Thursday, August 31, 2006

Emerson's Success

Success
To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.

This poem is often credited to Ralph Emerson, but there is some controversy around it.

Anyway, Emerson is my inspirational poet/author for September. rwe.org has the complete works of Emerson for free.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Creating custom OpenBSD ISOs

The OpenBSD project does not make CD images available for download. You need to purchase the official CD sets. If possible, please consider purchasing the official CDROMs and help fund the project.

That aside, here's how you can download a few files from ftp.openbsd.org and create your own custom OpenBSD 3.9 installation CD set. Any Unix or Windows system with an internet connection and mkisofs should be sufficient. The following procedure has been tested on i386 only.

  1. Create a base directory $OBSD that will hold the necessary files.
    1. export OBSD=/data/scratch/obsd
    2. mkdir $OBSD
  2. Visit ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.9 or your best mirror and download files from the i386 folder. Install.i386 contains the details on what needs to be downloaded. You should atleast download:
    1. To boot the installer you require bsd, bsd.rd, cd39.iso, cdboot, cdbr, cdemu39.iso
    2. The *.tgz files are the installation sets. Basic requirement (without X11) is: base39.tgz, comp39.tgz, etc39.tgz, man39.tgz, misc39.tgz.
    3. If you want to install X11, grab all the x*.tgz files as well.
  3. Your $OBSD folder should look like this:
    ./3.9
    ./3.9/i386
    ./3.9/i386/base39.tgz
    ./3.9/i386/bsd
    ./3.9/i386/bsd.rd
    ./3.9/i386/cd39.iso
    ./3.9/i386/cdboot
    ./3.9/i386/cdbr
    ./3.9/i386/cdemu39.iso
    ./3.9/i386/cdrom39.fs
    ./3.9/i386/comp39.tgz
    ./3.9/i386/etc39.tgz
    ./3.9/i386/man39.tgz
    ./3.9/i386/misc39.tgz
  4. It's also a good idea to grab source code and basic ports tree. Get sys.tar.gz, src.tar.gz, ports.tar.gz and copy them inside your $OBSD/3.9 directory.
  5. Change to the $OBSD folder and run mkisofs -vrTJV "OpenBSD39" -b 3.9/i386/cdrom39.fs -c boot.catalog -o obsd39.iso $OBSD
  6. Burn the resulting obsd39.iso image to a CD using your favourite CD burning software.
Win32 users can grab a native mkisofs.exe and build_cd.bat.