Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

4.1 - Overview of the OpenBSD installation procedure
OpenBSD has long been respected for its simple and straight forward installation process, which is consistent across all 
platforms. 
All platforms use a very similar installation procedure, however there are some minor differences in details on a few 
platforms. In all cases, you are urged to read the platform-specific INSTALL document in the platform directory on the 
CD-ROM or FTP sites (for example, 
i386/INSTALL.i386
, 
macppc/INSTALL.macppc
or 
sparc/INSTALL.
sparc
). 
The OpenBSD installer is a 
special
kernel with a number of utilities and install scripts embedded in a pre-loaded RAM 
disk. After this kernel is booted, the operating system is extracted from a number of compressed 
tar(1)
 (
.tgz
) files from 
a source other than this pre-loaded RAM disk. There are several ways to boot this install kernel: 
●
Floppy disk: OpenBSD can be installed on many platforms by booting an installer from a single floppy disk. 
However, due to space constraints, some larger platforms (sparc64, amd64, alpha) do not have some utilities 
which may be important to you, such as a DHCP client to configure the network. For these platforms, you may do 
better with the CD install. However, for platforms like i386 and sparc, you will find the boot floppy very 
complete. 
Floppy disk images are provided which can be used to create an install floppy on another 
Unix-like
 system, or on 
a 
Windows
system. Typical file names are 
floppy49.fs
, though several platforms have multiple floppy 
images available. 
●
CD-ROM: On several platforms a CD-ROM image (
cd49.iso
for just booting, or 
install49.iso
for the 
entire install) is provided allowing creation of a bootable CD-ROM. 
●