What is LiveUSB OpenBSD?

It is quite easy to a create a bootable USB stick/pendrive/flash with OpenBSD.

I wanted to create one and realized that this will be of general use.

A USB memory stick that you can carry with you on a keychain.

You can use that to get back into your favorite OpenBSD ecosystem without touching the hard disk of the laptop on which it runs.

Kindly note that this release only works on 64 bit Intel and AMD based architectures. For the new Mac series and other RISC based systems this won’t work.

These LiveUSB images are based on OpenBSD version 7.2 made on Oct 20,2022 .

Kindly note that this is a volunteer effort; hence strictly unofficial.

You need a minimum of two writable media for getting this going.

One is your host medium which runs your current OS like

• Linux
• Mac
• Windows.

Then you need a USB flash or pendrive on which you plan to install OpenBSD.

IT WILL WIPE EVERYTHING IN USB STICK BEWARE!!! 💣

Also remember that these images ignore the size of the USB medium.

The images you have here, all 3 flavors write to a 64 GB medium.

Why? These days the USB pendrives found in market are of that capacity.

Instructions for using this OS image

Using the OS images in this project needs a fairly decent level of familiarity with the Linux or Mac command line.

You can get this going from Windows as well.

Just the method is different.

There are instructions for flashing this from Linux, Mac as well as Windows here .

Downloads table

Make your choice, download, and enjoy!

The size and checksums of image files

Please verify the SHA256 checksums from the table below.

There is a trick to look at progress whilst checking checksum for large files.

    $ pv LiveUSB-Minimal.img.zst | sha256sum

    $ unzstd LiveUSB-Minimal.img.zst

To learn about zstd compression check this project

In all the 3 variants you can always add and remove packages.

Use

• pkg_add(1)
• pkg_delete(1)

commands in case my choices do not agree with yours.

One of the key attractions for me in OpenBSD is the ports system.

   root# cd /usr
   root# ftp https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.2/ports.tar.gz
   root# pv ports.tar.gz|tar zxpf - 
   root# cd /usr/ports/net/softflowd
   root# make install clean

You can do a lot of really excellent things with ports. Completely upto you.

If you wish to have LiveCD/LiveDVD instead, please refer to our other LiveCD OpenBSD project project.

The root and user passwords for all 3 variants

You can login as

• user live
• password live123

The root password is foo1729

Don’t blame me for this. It is only a hobby project.

The rock solid stability and performance is a thing to experience.

Enjoy the power of OpenBSD

Please do not forget to thank the devs for an amazing project.