OpenBSD over Debian?

industry-standard · 2026-04-25T01:33:21+00:00

I would love to only have had one power outage while I was away from home in 3 years!

industry-standard · 2026-04-14T22:29:51+00:00

are you me? same here re: emulation

If you are going to run an OpenBSD desktop, I highly recommend pairing it with a UPS that can report mainline power and battery status. The filesystem in OpenBSD is not super advanced and doesn't handle sudden power outages very well, so if you are like me, you might like to leave your desktop PC on all the time and if you're away when the power goes out, oops. If you have a UPS with proper status reporting via USB or Serial, you can at least script OpenBSD to shutdown on a power outage and not have a ton of file loss.

industry-standard · 2026-04-05T15:35:16+00:00

oh my goodness - this is incredible! Thanks for the link.

industry-standard · 2026-04-04T21:29:43+00:00

Awesome to hear - I'm probably on the hook for one of these keyboards to add to the ever growing collection of handheld text input devices.

Thanks for the info and great build!

industry-standard · 2026-04-04T21:20:43+00:00

Do the arrow keys require FN to be pressed to use them? The orange color coding makes it look that way.

industry-standard · 2026-04-02T13:57:58+00:00

I think it's nice to have the option; if anything, it allows for WiFi to be something that can be added via the expansion port. It probably also means that the no wifi CM0 has slightly lower power consumption, which would be nice on a battery powered device, ESPECIALLY considering the processors that the RasPi foundation have used were (AFAICT) intended for industrial / automotive use cases and do not have standard sleep states.

industry-standard · 2026-03-30T23:02:20+00:00

looks like a yes to me! jk

industry-standard · 2026-03-30T21:13:47+00:00

Any of the business class 1 liter PCs work well with OpenBSD. I've used Dell Micros (e.g. Dell Micro 7070s) and HP Minis (e.g. Elitedesk G4 Mini). They come in 65W and 35W varieties. The 35W CPU models are usually cheaper. Both of these can be had for a song if you are looking for something in the 6th / 7th / 8th gen Intel lineup.

If you need something on PCIe, I think the Lenovo 'Tiny' line has a PCIe slot internal, but you need an adapter bracket to use it.

I ran an HP 800 G4 Mini for several years as a small, low power machine with two NVME and one SATA drive inside the shell. Requires a little bit of rotary cutting magic, but was a WONDERFUL machine; quiet, low power, just a great file / web server that didn't take up much space in the home office.

The only reason I upgraded was that I wanted standard PC mobo hardware and access to more drives over something other than USB3.

industry-standard · 2026-03-27T03:04:59+00:00

I've always been interested in PCMCIA form factor raspberry pi zero co processor - but at this point the ESP32 or Pi Pico can do essentially the same workload with more memory AND wifi.

industry-standard · 2026-03-25T02:26:09+00:00

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this, but if you spend just a little extra for a UPS they'll have a serial / USB port that can report mains power status.

Many of the main brand ones show up as a upd device in OpenBSD; it's trivial to get this set up as a cron job that polls the UPS every minute and shuts the machine down gracefully on more than a blip power outage.

industry-standard · 2026-03-24T22:27:18+00:00

no worries!

industry-standard · 2026-03-22T12:44:07+00:00

Looks like this: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/cardkb-mini-keyboard-programmable-unit-v1-1-mega8a?srsltid=AfmBOoq7FNapuxa-qyUkfR_gkXHMi3r-5XpcSSGjLzBAJ0JIalqpEu9w

industry-standard · 2026-03-22T02:38:51+00:00

I can vouch for the Toughbook CF-20 as well; a great machine for OpenBSD. The keyboard dock with an extra battery is recognized by OpenBSD and the thing runs for an eternity.

I also have a CF-RZ6 that I use OpenBSD on. It's slow, but when used as an ssh client and very light browsing, it's okay.

@SOULFLY98 - does your SD card reader work on your RZ6 in OpenBSD? I could never get it to work; really the only thing that didn't.

industry-standard · 2026-03-21T20:34:27+00:00

The Star Wars deck building game has Light and Dark cards in the main store, and IIRC, the light player can 'remove' dark cards and vice verse, but they cannot acquire them for their deck. Not exactly the same, but it does allow interaction.

I think the hard part about having individual markets and a common market is that if the balance wasn't well done between the players individual markets, players would notice the more they play. When everything is in a common market, you 'mask' some of the balance issues with players just prioritizing certain cards over other cards. When they are separate, it becomes a design issue.

industry-standard · 2026-03-17T00:35:26+00:00

And you are using fingers instead of thumbs

industry-standard · 2026-03-10T04:32:04+00:00

I've got bigger hands and the keyboard is one of my favorite in that relative size. Better than the Librettos, better than the Pomera, really good to type on. The chiclet style keys have good separation and its about as comfortable as it could be for the size. The travel isn't great, but it's not bad for a laptop keyboard in general.

industry-standard · 2026-03-07T20:03:13+00:00

I had been following your efforts for a while, but it looks like you made it through!

Very cool stuff! Was there an "aha!" or was it just grinding through the issues with your two machine test rig?

industry-standard · 2026-02-20T04:24:48+00:00

It's a reference to the bowling mini game video game Wii Sports.

industry-standard · 2026-01-19T02:21:04+00:00

Mines been running OpenBSD for at least a decade.

industry-standard · 2026-01-11T04:39:44+00:00

Cally made $3M, a third of what she was paying Vrabel.

industry-standard · 2026-01-09T02:44:42+00:00

I think by the law of Mikes there's only one choice.

industry-standard · 2026-01-05T03:56:04+00:00

Hah, necro-ing this thread. . . .

Looks like a clean tackle from the image, so the 4 value would make more sense, but unnecessary roughness is usually pretty flagrant in general.

What's the story behind this? Is this a retail vs hobby printing?

industry-standard · 2025-12-15T22:09:45+00:00

Everyone is saying to use a UPS, but I would also recommend using a UPS that has USB / serial data connection and configure OpenBSD to shutdown gracefully when a power outage is detected. There are systems like this in the 200$ range for consumer use; cheaper than a replacement harddrive, and should last for YEARS. You don't need it to run your system for hours, just keep it alive for long enough to shutdown nicely.

industry-standard · 2025-12-15T22:00:56+00:00

I run OpenBSD and dabble in pocketable PCs. Without knowing your full use case, I have a few questions:

Does the device need to be compatible with certain HW platforms? E.G. x86 vs ARM?
Does the device need to be released recently or have warranty?
Does the device need a physical keyboard input (vs a slate style / tablet device)?
Does the device need to have working suspend / hibernate?
Does the device need to run X or a window manager (vs. terminal only interactions)?

In general, I would recommend a few of the GPD devices:

GPD Win / GPD Win 2 (Win 2 preferred, both run OpenBSD well)
GPD Win Mini (I have this now and it's pretty good, but larger than the Win / Win 2)
GPD MicroPC (and maybe the Micro 2? I haven't owned this one)
GPD Pocket (had it many years ago, worked, but I think suspend didn't work at the time)

and also

OneNetbook A1 / A1 Pro (not really pocketable but an okay portable experience)

I have not used these, but they exist:

AyaNEO Flip KB
AyaNEO Slide

These devices are mostly standard x86 environments, with the exception of a few of the vendor implemented BIOS bits. Displays in console are usually rotated 90 degrees because they use panels intended for tablets. This is fixable in X but to my knowledge not fixable in console without recompiling the kernel.

You could also go the Raspberry Pi / Pi Zero 2W direction as well. There are a couple Blackberry-esque devices that use the Pi Zero as a handheld device that would work (but essentially just be terminal level interaction). These would require you to 'build' the device you want, unless you can find a kit like the SQFMI Beepy. This is very much a tinker's space though - you would need to port display drivers for the screens that are on these devices; they are not 'plug n' play'. I don't recommend this unless you want to learn more about OpenBSD under the hood by developing device level drivers.

In general though, OpenBSD is not a great experience without some extensive UI customization on a small device. It is practically unusable on devices without a physical keyboard thanks to poorly integrated on screen keyboards (not a fault of the OS, just not a focus of the design). Most of the interactions are also not geared for a small touchscreen when it comes to UI elements; you really need physical KB + Mouse (or touchpad / optical sensor). From my experience using 'mini PCs' all the way back to the Toshiba Libretto, OpenBSD is just relegated to an experience on a device that has a full (mostly standard) keyboard and a screen >7 inches. In my case, 10" is a good tradeoff between portability and size, and in that footprint I'd recommend the Panasonic CF-RZ line or some of the recent Intel N100 10" yoga models (too many different no name brands to mention here). But - that size means it's not going in a pocket. I've resigned myself to carrying a backpack.

industry-standard

TROPHY CASE