OpenBSD 4.9 on a Samsung N148 Netbook
 

Well, this isn't a plea for help, it's just a general comment on a OpenBSD 4.9 install I did on a Samsung N148 a month or so ago.

I booted off a USB stick that had OpenBSD installed as there isn't a CD/DVD ROM unit on it. Installed via a network connection and had absolutely no problems there at all.

My intention is to use this as a system I'll drag along with me to whatever remote location and connect to my firewall via OpenVPN for access to whatever systems I have here at home. I'm studying for a CCNA cert, and have a stack of routers/switches here connected to a Baytech RPC5 that enables me to fire up the stack remotely. There were a few OpenVPN quirks that I had to solve, but it's working well now.

The wireless NIC and wired NIC were both recognized and work very well indeed.

This has been the cleanest/easiest OpenBSD install I've done up to this point.

Something else I use the netbook for is for scanning networks from work. I set up port forwarding to the netbook through the OpenVPN tunnel (between the netbook and my firewall at home) so I can log into it via ssh from my workstation at work. The WIFI I connect to at work has a firewall on it, so inbound connections don't work. Some of the systems we use have ancient versions of nmap on them, and I need superuser privileges to do fingerprinting, which I don't have there being a lowly user. Fingerprinting devices at some of the locations we support can come in handy. They're not 100%, of course, but you can generally tell if you're looking at a T1 router or /DSL/cable modem or a Cisco ASA. Surprisingly, some of those damn modems start dropping packets on scans. Kudos to the manufacturers.

Don't do much via the desktop, which is Xfce. It seems to work well enough, and with the everything included, the 1 gig of RAM is plenty enough for my needs. Hell, 256 meg would have sufficed.

Anyhow, if someone is looking for a relatively easy to set up netbook w/OpenBSD, I'd definitely recommend a Samsung N148.

Hi.

I'm actually contemplating installing OpenBSD on my netbook, but the lack of a USB iso/img has me a bit worried. I'm new to BSD in general, Linux distros being my main OS (though I did have a short fling with PC-BSD a couple of years ago), so I'd appreciate any sort of tutorial with regards to getting a bootable USB stick that I can use to install on my netbooks hard drive. If that's not quite possible, details on how you proceeded with the netboot install would be equally appreciated. I've read the documentation on PXE boot and all, but am still a but confused on the whole thing.

I currently don't have another machine with OpenBSD installed, so I can't exactly create a bootable USB from an existing install, sadly.

If you do take the trouble to answer my query, just wanna let you know that I'm sorta an idiot with regards to computing, so please explain like you would to a tech-illiterate grandma.

Thanks in advance.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but getting a custom tutorial on how to install OpenBSD on a netbook isn't going to happen (well, not without someone giving me copious amounts of money to do it). All the information I needed was reasonably easy to find online, and there are installation ISOs for OpenBSD available, too. Something I've come to appreciate from 'BSD people is that they tend to think for themselves. There was nothing I can think of through that process of installing the OS on the netbook that was out of the ordinary or challenging.

As I think I mentioned, this is by far the _easiest_ OpenBSD install I've done. I created a OpenBSD CD, then booted off it and installed on a USB thumb drive. I then booted off the thumb drive on the netbook, ran the install script, and that was pretty much it. End of story.

One of the great things about OpenBSD is the documentation written for it. Read it.

I wouldn't have asked without reading the given documentation first.

That's all I needed to know, actually. I did go through the documentation, and the only thing I wasn't sure of was the iso type, since some people had suggested I dd the floppy into a USB and run it from that instead (which failed). I had no idea that I could install to a thunmbrive directly via the CD ISO (I assumed I had to do a complete install to hard drive and then use that to create a USB image).

Thanks for the clarification.

After installing Debian on the Samsung netbook perhaps 3 years ago, I wiped it and installed OpenBSD 5.6 on it again a few days ago. It hasn't been used often over the last few years, but is convenient for serial consoles on network equipment.

I don't like Samsung phones so much (retired a S4 after 8 months -- no more Samsung phones for me for a while), but really do like their laptops. Haven't had any problems with the few I've had over the last four or five years. I have a Samsung NP900X3A that has been my work laptop for a few years with Debian installed that works flawlessly.

I just spent a half hour writing about my experience with Mint/Cinnamon on my workstation at home. Doesn't really belong here, but I was on a roll. Deleted it. To be concise, Mint sucks. You can't remove dnsmasq-core without it wanting to remove Cinnamon? Seriously? I saw what I'd consider fairly erratic behavior from dnsmasq too. It's apparently there to prevent people from breaking their internet access when they do stupid things that should break their network.

I spend more and more time disabling magical solutions (and the like) created to prevent idiots from breaking things, which, in turn, prevent basic services from working the way they should. I'm frustrated.

Nice! I'm happily running OpenBSD 5.6/amd on a Dell Optiplex 755. Runs like a top.

dnsmasq on a desktop like that is probably being used for local DNS caching and nothing more. No idea why it's woven in as a dependency, but Debian dependency chains are complex to say the least.