Re: basics

> Welcome to the nerdly and crochety OpenBSD community!
>
Like the man said, welcome aboard!
>> First is: can openbsd be installed on the run the mill pc or laptop 
>> that you
>> buy in the shops that normally runs windows or on the other side a 
>> second
>> hand apple laptop with no OS.
> Yes and yes.
With caveats: some laptops have kinky devices that aren't supported, 
either because
they are new, or because the manufacturers suck (e.g., won't give us 
documentation).
Go to the web site and look at the i386-laptops.html for representative 
results.
>>  what do you
>> use as a browser for openbsd,
>
Many use Seamonkey, others including me use Firefox, some use Opera but 
that requires
adding on the Linux emulation package.
> OpenOffice.
Yup. I've been using that one for a while. And OOo3 has just been added 
to our ports
tree.
>
>>  Last one is can you run MT4 trading platform in
>> openbsd? as i know MT4 is designed for windows. Id very greatful for 
>> some
>> answers as im on a learnign curve here. thanks.
>>  
No idea. Third-party software falls into two categories; open source and 
closed source.
Of the tens of thousands of popular open source solutions out there, the 
approximate five
thousand that out people use are in our ports/packages system. Most are 
available
pre-compiled as "packages" so you don't have to compile them yourself 
(though you can if
you really want to, using "ports" instead). Some are only in ports for 
various reasons,
usually licensing. Other open-source ones can usually be made to run by 
a programmer.

The closed-source software - which includes most MS-Windows software - 
leaves you
at the mercy of the software vendor.

That said, there are solutions that let you run MS-Windows under 
OpenBSD, such as
qemu, but I don't know if they're solid enough to run a business or 
trading on.