As a purchaser of the OpenBSD CD-ROM you already have a number of popular "packages", as well as the "ports" collection, and some of the "ports" source file releases. Installing applications from the CD-ROM package collection: The OpenBSD CD-ROM ships with several applications pre-built for various hardware architectures. The number of applications varies according to available disk space. Check the directory 2.9/packages/ to see which packages are available for your hardware architecture. To install one or more of these packages you must 1) become the superuser (root) 2) mount the appropriage CD-ROM 3) use the "pkg_add" command to install the software Example (in which we use su(1) to get superuser privileges, thus you have to be in group "wheel", see the manual page for su(1)): $ su Password: # mkdir -p /cdrom # mount /dev/cd0a /cdrom # cd /cdrom/2.9/packages/ # pkg_add -v # # umount /cdrom Your hardware architecture can be determined by issuing the command "arch". The response will be something like "OpenBSD.sparc". "sparc" is the architecture. Package names are usually the application name and version with .tgz appended, for example, "emacs-20.7.tgz". Installing applications from the ftp.openbsd.org package collection: All packages have been placed on ftp.openbsd.org in the directory pub/OpenBSD/2.9/packages// where is the supported hardware architecture. You may want to peruse the directory for your architecture to see what packages are available. The packages are also available from the OpenBSD FTP mirror sites. See http://www.openbsd.org/ftp.html for a list of current FTP mirror sites. Installation of a package is very easy: 1) become the superuser (root) 2) use the "pkg_add" command to install the software "pkg_add" is smart enough to know how to download the software from the OpenBSD ftp server. Example: $ su Password: # pkg_add -v ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/2.9/packages//emacs-20.7.tgz Packages are available by FTP for the following architectures: Go see pub/OpenBSD/2.9/packages/i386/ pub/OpenBSD/2.9/packages/powerpc/ pub/OpenBSD/2.9/packages/sparc/ pub/OpenBSD/2.9/packages/m68k/ pub/OpenBSD/2.9/packages/m88k/ pub/OpenBSD/2.9/packages/alpha/ pub/OpenBSD/2.9/packages/vax/ Note: not all packages exist for all architectures; some architectures may have additional packages. Installing applications from the CD-ROM ports collection: The CD-ROM "ports" collection is a set of Makefiles, patches, and other files used to control the building and installation of an application from source files. Creating an application from source can require a lot of disk space, sometimes 50 megabytes or more. The first step is to determine which of your disks has enough room. Once you've determined this, read the file PORTS to see how to extract the ports directory. To build an application you must: 1) become the superuser (root) 2) cd to the ports directory containing the port you wish to build. To build samba, for example, where you'd previously installed the ports files into the /usr/ports directory: $ su Password: # cd /usr/ports/net/samba # make # make install # make clean The make process is smart enough to download the source files needed. The install stage will build a package and store this under ports/packages/. You can then copy this package to another OpenBSD machine of the same architecture and install it using pkg_add as described above. Installing applications from the OpenBSD ports collection: See http://www.openbsd.org/ports.html for current instructions on obtaining and installing OpenBSD ports. Installing other applications: If an OpenBSD package or port does not exist for an application you're pretty much on your own. The first thing to do is ask ports@openbsd.org if anyone is working on a port -- there may be one in progress. If you have no luck there you may try the FreeBSD ports or NetBSD package collection. If you are on an i386 based machine it is quite possible that the FreeBSD port, if one exists, will work for you. If you can't find an existing port, try to make your own and feed it back to OpenBSD. That's how our ports collection grows. Some details can be found at http://www.openbsd.org/porting.html with more help from the mailing list ports@openbsd.org.