OpenBSD 4.7 Preorders Are Up

badger.foo writes "The OpenBSD 4.7 pre-orders are up. That means the release is done, sent off to CD production, and snapshots will turn -current again. Order now and you more likely than not will have your CD set, T-shirt or other cool stuff before the official release date. You get the chance to support the most important free software project on the planet, and get your hands on some cool playables and wearables early. The release page is still being filled in, but the changelog has detailed information about the goodies in this release."

Is ugrading OpenBSD still kind of a mess?

[flydpnkrtn]

See the upgrade guide for upgrading 4.5 to 4.6... it's a 280 line upgrade guide:
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade46.html [openbsd.org]
 
...on RedHat and CentOS, to go from RHEL 5.3 to RHEL 5.4 I did "yum -y update". That's it.

Can we get there with OpenBSD? At my current place of employment we were using OpenBSD, but the upgrade process was an argument that was made (by other members of my team) to move to RHEL...

They focused on Security to distinguish themselves

[doodlebumm]

I have great respect for the OpenBSD folks. Their focus on security was a result of needing to distinguish themselves in the free marketplace. Back in the late 90's it was necessary to focus on something to keep from being lost in the fray. I don't believe it was their altruism that pushed them to that focus as much as they had some good expertise and made the most of it for marketing. Like I said, I have great respect for them, but let's not put them up on a pedestal that is too high. They have made some security mistakes in the past, and they've fixed them pretty well, too. They are human just like the rest of us.

Re:It is the most important open source project.

[DAldredge]

Why can't anyone actually answer the question I asked?

Re:It is the most important open source project.

[CAIMLAS]

but what MS does not do well is security. not at all.

I wouldn't argue against that, not even for a moment.

But despite the myriads of host, application, and server level exploits for Windows, the default security policies, and generally poor network server capabilities, there's one thing that sticks out in my mind: have there been any exploits for Microsoft's RDP implementation yet?

I realize that older versions of Microsoft products aren't able to upgrade to the newer versions, but I've never seen a "Terminal Services Root Exploit" as I have with OpenSSH. Maybe I've just not noticed it (I don't pay attention to MS land), but the tool does seem fairly useful.

Re:It is the most important open source project.

[alexandre_ganso]

Any PC that is new enough to still be running its original power supply can run some incarnation of Windows 7.

You forget the fact that windows 7 screwed with drivers severely. We have seven different generations of computers in my department bought through the last thee years (it were several smaller university departments that were joined together, that's the reason of so many purchases), from 3-year hp desktops to 6-month asus notebooks.

NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM has all the drivers required for normal operation. You name it: 512mb radeon video cards which run with no 3d, no network, no wifi (my personal machine had 3 different wireless adapters tested, no go), on the portables not even the sound cards and webcams work! And they don't accept vista drivers either.

Amazingly, on several of those machines, as a joke we tested mac os x hackintosh, just to see how it goes. And the hackintosh performed better out-of-box than windows 7. No need to say that ubuntu recognized everything from the start.

So, we are still on windows XP and vista on the newer notebooks.

Re:Subjective summary is subjective

[TheRaven64]

It, along with the rest of the OpenBSD base system, now compiles with PCC. It also compiles with clang and, last benchmarks I saw, performed better when compiled with clang than with GCC. So, I guess the answer to your question is 'better'.