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You can find XMMS in the ports collection, which is great. XMMS will even play you wav files out of the box. To get mp3s to play, you’ll need to do a little bit more work and also install:

xmms-mad

which you can find in /usr/ports/audio (presuming thats where you put your ports files)

In unix pretty much everything is a file (some people don’t like this), including audio devices. So if you fancy listening to some white noise, just cat a file to /dev/sound

Its got to be said, the documentation from the bsd guys is very thorough. Its not good enough for them that they get your mp3s playing. They tell you that wav and au files use little-endian byte ordering and signed linear quantization. You could figure this out by reading the header with hexdump(1). Reading the hex of your audio files, wow, thats a bit hardcore! Having said that, if you cared a little bit more and read up what that meant, you might be a better person. Or maybe a little more bitter….or maybe neither. Who knows! Either way, enjoy the audible goodness!

First up, its cute. Thats right, the branding is so adorable, you just want a little puffy, like its was a Pokemon or something. No, but really, I do think the branding tells you something about the product; its lean and functional. Of course, you pick whichever product you feel solves the problem, but heres my reasons for liking openbsd:

1. The download is relatively small: about 207MB for the iso image
2. It takes up little resources: 30MB once booted up (and 13 processes). Of course, you’ll be expecting to load the machine up with services, thats the whole point of a good OS, right? Unless you don’t actually intend on using it…
3. Easy to use ports system. You just download the ports.tar.gz file for your version of openbsd, uncompress and then untar in the right directory (/usr/ports), then navigate to the directory of the software you want and type
make && make install
   Of course, this is only really needed for people who like to compile from source! Everyone else can just use the usual packages system
4. Easy network configuration. You can make a bridged connection with two commands:
ifconfig bridge0 up
brconfig bridge0 add xl0 add fxp0 (insert your own network cards here)
5. It ships with apache! Just type:
   apachectl start and your running! (the htdocs directory is /var/www/htdocs )
6. The documentation is fantastic. No really, it really is good, its always a pleasure to RTM on openbsd
7. After installing a window manager like fluxbox, it takes one command to get it working, provided you want to type startx each time you boot. Also bear in mind you’ll need to add /usr/local/bin/fluxbox to your users .xinitrc file , from a fresh install you’ll need to make this file.
8. It recognised my ancient 3COM pccard Ethernet adapter! I can just pull it out and openbsd doesn’t die, it just kills off the dhclient process that was using it!
9. You get stickers if you buy the CD set!!!