BSDanywhere: UNIX For Everyone’s Desktop
BSDanywhere 4.5, a bootable LiveCD image containing OpenBSD 4.5 was just announced. OpenBSD is a free UNIX operating system based on BSD, multi-platform compatible. It provides support for binary emulation of applications from FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, BSD/OS, SunOS and HP-UX. BSDanywhere is formed by the complete OpenBSD 4.5 system (without the compiler). In addition, it provides a graphical desktop environment, a collection of software and automatic detection of computer hardware. BSDanywhere supports a wide range of graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and many other peripherals.
Version 4.5 of BSDanywhere contains an unmodified OpenBSD kernel, as compared with the previous version which was delivered with the kernel changed, in order to simplify the booting process.
This operating system allows the running of various graphical and console based applications in the same time. BSDanywhere deploys UNIX on any desktop computer with the possibility to select one of the several graphical environments (X and Enlightenment DR17, cwm, twm and fvwm).
BSDanywhere has also applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, ePDFView and tools like nmap, iperf, pftop, trafshow and rsync. The main changes performed in this version and the entire software list can be found on the official website.
After a successful boot sequence, you can login by using “live” or “root” as user name. These accounts have not a default password set, but one could be defined with the passwd utility after a successful log on. In case of the live user, a graphical environment will be launched.
BSDanywhere 4.5 is available for free download as bootable LiveCD image for i386 (32bit) and amd64 (64bit) platforms. BSDanywhere Live CD is intended to run as a read-only media and as a consequence, you cannot install it on a hard drive. It can be used as an educational UNIX system or hardware testing platform.
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