OpenBSD 6.8 arm64 Raspberry Pi 4 4GB xenodm Xfce

[TheTKS]

OpenBSD 6.8 arm64 Raspberry Pi 4 4GB xenodm Xfce

Working well here and I'm liking it a lot.

The installation went well with help from INSTALL.arm64, and experience from others who went before me, explained in the OpenBSD arm mailing list (Sep and Oct) and sudopigeon.

No need for serial console, I was able to do everything through my HDMI connected monitor with advice from those references.

A few installed packages so far. firefox-esr isn't blazing fast, but fast enough for everyday use.

Ethernet only for now, since it looks like the wifi card isn't recognized, and I don't need it so won't connect a usb wifi dongle. Not a problem for me, but be aware if you intend to install OpenBSD on RPI 4 in the next while.

Many thanks to the OpenBSD team for a great OS and, once again, to others on daemonforums who have given advice on installing and setting up Xfce to work nicely on OpenBSD.

Is anybody else here using OpenBSD on arm 64 or v7 on RPi? I'd be interested in what you're doing with it and maybe trading stories and tips.

This is a weekend hobby project. I may do some Arduino programming, maybe some RPi-Arduino projects, and eventually look at other boards, for home, garden and automotive projects, depending on how much time I can put into it. OpenBSD arm64 -stable will share time with Slackware -current and occasionally Raspberry Pi OS, and eventually I might move to OpenBSD snapshots or current.

TKS

[psypro]

Thank you for sharing. Gives my courage to try myself, thought HDMI did not work.

[TheTKS]

@psypro If there's nothing stopping you from trying, then I would encourage you to read those three resources a few times, then give it a shot. People's paths can differ, but so far it seems to be common enough experience that it's possible in many cases.

Be aware that I have installed Raspberry Pi OS and Slackware ARM -current with Sarpi packages, so I'm not starting from a brand new RPi4.

A few points, read the references for the rest:

- You have to have ethernet connected

- I used the most recent RPi4_UEFI_Firmware_v1.20. Others seemed to have trouble with it and used 1.16 or 1.18 instead.

- To use HDMI connected monitor throughout and avoid having to use serial console, at boot> I typed in

set tty fb0

I don't know if that will work for everybody installing for the first time without other intervention when in the UEFI firmware menu.

- The first time I got to the Install/Upgrade/Autoinstall step, the installer wouldn't take keyboard inputs, and I didn't read anybody else having that problem. After trying a few things to get keyboard input, I ended up doing this:
> powered down by disconnecting the power supply
> removed the wireless mouse USB adaptor that was in one of the USB 2 ports; mouse isn't needed during installation
> moved my wired keyboard USB connector to the USB 2 port that the wireless mouse adaptor had been in
> reconnected the power supply
> et voila, keyboard inputs accepted by the installer

I don't know what fixed the problem, but I assume USB weirdness worked around by one or a combination of those actions and all the jiggling around. I have a recommended 3A power supply.

At boot>, I had to hit enter for it to proceed. If I remember correctly, amd64 6.7 and earlier that I've installed have proceeeded on their own from this point - but I might not remember correctly.

Installation then went like amd64 with modules loaded over https instead of from a CD or USB key.

Before rebooting, I plugged the wireless mouse adaptor back into the port the wired keyboard had been in.

Then I:
- installed some packages
- went through some steps to make sure Xfce works nicely, and installed Xfce and Xfce-extras
- enabled xenodm
- did several of the actions described in man afterboot
- disabled 3GB memory limit, so all 4GB are seen

And with Xfce, keyboard, mouse and packages work.

Good luck and if you have questions, I'll help if I can, when I get onto daemonforums (I don't go on every day.)

Excuse the rambling. Hopefully this helps give a sense of what you'll experience.

TKS

[psypro]

Thanks.

I just installed OpenBSD 6.8 on raspberry pi4.

Was it only me, or did installer not ask for keyboard layout?

wsconsctl keyboard.encoding=


I installed raspbian lite first and run the rpi-update to get up to date firmware.
Then i did nothing special beside following som guide for OpenBSD.
HDMI worked out of the box, I did not have to enter any command.
Wirless keyboard did not work during install for me, but worked fine after words.

[berni51]

Here is another BSD fanboy with OpenBSD on a Raspi 4/8GB! I bought my Raspi in September and after trying Raspian and ArchLinux I changed to OpenBSD.
The first OBSD installation was via the serial interface. It was a little bit like in the good old days with modems and serial connection to the usenet. However the system 6.7 worked fine and rockstable.
Later I read the hint in the OpenBSD-arm mailinglist that the fb0 line is useable. Writing "set tty fb0" to /etc/boot.conf than made the system perfekt.

I than connected a NVMe ssd via USB to the Raspi and now everything is perfect for me.

In September the control unit of my 38 years old oil-fired heating died and now I use the Raspberry to control the heating. This is not a hard job, as the old heting only has 2 temp-sensors to switch the oilburner on and off. It works and I must not buy an new heting system.

Last week I tried NetBSD on the Raspi.
I downloaded an arm image und wrote it onto a ssd. The NetBSD people are using the same EDK2 firmware for booting, but they wrote everything into only one image. So the system boots without any action from the user. Thats a little bit better than the OpenBSD solution. However the OS itself is more Beta than OpenBSD. OK, it works stable, but there is a lot do do manually, until the system is ready.

Berni, OBSD fanboy from Germany

[3enj]

Running OpenBSD 6.8 GENERIC arm64 on an rpi 4/8GB. Everything is running smoothly as expected. Just running into an issue with libEGL and DRI when using a gtk3 webkit browser. Not sure if hardware accel with the broadcom chip is something that is currently supported by OpenBSD 6.8.

Other then that, Loving the experiance. Have a lot of experiance with Linux and a little with FreeBSD. Wanted a setup that was a little more suckless .

[TheTKS]

Thanks for all the responses. It's good to see other people trying this out, and I look forward to hearing your experiences as you use them. I will post mine as well, although it won't be rapid fire. I'll post them as I get to them.

Originally Posted by psypro

Thanks.

I just installed OpenBSD 6.8 on raspberry pi4.

Was it only me, or did installer not ask for keyboard layout?

wsconsctl keyboard.encoding=

I don't remember whether the installer asked for keyboard layout.

It does seem to me that there were a few differences between x86_64 and aarch installations.

For instance, I didn't see the option to start xenodm. I added that to /etc/rc.conf.local manually later.

TKS