Review: OpenBSD 3.4 SPARC64 Edition 39
'It's me' writes "Tony Bourke is reviewing OpenBSD 3.4 for SPARC-64. He discusses installation, the feel of the OS, its desktop, its performance, a MySQL problem he stumbled on, development tools and hardware support, firewalling and more."
Dupe (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Dupe (Score:1, Offtopic)
3.5 is out. (Score:2)
I'm so upset, I'm going back in time to stop running X, KDE, GNOME and the festival of apps I've used on BSD since 1994. Did Linux have a network stack yet then? /me forgets.
OSNews Article Overview (Score:3, Funny)
It recognized my NIC and worked very well.
The firewall features are very valuable and robust.
Conclusion: Linux is not ready for the desktop.
Re:Not only a dupe... (Score:4, Interesting)
He did try a snapshot dated 29th of March, and that snapshot is pretty much OpenBSD 3.5. It would be nice if he could at least toch upon some of the new features of OpenBSD 3.5 like Greylisting (very efficient anti-spam and anti-email-virus) or CARP (the Common Address Redundancy Protocol) for failover.
Not a Dupe! And an OK review (Score:4, Informative)
Reviewer unfamiliar with *BSD? (Score:1)
Re:Reviewer unfamiliar with *BSD? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sparc64. . . (Score:5, Informative)
The main reason I run OpenBSD on these machines, is that the graphics support was superior to NetBSD [which I run on an old SS20], and FreeBSD doesn't support the SBUS [yet].
Few errors (Score:5, Informative)
For example he tried to run the various X configurations utilities. The FAQ clearly states that there is a WORKING example configuration that you should start from in /usr/X11/README .
Furthermore the FAQ also states to not compile from source unless absolutely nessessary. If he had used packages, he might not have had the problems with the databases that he had. However there was a MySQL glitch in 3.4 (I think, it could have been 3.3) that was fixed in stable. Also, the 3.5 snapshot from the 29th had some serious problems (people were told not to use it). Doing a little more homework would have avoided these problems; it's all documented.
While overall the article was very interesting, I am disappointed that his haste caused him to have problems where he should not have.
Re:Few errors (Score:3, Informative)
The FAQ does not state this at all. Which FAQ are you refering to? ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/doc/obsd-faq.tx t
While it was odd that starting up X11 with a non-working config crashed the system, I was able to get X11 working, as you can see in the screenshot.
Furthermore the FAQ also states to not compile from sou
Re:Few errors (Score:4, Informative)
As far as the MySQL problem, its very well known and has been in OpenBSD for some time, the MySQL Manual has it listed for as far back as 2.8 if I recall correctly, just for some reason not everyone hits it.
On a side note, it was nice to see my name in a review, even though I was for all intents and purposes no help at all.
Re:Few errors (Score:2)
I just checked the manual, and found this:
OpenBSD 2.8 problem [mysql.com]
Interesting, I hadn't seen that before. It's for 2.8, but it seems to be the same issue I had. When I get back from Hawaii I'll run MySQL with that tweak, see if that resolves the problem.
Re:Few errors (Score:2)
As I stated in the article, I figured it probably wouldn't run and die with an error. What I was surprised about was that it actually caused the operating system to crash.
Re:Few errors (Score:2)
> The FAQ does not state this at all.
Wow, you've got me there. The faq doesn't seem to have that information anymore. I'm pretty sure it or some man page (X, startx) used to because I remember reading explicitly to start with the example in the README file instead of running the config when I set OpenBSD up on that Blade 100.
> There are no packages or even ports for MySQL 4.0
Well, while I don't use MySQL, this [openbsd.org] does look like 4.
Re:Few errors (Score:2)
Re:Few errors (Score:2)
They've just added MySQL 4.0 for
Re:Few errors (Score:2)
Yeah -current will tell you it's 3.5 (because it's 3.5-current). Does it have the -stable or the -release tag after the 3.5 at the top of the dmesg? I guess that's possible since you did get the snapshot back in March.
>However, I was able to find a solution.
I'd strongly suggesting using 3.5-stable (or release) and the MySQL package when you do your addendum. The MySQL problem should be fixed in one of the patches and should work for you "out-of-the-box" (but I'll make no g
Hardware support problem in ALL BSDs (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried OpenBSD in my Ultra5 a while ago, before the first of these two reviews came out, and it ran much faster than Solaris. I have a SCSI disk in there, so it was an impressive firewall, except it didnt see the ATM card.
Also needed to install OpenBSD (I'm used to OpenBSD's simplicity) on my spanking new VA Linux 1000 webserver, but I was using a Promise SATA card in there to run the SATA disk. Only Linux can read the SATA, so I had to revert back. BSD is great but (1) You have to have the hardware it supports (2) You should only need the functions your version of BSD supports.
I'd love to see FreeBSD support SATA cards (Promise TX2plus) and have facilities like Linux UML or Solaris zones, unlike chroots. In the short run, Linux is there, in the long run BSD will be used unless Linux becomes real stable, and is standardized, or the Slackware development is continued.
Re:Hardware support problem in ALL BSDs (Score:3, Informative)
WTF? FreeBSD does support SATA cards. My workstation does not have any IDE harddrives, yet I've had FreeBSD on it for a year. This machine does not have Linux on it because at the time I purchased the system Linux only had SATA support as a patch. At the last time I tried to install Linux on it, none of the shipping distros included SATA support on the install media.
Re:Hardware support problem in ALL BSDs (Score:2)
The fact that Linux is becoming an OS standard, with vendors releasing drives for it along with Solaris win2k, and not BSD, Plan9 etc, doesnt help the situation.
For now we're thankful at least one free OS is supported by many hardware vendors.
Re:Hardware support problem in ALL BSDs (Score:1)
"the feel of the OS" (Score:1, Funny)
Again? (Score:2, Funny)
Would someone please give this guy a Solaris CD already?
He's reviewed _everything_ else that runs on his eBay-purchased US5. Let it go.
--saint