As a purchaser of the OpenBSD CD-ROM you already have several popular ``packages'', 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 vary according to available disk space. Check the directory 5.5/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 appropriate 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/5.5/packages/ # pkg_add ... # # 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, e.g. emacs-21.4p27.tgz Installing applications from the ftp.openbsd.org package collection: All packages have been placed on ftp.openbsd.org in the directory pub/OpenBSD/5.5/packages// where is the supported hardware architecture. You may want to peruse the directory for your architecture to see what packages are available. A per-architecture listing is also available on the webpage, see http://www.openbsd.org/5.5_packages/ The full set of packages is on all of the OpenBSD FTP mirror sites. See http://www.openbsd.org/ftp.html for a list of current ftp mirror sites. For each architecture, a "pkglocatedb" file is also included, which is a locate(1) database indexing the contents of all packages found in the FTP directory. This can help you identify which package contains a program you are looking for, for example: $ locate -d /cdrom/5.5/packages//pkglocatedb plaympeg smpeg-0.4.4p12:/usr/local/bin/plaympeg smpeg-0.4.4p12:/usr/local/man/man1/plaympeg.1 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 ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/5.5/packages//emacs-21.4p27.tgz 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 don't have any luck there, you may be able to adapt one from the FreeBSD ports or NetBSD package collection. 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 coming from the mailing list, ports@openbsd.org.