tell you how to install OpenBSD – read the FAQ – its good – also INSTALL.linux – but dont take that as a bible. Actually you should understand at least some of the stuff – sure you cant understand the whole FAQ. My suggesttion with starting with OpenBSD is to play with it – read the FAQ and repeat steps – if you come from Linux do not hurry. Take your time. Give yourself a break!
- Next step is the ‘evil’ GRUB. In the INSTALL.linux you will find an example which contains a line “makeactive”. Actuall you do neither need that – it will also break the boot process. As the GRUB docs state: “This command is limited to primary PC partitions on a hard disk.” – This means that does not work for extended partitions where I have my OpenBSD on. If you use Ubuntu there is a passage where Ubuntu autoupdates Linux kernels. I suggest adding the OpenBSD at the very much bottom below
I had left some part of the hard disk free to try installing OpenBSD on my IBM Thinkpad R52 later. The later is now. I had some respect for trying the dual boot as last time I tried it was a mess. I now have working OpenBSD on sixth partition. That means if you read this I can confirm you can boot OpenBSD starts also from an extended partition. So my layout seen from Linux was a sda1(Ubuntu /boot)-sda5(Ubuntu SWAP). sda4 was the extended partition. I now did this: - Add a sixth and seventh partition from Ubuntu (/dev/sda6) – sda7 is OpenBSD SWAP.
- Mark the sda6 as partition type “a6″ for OpenBSD.
- Download a fresh OpenBSD install CD from snapshots.
- Start (I)nstalling but do not use the whole disk.
- OpenBSD thinks the partition name should be wd0a.
- Ok, go through the setup steps – I very much use all file sets as I think installing them later would be more troublesome. OpenBSD already is small (228 MB install CD)
- When all is finished you can reboot. I do not tell you how to install OpenBSD – read the FAQ – its good – also INSTALL.linux – but dont take that as a bible. Actually you should understand at least some of the stuff – sure you cant understand the whole FAQ. My suggesttion with starting with OpenBSD is to play with it – read the FAQ and repeat steps – if you come from Linux do not hurry. Take your time. Give yourself a break!
- Next step is the ‘evil’ GRUB. In the INSTALL.linux you will find an example which contains a line “makeactive”. Actuall you do neither need that – it will also break the boot process. As the GRUB docs state: “This command is limited to primary PC partitions on a hard disk.” – This means that does not work for extended partitions where I have my OpenBSD on. If you use Ubuntu there is a passage in ‘menu.lst’ where Ubuntu autoupdates Linux kernels. I suggest adding the OpenBSD at the very much bottom below:
### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST.
And put something like this there. AGAIN: Think before you just copy and paste. If your setup is different it will not work:
title OpenBSD
root (hd0,5,a)
chainloader +1
That should be it. I guess Debian should work exactly the same. Personally I think those autoupdating of menu.lst is stupid. You can imagine how delighted i was as I realised that the “makeactive” was actually the problem. I tried nearly everything before finding that all. And now I share. Not that OpenBSD is good for dual boot – but maybe many of you like me like to have a Linux as a backup system while we are progressing in how we can use OpenBSD.
As this post is already a little long I will talk about the new OpenBSD WPA wireless on my next post.
2 Comments
2008/10/19 at 9:30 AM
[...] X11/Xorg with OpenBSD Jump to Comments On my last post about installing OpenBSD on my R52 notebook I forgot to say that the X11 really ran out of the box [...]
2009/08/28 at 7:35 AM
nice tutorial.. good luck