Installer Image — OpenBSD 7.9 + OpenRiot
│ "Install OpenRiot in five minutes, offline, with no internet required."
Release Overview
OpenRiot v7.x ships a bootable OpenBSD installer image builder. Build openriot.img , flash it to USB, and
boot. The base OS, all packages, and non-free firmware are pre-bundled inside the image. No network
required during the base image install.
Networking is required after first-boot to finish the installation.
💾 Bootable Installer Image
The Problem: Installing OpenRiot required booting standard OpenBSD, running a curl pipe to setup.sh , then
manually installing dozens of packages with pkg_add . This took 30+ minutes, required internet, and
assumed the user knew OpenBSD partitioning.
Flash
dd if=Build/Images/openriot.img of=/dev/rsdX bs=1m
The image starts from a standard install79.img (~801MB) and is expanded to ~1732MB. A 350MB buffer
accommodates the site tarball (~781MB of packages + ~31MB firmware) and FFS metadata. There is no shrink
step; truncating an FFS image after writes corrupts the superblock.
At the "Which sets?" prompt, the user types * (all sets) and yes to confirm. This discovers site79.tgz
as a custom install set. The installer then extracts it and runs /install.site automatically.
Everything else — packages, firmware, doas.conf , /etc/shells , service enables — happens inside
install.site in the chroot.
After Reboot
Log in as the user you created during install. A welcome message in ~/.profile instructs you to run:
curl -fsSL https://OpenRiot.org/setup.sh | sh
This fetches the OpenRiot repository, copies configs to ~/.config/ , and runs openriot --install . It
requires network, but you are spared the 30-minute pkg_add marathon — all packages were pre-installed
from the image. User setup (groups, shell, XDG dirs) is also handled by setup.sh , not by the installer.
🗣️ Final Words
This release eliminates the single biggest barrier to OpenRiot adoption: the install process. No more
hotel-WiFi pkg_add marathons. No more partitioning anxiety. Burn the image, boot, answer the installer's
prompts, hit * at the sets screen, and you have a fully configured OpenBSD workstation with doas , fish,
i3, Firefox, Bitcoin, Monero, and every tool we ship — even in a cabin with no cell service.
The installer fits on a 2GB USB stick. That is the point.
— The OpenRiot Crew
"Privacy requires control. Control requires booting your own OS. Now you can, anywhere, no internet
required."