LiveCD image with OpenBSD - carry your OS on a DVD/CD

What is LiveCD-OpenBSD?

It is trivial to a create a bootable USB stick with OpenBSD. I wanted to create one and realized that this will be of general use for anyone who likes a UNIX USB memory stick that they can carry with them on a keychain. This is the LiveCD/LiveDVD created using the LiveLiveCD/DVD images as base. This is the sister project of LiveUSB-OpenBSD.

These CD/DVD images shall not touch your hard disk in any way. All the operations are done in the USB stick and main memory. Nothing will be written to your MBR or boot loaders!

Getting LiveUSB is a 2 step process. First you boot from the LiveCD. Install to the USB stick and reboot from the USB stick to get LiveUSB. In fact it is a replacement for dd(1).

Remember that it will install to the hard drive if you choose to do so. After that you have to remove the optical medium and boot from the hard disk or USB stick to enjoy LiveUSB.

To install the LiveLiveCD/DVD image to hard disk, please use the excellent nCurses progress bar based installer.

  • Minimal version without X
  • MiniX version with X
  • Full version

    • Please make your choice, download and enjoy!

    Quick Download links

    LiveCD-OpenBSD-Minimal for 4GB

    LiveCD-OpenBSD-Minimal shot

    This is the non Xwindow version for geeks. Though there is no X, it still is way too powerful! Here are the installed packages. You still have mplayer, pure-ftpd, lftp, dsniff, ncftp, curl, hping, nmap, mutt, procmail, nail, vim, lua, python, rsnapshot, rdiff-backup, rtorrent, and a whole lot of other stuff!

    You can login as user live and password live123 The root password is openbsd1729.

    Download LiveCD/DVD image of LiveUSB-OpenBSD-Minimal ISO image from here.

    LiveCD-OpenBSD-MiniX

    I have installed only the most important packages that I required. This does not have firefox browser. I do not need it. If you wish to create your own liveUSB, you can do that of course. You could get in touch with me if you need custom packages.

    For now you can make do with this one. This throws up a nice xdm prompt where you can login as user live and password live123. The root password is openbsd1729. The password is three words with two spaces in between.

    You can listen to streaming audio or watch videos with mplayer. You have a nice minimal graphical environment with windowmaker. You can read man pages in color. There are several nice things you can do with this minimal OS. Just download the image and try it out.

    Download LiveCD/DVD image of LiveUSB-OpenBSD-MiniX ISO image from here.

    LiveCD-OpenBSD-Full for 4GB

    LiveCD-OpenBSD-Full shot

    This is the full version with every imaginable package. Here is the complete list. In spite of the space taken by packages, you still have more than 3 GB for storing user files!

    You can login as user live and password live123 The root password is openbsd1729.

    With this version you can browse the Internet with Mozilla Firefox, chat using pidgin, download youtube videos with yt or youtube-dl and it has several networking tools like nmap, hping, socat and sing thrown in. The repertoire is really interesting.

    Download LiveCD/DVD image of LiveUSB-OpenBSD-Full ISO image from here.

    These images are based on 5.0 release of OpenBSD made on Nov 1, 2011.

    In all the 3 variants you can always add and remove packages with the pkg_add(1) and pkg_delete(1) commands in case my choices do not agree with yours.

    Then verify the SHA1 checksums from the table below.

    Please e-mail girish@gayatri-hitech.com for anything.