OpenBSD Virtual Machine
March 2022
I installed OpenBSD 7.0 on a virtual machine to give it a try. So far I like the minimalist nature of the system. You add just the software you need. It doesn't include a lot of extra programs you won't find useful. It is certainly different than Linux but not so foreign that I can't accomplish anything or find my way around the system, especially once a familiar Desktop Environment is configured. Desktop Environments are basically the same no matter what operating system they run on. The biggest difference is in the command line tools and their options. The man pages are the primary means of help so I'll definitely have to keep reading them to get a grasp of how to administer the system.
OpenBSD Virtual Machine Update 1
May 2022
So far I've successfully installed errata patches, updated installed packages and upgraded the system from 7.0 to 7.1. I would like to install OpenBSD onto real hardware and use it daily, but neither of my laptops have supported wireless cards. Not sure that I am comfortable opening one up to replace the card with a supported model. Both models require removing removing rubber feet to get at screws then pry the back cover off to get at the internals. Not as easy a job as opening an access cover like on older models. I do have a USB adapter that will work with a hardware install of OpenBSD so I'll have to think about it more. I also have an old Dell Pentium 4 desktop I can install onto and it doesn't have WiFi so I can use the adapter on it but I need to create space to set it up.
OpenBSD Virtual Machine Update 2
August 2022
After an update to QEMU in my Linux host, my OpenBSD guest virtual machine starts in a window larger than my laptop screen. The size reported by xrandr in the virtual machine is 1920x1200 while my laptop screen size is 1366x768. That large a window makes the virtual machine unusable. Xrandr also reports "xrandr: Failed to get the size of the gamma for the output default". Zooming out from the host's window menu makes the window smaller but fonts are unreadable. Trying to switch the window to full screen doesn't change anything. Xrandr can change the screen resolution but it doesn't survive logout or reboot and fonts are too big, except fonts in the terminal window. If I add a xrandr command to the .xsession file the resolution is usable, however when the display manager starts it is still at the 1920x1200 resolution until you log on. I recreated the virtual machine but the issue remains in the new install. All my Linux virtual machines start the same size as before and xrandr doesn't report the message about gamma size. I can add the -vga option to the qemu-system-x86_64 command with the different values listed in the man page and the std value is the only one that creates a virtual machine with the screen resolution much bigger than the laptop resolution. Only the virtio value creates a size too small to be useful. Interestingly, each -vga value has the same message about gamma when running xrandr.
OpenBSD Virtual Machine Update 3
September 2022
After much digging around and reading about X, I came up with a solution to the overly large resolution issue. I created a monitor configuration file, named it screen-resolution.conf and set a usable mode there. Saved the file to /usr/X11R6/etc/xorg.conf.d and now it works.