LiveUSB image with OpenBSD - carry your OS on a memory stick

What is LiveUSB-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.

If you wish to have LiveCD/LiveDVD instead, please refer to our other LiveCD-OpenBSD project on sourceforge!

This USB image 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!

Obviously the USB image to install OpenBSD 5.1 in your machine will install to your hard disk! Also remember that these images ignore the size of the USB medium. If you install these 4GB images, you will lose the ability to use the remaining 6GB if your USB stick is of size 8GB.

  1. USB Install version for around 200MB which is a USB installer for OpenBSD instead of a CD/DVD medium
  2. Minimal version for 2 GB without X
  3. miniX version for 2 GB with X
  4. Full version for 2 GB

Please make your choice, download and enjoy!

Quick Download links

How to create your own LiveUSB with OpenBSD?

Really easy. Watch out. Everything is done with qemu by Fabrice Bellard. Just install that package and blindly follow the instructions below. 

                # qemu-img create liveusb-miniX.bin 1000000

                # qemu -hda liveusb-miniX.bin -cdrom install51.iso

That is it! You are ready to dd(1) now. See below.

Creating a LiveCD is more work because you need a read only OS. No such issue with writeable USB memory sticks.

USB-OpenBSD-Installer for ~ 200 MB

This is an OpenBSD 5.1 install CD/DVD image on a USB stick. You can install OpenBSD 5.1 from a USB memory stick instead of an optical medium like CD/DVD. Have fun!

Remember to follow this process to install the sets from the USB stick. It is little different from installing from optical media. Only the relevant interactions are here. Follow your instinct and use your common sense. 


                Let's install the sets!
                Location of sets? (cd disk ftp http or 'done') [cd] disk
                Is the partition already mounted? [no]
                Available disks are: sd0 wd0.
                Which one contains the install media? (or 'done') [sd0]
                Pathname to the sets? (or 'done') [5.1/i386]

LiveUSB-OpenBSD-Micromini for 4GB

This is the version for minimalists. It still is way too powerful! There is ONE package for uncompressing the installer p7zip. You can install whichever package you need. OpenBSD base install comes with a fully functional DNS server, HTTP server, web browser, command line download with ftp(1) for HTTP and FTP with resume support and so on...

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

LiveUSB-OpenBSD-Minimal for 4GB

LiveUSB-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 USB image of LiveUSB-OpenBSD-Minimal 7z image from here.

LiveUSB-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 only need 4GB for this. The packages installed are:

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 USB image of LiveUSB-OpenBSD-MiniX 7z image from here.

LiveUSB-OpenBSD-Full for 4GB

LiveUSB-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!

To enable mplayer menu while playing a video, please left click the mouse on the video. Enjoy mplayer menus!

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 USB image of LiveUSB-OpenBSD-Full 7z image from here.

These LiveUSB images are based on 5.1 release of OpenBSD made on May 1, 2012.

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.

Once you download the 7z image, install p7zip and unzip the USB image. 

                Install 7zip if not already present.
                # pkg_add p7zip

                Unzip the downloaded image with this command.
                $ 7z e liveusb-miniX.bin.7z

Then verify the SHA1 checksums from the table below.

OpenBSD LiveUSB image Download image size SHA1 Checksum for 4GB image
install51.bin 212646073 Bytes e60079ba9b166fd6539fe7d906bb8950da56acb7
liveusb-mini.bin 136398678 Bytes cf868142ed8d760a7d2e3386b9c4c7cea109affa
liveusb-miniX.bin 271173836 Bytes 5c8c389ca8126ae14af61fc6aa140ef77c311139
liveusb-full.bin 267840176 Bytes 658c0217b77143f6ca2c0cec0172487f6b4716bf

You can burn this image to a USB stick with this command on OpenBSD 

                # dd if=liveusb-miniX.bin of=/dev/rsd0c bs=256k

Please be aware that your USB stick could be sd0 .. sdn depending upon in what order you insert into your computer.

You can burn this image to a USB stick with this command on Linux. 

                # dd if=liveusb-miniX.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=8192

Please check with dmesg and find out whether your stick is identified as sdb or sdc or whatever else.

Once you write the image you can test the USB stick without rebooting the computer with this qemu command on OpenBSD. 

                # qemu -usb -hda /dev/rsd0c

Once you find that things work fine you can reboot. You can do something similar on Linux and Windows too.

If you are too lazy to burn it into a USB stick you could run this off a qemu emulator. 

                # qemu -hda liveusb-full.bin

                (If you want full networking you boot with)
        
                # qemu -net nic -net tap -hda usb-full.bin

Booting resumes from this point and throws up an xdm screen. Doing this saves this fstab into the USB image. Instead you can do better by copying it and using one image for qemu and another for USB burning.

If you wish to have LiveCD/LiveDVD instead, please refer to our other LiveCD-OpenBSD project on sourceforge!

In fact the easiest way to use LiveUSB is by burning the ISO of the sister project LiveCD-OpenBSD and use the LiveUSB that it creates.

Please e-mail girish@gayatri-hitech.com for anything. I can do any amount of customizations for your needs.

If you wish a pre loaded LiveUSB stick to be mailed to you then get in touch with me.