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OpenBSD 4.4 Released
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Nov 02, 2008 04:31 PM
from the fresh-daemons dept.
from the fresh-daemons dept.
Linux blog writes "The new version of OpenBSD is available for download. There are lots of nifty new features to try out including OpenSSH 5.1 with chroot(2) support, Xenocara, Gnome 2.20.3, KDE 3.5.8, etc. Machines using the UltraSPARC IV/T1/T2 and Fujitsu SPARC64-V/VI/VII are now supported. It seems amazing to me that they keep delivering these new results on a six-month release cycle."
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Submission: OpenBSD 4.4 Released by Anonymous Coward
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Congratulations (Score:5, Informative)
Congratulations to the OpenBSD team. BSD is far from dead!
Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, BSD is not dead at all. In fact I took a look at their mailing list archives last week and saw more than half a dozen very active threads. Shame they were all flame wars.
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Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. I'd really like to like OpenBSD. Technically, it's superb. It's smooth, polished, well documented --- it's got a level of consistency that most Linux distros can only hope to dream of. The kernel is well designed and fast, with excellent hardware support. System setup is consistent and well-thought out. Above all, it doesn't confuse easy-to-use with easy-to-learn --- everything is as simple as possible without oversimplifying, which makes it a joy to admin.
But then, every time I try to use it, I run up against the OpenBSD developers, who are an arrogant bunch of elitist assholes. In a couple of years, on and off, I think I've seen Theo make a civil reply to someone *once*. Maybe twice. No, I'm not kidding. When you see someone ask what looks to my untutored eye a reasonable question about VMs, and the head developer replies publicly with the words 'You are full of shit' and nothing else (apart from a complete copy of the original message, no snipping), there is something very wrong. Most of the other devs are nearly as bad, and of course there are hordes of groupies who assume that if the people in charge are okay with personal abuse, then it's alright for them, too.
Despite this, the actual operating system is definitely worth checking out if you're interested in what a well-designed Unix actually looks like. Linux can learn a lot from it.
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Re:Congratulations (Score:4, Informative)
I've used OpenBSD for many years (early 2.x days). Before asking questions on the list it helps to gooooogle and read until your eyes are bleeding. OpenBSD has (IMHO) the best manpages of any *nix system I've ever used. The FAQ and How-Tos on the site are excellent as well.
I've had a few replies from questions I've answered both on and off-list and the people have always been helpful. That includes the few exchanges I've had with Theo over the years.
In short: exhaust your reading and searches before asking questions on the lists. The OS is free, but developers' time is limited.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In short: exhaust your reading and searches before asking questions on the lists. The OS is free, but developers' time is limited.
And that justifies arrogance and being an asshole?
We must be living in different worlds.
Re:Congratulations (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, you and I (we) must. OpenBSD is not for the faint of heart, not for the n00bs, not quite for granny (but if she's asking questions on a OpenBSD mailing list, there's something seriously wrong with the way you set up her rig, or seriously wrong about your understanding of her computer understanding, or whatever). For user-friendly answers, the *BSD documentation is very extensive (try the FreeBSD handbook, most of which translates to OpenBSDdom or Linuxdom), and there are very, very many user-friendly Linux forums out there; the problems you'll have as a end user will be most probably with an end-user app, and kernel developers don't need to be hassled with such questions. As an analogy, I use to say that one novice user's question about the cup holder to the power users is the power user's question about the parameters to their device drivers.
Not that I'm an OpenBSD developer or any such things, but I think that people who dwelve onto the *BSD realm must be braced for such coups, and must be prepared to RTFM!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. Mabye in OpenBSD land, but here in FreeBSD world, we dont flame people to death. The people I encounter in my travels are never hostile, always helpful, and very non-religious (i.e. you dont have to apologize for the fact you are sending in a patch via Outlook and your favorite windows text editor).
That said, only would the OpenBSD flame this guy [gmane.org] to a well deserved, and hilarious, crisp [gmane.org].
Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Interesting)
Mabye in OpenBSD land, but here in FreeBSD world, we dont flame people to death.
Interesting to hear. I did a series of articles about the new versions of NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD about a year ago. I originally intended to write one on FreeBSD for the same series, but decided to drop it. When I emailed the OpenBSD developers, I got well thought-out replies to my questions. The NetBSD guys went even further and forwarded my questions to some other people, collected replies, and gave me a huge amount of material to work with. Matt Dillon, likewise, gave me some great material on his plans for Dragonfly. The FreeBSD developers ignored me for a month, and then replied with a colossal flame ending 'never contact me again'. One of the other developers did apologise for this behaviour later. I thought this was a shame, since I've been a FreeBSD user for some years and wanted to give the project some free publicity. After this encounter, however, I dropped the idea of a FreeBSD article.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh... Who said that "Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups"? OpenBSD is indeed, targeted for another world, hence the rude answers some non-googling users get on their mailing lists...
"Assumption is the mother..." (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Congratulations (Score:4, Insightful)
A year later they implemented prebinding, which means my effort wasn't completely wasted.
Parents don't like it when you criticize their children, even if in their heart of hearts they know the criticism is true. Here, software = children; developers = parents. It's not too hard to imagine nerdy group could be like that.
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Re:Congratulations (Score:4, Informative)
I can't stand the arrogance of most open source developers I've associated with. To be fair, I can't stand the ambivalence most closed source companies have towards their users. Flash Player 10, for example, won't install on Windows unless you have -a- C:\. If you installed Windows onto a spare hard drive, it is given a different drive letter (such as E:\, in my case.) If I didn't have another disk that I could re-assign to C:\, or if I were a less technical person, I could not install Flash Player 10. Interestingly, from installing the trial of Adobe CS4 (the designer tool,) it was the only program that failed to install. I tried to contact Adobe and was told that support would come with a fee. WHAT? I am reporting a bug and they want to charge me money to elevate my call.
Maybe I just hate other programmers? Perhaps Jean-Paule Sartre should have said, "Hell is other programmers."
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Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Truly, this is the year of BSD on the desktop.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
KDE 3.5.9 was released February 19, 2008.
Far from dead... (Score:2, Funny)
Congrats to the OpenBSD team.
In related news, NetBSD 5.0 should be released soon, too.
BSD proves Netcraft wrong again.
Rock Solid (Score:2, Interesting)
I have been regularly running OpenBSD for the last 8 years, and I have never been disappointed. 4.4 keeps up the string of solid releases.
I have a thinkpad that runs it as well.
Yes, I buy the CDs, and a few shirts, and donate $ when I can. Hopefully it keeps them working on the next release. I don't know what I would do without it running my DNS and other servers.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
man acpithinkpad [openbsd.org]. man apm [openbsd.org].
Yes, it works fine.
KDE version (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess is they care more about mature, audited code than something that's top-of-the-line by .1 version.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
3.5.9 is included in 4.4!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The quality of most Linux-oriented code leads to a great deal of time spent porting it to other systems
While I can understand why OSS developers would be content if they can just get their code running on Linux, they do miss out on the debugging opportunities inherent with porting to other systems.
The other aspect is that the OpenBSD team would like to make sure they are not introducing more security holes with the "latest and greatest" from the various projects. Something like KDE or Gnome could be loaded with hard to detect security holes.
Re:KDE version (Score:5, Informative)
I keep seeing this, but it is not entirely correct. According to their own FAQ they do not audit ports or packages to the same degree as the base system. One must assume that the "external stuff" has not been through an audit at all when installing a port/package.
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#Intro [openbsd.org]
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A site geared towards Linux user, to learn OpenBSD (Score:5, Informative)
One Day.. (Score:4, Funny)
Death "SO DISAPPOINTING"
Silent Money Maker (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
This is not flamebait. I encourage moderators to read the guidelines at http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It was flamebait on several counts, the first being FreeBSD is not anything like Linux. Kernel, filesystem, hier, SMP, licensing, and general philosophy are greatly different.
I personally think Theo de Raadt is a great project leader, even if he leaves a bit to be desired in tactfully dealing with situations. He's a bit abrasive in way House, MD is abrasive. I think Linus Torvalds is an ass but if I were to use that a basis of running down his work, then I too would be guilty a flamebait.
The rest of the
Re: (Score:2)
Read the guidelines.
Wrong comments are not flamebait. Wrong comments should be left unmoderated.
Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:5, Insightful)
How is it that these comments are raised again and again with rarely a genuflect towards the possibility that our social norms and our technical norms exist at cross purposes?
It is often pointed out that humans are hierarchical animals. What's pointed out far less often is that we are also polarizing animals. For the most part, it's pretty darn hard to get a community of people to rest comfortably within a dual hierarchy: the polarizers will either succeed in driving the culture toward a political hierarchy, or they will succeed in driving the culture toward a technical meritocracy, politics be damned.
What evidence do we have that people can be effective and polite at the same time? NASA? I think not. When it became a political culture, shuttles exploded.
Is Linus an ass, or does he choose to occupy the niche that has proven viable? Larry Wall has taken a gentler stance toward his position as benevolent dictator for life, and he's not getting much good press lately. Nice guys finish last or at best, five years late.
Every time this subject comes up, there is a lot of chattering from the "How to win friends and influence people" crowd that despite the technical merits of X, it doesn't suit that person's social worldview, as if technical merit belongs in a marriage with popularity and approval.
As far as I can tell from my experience, the majority of PC marriages of that ilk are functionally destitute, yet the chattering never ceases that the world *ought* to operate that way. On what basis? What annoys me most is that this chattering rarely includes even the slightest nod toward justification.
This is another fact about human nature: we seem to have an inbuilt algorithm for determining that certain kinds of opinions can be safely put forward with little or no justification (e.g. "that's just how things are"), and which kinds of opinion can automatically be called to account. In my experience, the hierarchy of what must be fully justified and what needn't be has been pretty much decided on the grade 3 playground.
There seems to be a lot of people out there who are offended to the core that Theo's objectionable personality has been associated with so much durable accomplishment. In my opinion, that's just a bad case of shooting the messenger. Given broad human instincts toward hierarchy and polarization, it was as inevitable as the rise of the spam king having created a zero-cost anonymous distribution channel.
The underlying problem is that there is no reliable chalk line between civility and brown-nosing, and it's hell to police in a project that could otherwise rely on more objective measures. It's kind of like Sudoku. A complete waste of time, but I enjoy it anyway. We've made almost no progress (as a social organism) at efficiently policing the line between civility and brown-nosing, but so many among our ranks seem to prefer sliding down this slippery moss bank over the firm traction of dystopian merit.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Spend $20 on a new ethernet card? I used a cheap off-the-shelf realtek on openbsd for years. On a Sun SPARC, no less.
Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:5, Interesting)
although they lack a good pre-built distro like Ubuntu.
They do have a good pre-built distro. It's called PC-BSD [pcbsd.org]. It's very good in my experience, very nice. And it's a breeze to install, just like Ubuntu.
I like Ubuntu even better. But PC-BSD is very fine, really, it deserves recognition. It's well worth trying.
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Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:5, Informative)
Let me just point out that PC-BSD's kernel is the very same FreeBSD, nothing related to OpenBSD; let me also just point out that the standard FreeBSD distribution combines the advantages of Gentoo's (customizing the building of packages to your needs or desires) and of Debian (superb dependency tracking, very fast on searches, always up-to-date (if you consider Debian Unstable)).
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:5, Funny)
In other late breaking news, 100% of Coke drinkers prefer Coke to Pepsi.
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Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:4, Informative)
PC-BSD, like DesktopBSD, is FreeBSD based. Don't confuse FreeBSD and OpenBSD - they share many userspace utilities and their kernels have some common history, but they are not the same OS.
Basically, OpenBSD is the one that is rabid about security - makes great server software.
NetBSD is the ultra-portable one - good for unusual hardware.
FreeBSD has excellent support for commodity hardware. It is the one used to make the user-friendly distros.
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Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:4, Informative)
Yes and don't forget the other three since you're trying to be complete:
DragonFly BSD - clustering (freebsd 4 fork) good for servers.
MirBSD - OpenBSD fork (3.x i think)
MidnightBSD - FreeBSD 6.x fork (although bringing in 7.x features now) Focused on desktop use. Not at PC-BSD usability levels yet.
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Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, OpenBSD's performance is behind that of Linux and FreeBSD (which are neck-and-neck.) However, performance is still quite adequate. OpenBSD has a kind of austere simplicity, however, that makes it a pleasure to administer. It certainly has a niche.
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Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:4, Insightful)
They're significantly behind Linux in many areas, but don't mistake optimization for specific workloads as obsolescence. Performance sucks once you hit userspace, but most OpenBSD machines spend almost all their time in the kernel, routing and firewalling, tasks for which they are quite competitive with Linux.
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Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Linux doesn't take anything from BSD. Everything in Linux is free for BSD to use as long as the code stays free, ie under the GPL. While if apple takes code from BSD, you will never see that code again.
Every bit of BSD code that Apple uses is still available from them (either under the original license, or the OSI approved APSL).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Apple regards the open source community as a convenience, not as partners.
Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:5, Informative)
> What does Linux take from BSD? All those vendor supplied drivers? The userland? The vast array of high quality filesystems?
The overwhelmingly dominant SSH implementation?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, the UltraSPARC T2 was released in October 2007.
Re:why bother with 6 month release cycle? (Score:4, Informative)
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Copy-pasted from Wikipedia! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Normally you don't NEED to upgrade it. Set up the device and forget about it, unless there's some type of remote exploit you'll be fine.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
and yes we have backup systems, but if you've ever worked in a real industrial environment it's not
Re:EOL cycle (Score:4, Insightful)
that's not a solution when you have applications processing information, and you switch over while your in the middle of processing requests. In my situation there isn't a single second the system isn't fielding 100's of requests. basicly it involves a hand shake where the client makes a requests and expects an answer, if you switch over the new system won't know the client is expecting an answer so you'd have to re engineer a black box system to do it somehow.
Ever heard of connection draining? You build systems with the expectation that they will fail. Any component at any given point in time should be expected to be broken, because it will be at some point. If your system can't handle bringing down a server for maintenance, then you have far bigger problems than picking a good OS. Good luck to you.
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Re:4.4 (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Package security? (Score:5, Informative)
Anonymous cvs access is done over ssh, and the public keys are listed on the OpenBSD website. The ports tree includes checksums, and these are all verified automatically. So if you check the ssh key of the cvs server, all your ports are safe.
As for pre-built packages from FTP, I don't think there's anything in place for verification.
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