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OpenBSD, Xubuntu, and XP on one box?


Signal Hacker

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At home, I have an old POS Dell desktop that I've turned into a victim for my pentesting "target practice." The thing was built in 2002, has a junk x32 Celeron processor (I'm at the office right now and I don't remember what speed it is), and 40ish GB hard drive.

Originally, it just had XP and, since my Symantec subscription had long ago expired, the thing was festering and bloated with malware, so I wiped everything and installed Xubuntu. Worked great! Decided to dual boot it with XP, that worked great too.

Then I decided to put openBSD on it as another plaything and something to help sharpen my technical skills. XP and Xubuntu might still be there, but since openBSD comes pretty bare out of the box (read: no boot loader), they might as well be gone. No big deal, there was no important info in either OS anyway.

I've seen a few dual-booting guides for openBSD on the web...but what I want to do is triple boot this sucker. Is this possible with a minimal impact to sanity?

Or would I be better off triple booting XP/Xubuntu/FreeBSD (I'm under the impression that FreeBSD is a little more user-friendly) for now, until I attain enough 1337 H4X0Rness to tackle openBSD?

Don't worry, I have no illusion that this will be easy...the whole point is that I want to really start learning and delving into *BSD OS's (especially openBSD because of it's rep for being super-secure), but I don't have a single box that I can devote to just running a BSD Unix distro, it'll have to share space with something.

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I would just go with virtualisation, pick up VMware server and you life will be so much easier.

If your heart is set on having them natively on your machine, then install the hardest first, leaving free unpartitioned space on your hard-drives to install the next one, which you'll want to pick that has a good boot-loader, then go for the third and update the boot-loader.

If you want to play with server stuff, stick with OpenBSD, knowing FreeBSD will help with OpenBSD, but not by as much as you think. Otherwise go with FreeBSD.

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I thought about the VMWare route, but I doubt my POS Celeron processor and 0.25gig of memory on that box can handle it! :lol:

But now that I think about it...I think I WILL run VMWare.......on my 2gig x64 laptop. I'll use VMWare on the lappie to play with the *BSD's, and just have XP and a lightweight Linux distro (like Xubuntu) native on my stunt box.

Thanks for the response! :)

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