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BSD Operating Systems

OpenBSD Review at DistroWatch 236

Posted by michael from the it's-not-paranoia dept.
jpkunst writes "Robert Storey at DistroWatch com has written an in-depth and favorable review of OpenBSD: OpenBSD - For Your Eyes Only. 'The first OpenBSD memento I ever saw was a T-shirt with a picture of a cop chasing a script kiddie. That image remained etched in my mind for well over a year before I finally got my hands on a copy of this fine OS. Now that I have it installed on my machine, I only wonder what took me so long.'"
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OpenBSD Review at DistroWatch More

OpenBSD Review at DistroWatch

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  • BSD IS... (Score:4, Funny)

    by TedCheshireAcad ( 311748 ) <ted AT fc DOT rit DOT edu> on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:32PM (#9647240) Homepage
    BSD IS........being nursed slowly back to health?

  • this should be a definitive guide to installing OS (Score:5, Informative)

    by phaetonic ( 621542 ) * on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:35PM (#9647281)
    The article is very clear and concise. While BSD was not trivial to install the very first time, it isn't too difficult for those with experience. However even noobs can install OpenBSD with this article.

    BTW - A good idea is to install OpenBSD on a dedicated secondary hard disk, such as a 4GB or something that you can find for free now a days. That way you will not have to worry about ruining your partitions on your primary disk, as OpenBSD is a bit scarier with writing to your MBR than, lets say, the GUI for GRUB in the RedHat installer.
    • man, the first time i ever ran into the whole BSD disklabel thing, i almost crapped a brick. I was pretty new to GNU/Linux at the time, and had not to much of a clue how widely varying the various filesystem types out there were.

      anyway, it was 4am at the time. within the next twenty four hours my computer had about 8 different OS's (not installs, seperate OS's). by the end of it i had a 120 mb partition with an ultraslim windows 98 incarnation and OpenBSD in all it's cryptographic glory.

      that was a fun day.

    • Re:this should be a definitive guide to installing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:45PM (#9647377)
      non-trivial to whom? as a linux dork maybe 5 years ago, i installed BSD on a friends laptop without ever reading a single thing about BSD. He asked me if I would, then handed me the cd's. A little while later it was up and running.

      non-trivial to MS-Windows users, Mac users, and Linux initiates maybe. But 5 years ago, I was barely above the status of linux newb. Ok, so it wasn't exactly trivial to do at the time, but easy enough to do without documentation.

      Still, your point is well taken.

    • Re:this should be a definitive guide to installing (Score:5, Funny)

      by vijaya_chandra ( 618284 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:52PM (#9647415)
      That way you will not have to worry about ruining your partitions on your primary disk, as OpenBSD is a bit scarier with writing to your MBR than, lets say, the GUI for GRUB in the RedHat installer.

      You don't seem to have heard of the *feature* [redhat.com] in Fedora Core 2 to get rid of booting from a windows partition

    • Re:this should be a definitive guide to installing (Score:4, Interesting)

      by iomanip ( 775663 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:56PM (#9647454) Homepage
      I have found OpenBSD to be trivial to install on one platform out of the three I have tried. When installing OpenBSD on an UltraSparc 10 there was no issues what-so-ever and everything might as well have been point and click. The x86 family of processors and the Power PC processors, however, were an entirely different story and headache all together. You'd think that with OpenBSD talking about how secure it is and how great it is, that you'd see one of those developers make some user friendly installer in order to increase the popularity of the operating system. Personally I believe that more people running more secure computers is a good thing, but thats just me and I ramble.

    • Re:this should be a definitive guide to installing (Score:5, Informative)

      by cleverhandle ( 698917 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @06:25PM (#9648172)

      The only potential difficulty, IMO, is getting past the the whole "partitions vs. slices" thing. The BSD and Linux versions of those ideas are dangerously similar - close enough to make a clueful Linux user think they understand then, but different enough to hose that user's system. Even then, there's nothing particularly difficult there as long as you wipe your mind of what you think you know before beginning.

      Once you get past partitioning/slicing, there's really nothing to the rest of the install.

    • Re:this should be a definitive guide to installing (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bfg9000 ( 726447 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @11:02AM (#9652901) Homepage Journal
      I got OpenBSD running the first time I tried it (2.x); I'll let everyone here in on my secret - I READ THE INSTRUCTIONS THAT POPPED UP ON MY SCREEN.

      That's it. When your computer asks you a question, read the paragraph above it explaining the question before you just hit 'Enter' without thinking. This tip actually works for every OS. When my mom can't figure out how to use her email or something, I make her actually read the questions her app pops up before she impatiently hammers the 'enter' key to get through. And she realizes that nearly EVERY app is user-friendly enough to use.

      Ironically, about 90% of you skipped half of the above text and just went on to the next post.

  • BSD FAR from dead (Score:3, Informative)

    by eamacnaghten ( 695001 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:36PM (#9647284) Homepage Journal
    Don't get me wrong - I am a Linux user not a BSD one - but I know a lot of administrators who prefer the BSD family over the Linux one.

    I wonder if BSD would benefit from changing to a similar development model as Linux. There sem to be relatively few active BSD developers, and although they do a good job, they must have a bad time trying to keep up with the latest hardware and technologies available.

    • Re:BSD FAR from dead (Score:5, Informative)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:39PM (#9647322) Journal
      I wonder if BSD would benefit from changing to a similar development model as Linux. There sem to be relatively few active BSD developers, and although they do a good job, they must have a bad time trying to keep up with the latest hardware and technologies available.

      Now that is funny! :-)

      Perhaps you would like to know that FreeBSD usually gets new hardware support before Linux... It some cases, LONG before Linux... USB & Firewire support come to mind immediately, but there are plenty of other examples as well.
      • atheros chipset as well, the madwifi drivers for atheros based cards were part of the freebsd kernel back when i was still strugling to get it to work in slackware....

      • Re:BSD FAR from dead (Score:5, Informative)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @05:53PM (#9647941) Journal
        I started using FreeBSD because my usb keyboard and mouse ran on it first before Linux.

        The drivers were in kernel 2.4 but Linus and others held backporting it into 2.2 and the 2.4 kernel kept being held back with delays. When 2.4.0 came out due to those screaming for newer hardware support, it turned out it had a broken VM subsystem. Ouch.

        The BSD kernels are updating more often for trivial things like drivers compared to Linux.

        USB, Devfs, and even SCSI had better and earlier support in BSD before Linux. Infact Adeptec to this day creates their unix drivers on FreeBSD first and then ports them to Linux and Solarisx86 afterwards. Ide on the other hand was an exception since Linux was geared for pc's and BSD for servers.

        Its those strange peripherals like no name laptop display drivers, nics, and winmodems that Linux has an advantager over.

      • Now this doesnt make sense to me.

        If there are more users of linux, why or rather, how does FreeBSD get support for newer stuff quicker?

        Thanks for the info

        • Re:BSD FAR from dead (Score:5, Informative)

          by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @06:05PM (#9648042) Journal
          Read my post here

          http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=113848&o p= Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=122&mode=threa d&pid=9647941

          THe BSD kernels are updated every few months in minor releases. Yes the Linux kernels are also updated but for alot of items depending on new things like Devfs they are often ported to the latest beta 2.odd releases. 2.4 was over 12 months late and had all the newest drivers.

          FreeBSD on the other hand puts things like driver updated in every kernel release and keeps the architecture changes in seperate -current series.

          They have 2 kernel teams. One for -current which will eventually be the new kernel series. And one for -stable which are maintance releases. Drivers are almost always backported to the -stable releases or dual ported.

          Most Linux kernel developers use the beta 2.odd kernels so they port the drivers to that and someone needs to back port them back to the stable releases.

          I admit the 5.x series has newer drivers oddly that are not in 4.x because of huge architectural changes. BSD users do not like to do radical changes which makes writing drivers easier. Its an unusual change for them but FreeBSD users make up %15 of Linux users. 15 million Linux users = 1 million FreeBSD ones. That is alot of hardware that is being tested. Also most Linux users are hobbiest while the FreeBSD ones are more professional and capable of writing drivers.

        • Just because an OS has a large number of users doesn't mean that it is better than an OS with a smaller number of users (MS Windows has a very large user base). Also, look at the user base, *BSD users are mostly hardcore professional users, Linux users are predominately hobbiests.

      • Re:BSD FAR from dead (Score:3, Interesting)

        by J. J. Ramsey ( 658 )
        "Perhaps you would like to know that FreeBSD usually gets new hardware support before Linux... It some cases, LONG before Linux... USB & Firewire support come to mind immediately"

        OTOH, in my experience, Linux has had *working* USB scanner support, while FreeBSD support (at least in the 4.x versions) was pretty broken.

    • Re:BSD FAR from dead (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:52PM (#9647418)
      Keep in mind that all the BSDs share code with eachother. FreeBSD and NetBSD have imported OpenBSD's PF. NetBSD has imported OpenBSD W^X. All of the BSD's share various internals and device drivers.
      There have been 300+ committers to FreeBSD in the past year. I'm guessing Open/Net/DragonFlyBSD have 1-3 dozen developers each. Apple has a bunch of developers. All combined, the BSDs are doing pretty good.
      Since each BSD has a different focus, the developer has a choice of which fits their style best.

    • There sem to be relatively few active BSD developers,

      You have proof of this?

      ...If you want I could subscribe you to the the cvs commits mailing lists for all of *BSD projects. >:P

    • Re:BSD FAR from dead (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "There seem to be relatively few active BSD developers"

      Well, if you ever decide to give BSD a try (I haven't tried DragonflyBSD or OpenBSD yet myself, only FreeBSD and NetBSD) the first time you do a 'cvsup' you'll really notice just how many people are working on it and just how often BSD is updated. BSD is well worth a try if you're bored of all the linux distros and have an urge for something new, a little more challenging, and a little different than linux.

    • Re:BSD FAR from dead (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @05:11PM (#9647567)
      I wonder if BSD would benefit from changing to a similar development model as Linux.

      The short answer is NO!

      The fact is, the BSD development model is what leads to the quality of BSD systems. If you want the Linux mode, well, thats what Linux is for. We WANT the BSD model.

    • Re:BSD FAR from dead (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JonMartin ( 123209 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @05:14PM (#9647584) Homepage
      I wonder if BSD would benefit from changing to a similar development model as Linux. There sem to be relatively few active BSD developers, and although they do a good job, they must have a bad time trying to keep up with the latest hardware and technologies available.

      The development models (it would be more accurate to refer to them as "developer management styles") are, in practice, quite similar. For all the talk of "the bazaar" model, the core of Linux is largely created by a small number of highly skilled developers. The BSDs just formalize this fact by publicly identifying "core" teams. Both have a cloud of lesser developers contributing. By identifying a core team the BSDs seem to have more control over the cloud, everybody knows where patches are supposed to go, patches are accepted and rejected, etc.

      So much of this comes down to psychology so I could be way off base. In my opinion the more formal approach of the BSDs has lead to higher quality, with only a small delay in hardware support.

      • Re:BSD FAR from dead (Score:4, Informative)

        by Homology ( 639438 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @06:18PM (#9648132)
        For all the talk of "the bazaar" model, the core of Linux is largely created by a small number of highly skilled developers. The BSDs just formalize this fact by publicly identifying "core" teams. Both have a cloud of lesser developers contributing.

        With *BSD you also have that userland is kept in sync with the kernel, and the core developers work on userland as well. The *BSD is an operating system, while Linux is a kernel.

    • DIfferent model, by design (Score:4, Insightful)

      by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @07:05PM (#9648449) Homepage Journal
      Part of what makes the BSD's what they are is the surrounding 'development model'.

      If you change it to be more like Linux, you would have a product more like Linux and loose what makes BSD, BSD...

      Neither is right/wrong, just different.

  • Firewalling on BSD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by raistphrk ( 203742 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:37PM (#9647304)
    I learned my packet filtering basics on FreeBSD. I've looked at ipchains and iptables/netfilter, but the ipfilter/pf packages just seem to be the packages that best encompass my beliefs of how firewalls should be constructed. I've always liked the syntax and organization; I suppose that's one of the major reasons I've stuck with FreeBSD for so long.

    OpenBSD felt "more" secure than FreeBSD, but in terms of desktop use, FreeBSD just offered more. I'll run OpenBSD on my servers, but for my desktop I want FreeBSD.

    • Re:Firewalling on BSD (Score:2, Interesting)

      by phaetonic ( 621542 ) *
      I'll second this and say that I learned and implemeneted NAT, firewall techniques, and port knocking all on OpenBSD since 'pf' became available. A pretty weak system can handle a large amount of packets. I also felt that OpenBSD was not a good desktop platform, however there was an ease of mind knowing my peremiter was protected by OpenBSD. In fact, I'd be curious if there have been more Cisco IOS exploits than default install OpenBSD exploits.

      • Re:Firewalling on BSD (Score:5, Informative)

        by adiposity ( 684943 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:54PM (#9647438)
        Something that might interest users of FreeBSD who envy pf:

        pf on FreeBSD [love2party.net]

        -Dan

      • Re:Firewalling on BSD (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Question to you or anyone. Why would it not be a good desktop system? Just ease of use, or lack of apps, or what? Aren't most apps that most folks use on a typical desktop available? Browser, email, chat client, media players, editors, etc? If it has all that, then what's the problem?

        Just wondering because I keep threatening myself to switch from Linux, for better firewalling and a tighter but smaller community. I like that the apps get relooked at,audited before inclusion, I like that part a LOT, because

        • Re:Firewalling on BSD (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          (where'd I put my slashdot PW when I need it?)

          "Why would it not be a good desktop system?"
          Well...depends on what you want. Define "desktop", then see if OpenBSD fits.

          Currently, most Unix apps are written on Intel-compatable Linux systems, by people who think "portability" means "runs on both Redhat and Fedora". Yay. After that, someone cleans it up and ports it to FreeBSD. After that, it may get ported to OpenBSD.

          For reference, this is being written on a three monitor OpenBSD box I use as my primary
          • SSH is unuseably slow on older sparcs (sun4, sun4c) but works just fine on a 50mhz sun4m (sparcstation 20) the trick is, to compile SSH with optimization for the sun4m chips... If you dont turn optimization on and tell the compiler to generate code for a sun4m, you will get sun4c code... The sun4c architecture lacks a number of divide/multiply instructions which are heavily used for ssl code such as ssh.
            And who said optimization provides no benefits? try if for yourself!

        • Re:Firewalling on BSD (Score:2, Informative)

          by BSD Yoda ( 701352 )
          ** Flame disclaimer - comments below are my opinion and personal experience **

          Question to you or anyone. Why would it not be a good desktop system? Just ease of use, or lack of apps, or what?

          A combination of all of the above. Getting Gnome/KDE working on FreeBSD isn't quite as no-brainer-ish as it is on say RH9 or Suse. Getting it working on OpenBSD (as with most apps) is another notch up the difficultly ladder. Anyone who knows what ~/.xinitrc means will have OBSD or FBSD up and running with their
        • Those are exactly the questions I'd like to know. I use Debian (Desktop, testing) and OpenNA (server) at the moment. They're both fast and easy to use. Finding any information about the differences not written by a zealot on one side or the other of the BSD/Linux divide is very hard.

          It would be nice to have an up to date list comparing actual facts and figures like X11 performance, disk benchmarks, boot and application start up times, hardware support etc. so that users can make an informed decision rather
          • I probably ride pretty close to the zealot line, but I can give you some information:

            Performance on UP systems is too close to call. They all "feel" the same.

            It comes down to features. OpenBSD and FreeBSD have unbeatable server features. OpenBSD for the general security, FreeBSD for really killer things like jails.

            I'm honestly not that impressed with any of them on the Desktop, I mostly use MacOS for that. I have a *nix workstation, that's mostly for programming work and it runs whatever is convenient. W
    • Other then the fact that FreeBSD has more in the ports tree then OpenBSD, what did you find lacking in OBSD as far as desktop use?

  • New Years Eve (Score:5, Funny)

    by losvedir ( 712221 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @04:38PM (#9647311)
    "As Benjamin Franklin once said, the only way for three people to keep a secret is if two of them are dead. While it's doubtful that Ben was referring to computer security, many PC users have lots of little secrets stored on their hard drives. Things such as credit card numbers, a personal address book, and perhaps a few naughty photos from the New Year's Eve party."

    Man, why aren't my New Year's Eve parties like that!

  • What really holds back OpenBSD... (Score:5, Funny)

    by athakur999 ( 44340 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @05:03PM (#9647509) Journal
    ... is the mascot they present when you visit their respective web sites.

    Linux = Penguin = Warm and cuddly.
    FreeBSD = Cartoony demon = Warm (hot?) and cuddly.
    NetBSD = Many cartoony demons = Even warmer and cuddlier than FreeBSD.
    OpenBSD = Blowfish with a leaash on another fish with a spiked collar = spiky, poisonous, and into S&M

  • OpenBSD: First Impression (Score:5, Informative)

    by karniv0re ( 746499 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @05:07PM (#9647540) Journal
    I am somewhere between newbie and novice when it comes to *nix. When I decided I needed a good secure operating system for my job to put their web server on, I realized that I didn't know or want to learn all the steps it takes to secure Linux.

    So I decided on OpenBSD (that whole "secure by default" thing kinda enticed me). I picked up a copy of "Secure Architectures with OpenBSD" and went to work. Well, then I realized that it probably would have been faster to learn the steps to securing Linux, but I am really liking OpenBSD so far.

    I can honestly say, installation was incredibly easy once I RTFM, and I'm finding it is that way with most stuff. And the things that I have hit snags on (making PHP and MySQL play nice together) have been resolved by a few posts to misc@openbsd.org.

    And OpenBSD's clean filesystem makes it a lot easier to learn Unix than other OSs.

    Oh, and did I mention that Ports and Packages kick ass?
    • Well around half of what you learn on BSD applies to Linux anyway. Much of hardening comes from sockstat -l , and you'll notice most of what's listed runs on Linux as well. But at least you'll have a sane firewall, which is something iptables/chains just isn't =P

  • Easiest *nix (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @05:13PM (#9647580) Homepage Journal
    Just read the man pages. Amazing how down to earth and straightforward things can be if there's a group focus on simplicity. Everything is laid out in plain English. Setting up my OpenBSD box as a DHCP server took less time than doing the same thing using the GUI on my Linksys wireless AP. That's including reading the man page.

    • Too true (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rjstanford ( 69735 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @06:31PM (#9648223) Homepage Journal
      The man pages on BSD simply rock. As opposed to the man pages on most Linux distros, many of which say, "This hasn't been updated since the dawn of time, you should be using our proprietary hypertext system 'info' to get your information, dumbass." Not including the ones that were taken (as is allowed under the BSD license) directly from the BSD folk, of course. And most tools written by people influenced by their system provide equally usable man pages. Its a great cycle of documentary bliss! Or something. Either way, its pretty cool.

      • Re:Too true (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:13PM (#9649638) Homepage Journal
        The best example of a stupid GNU man page is the GCC man page. It's downright insulting: "If we find that the things in this man page that are out of date cause significant confusion or complaints, we will stop distributing the man page." In other words, don't complain or they'll take it away!

      • Sometimes I just read the info files in vi, as the table of contents is often broken or certain files just aren't visible to the info program.

        Another nice thing about the BSD man program is that it consistently understands many vi commands, and it is actually much better than the one shipped with Solaris. For certain things, the BSDs just got it right.

        • Re:Too true (Score:4, Interesting)

          by zemoo ( 582445 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @03:24AM (#9650332) Homepage
          man does not come with its own viewer. By default, man pages are viewed with 'more', which is the behaviour you see in Solaris.
          Apparently, under BSD, the pager has been set to 'less', which supports the vi commands.

          Under Solaris, I try setting the PAGER environment variable to '/usr/bin/less -isrm' or something similar in your startup scripts. This will change man's behaviour.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I've had more headaches configuring a Cisco PIX than PF. Almost like writing firewall rules in English using PF.
        • I've had more headaches configuring a Cisco PIX than PF

          Heh heh... One of my favorite peaves.

          Why in the hell doesn't Cisco just let you use a subnet mask in their "ACLs". It's just inverted after all... You have to use 0.0.0.255 instead of 255.255.255.0. Suppose it's just so you have to buy their books to learn all the stupid tricks, where they decided to do things completely different from the rest of the world... Arggg.
        • When I deployed my fw, I didn't get very far into writing the config file before it hit me: the programmers must have had to maintain other firewalls and decided to fix what sucked about them. They get it!

          Man! Easy ways to compose arbitrary lists. macros that help readibility. Read in lists from external text files. Dynamic rules. I can express in one line what has taken 10 in a cisco acl. On and on. It is a real improvement - simpler, shorter human input means fewer human mistakes.

          And pf follows th

  • coincidence (Score:4, Insightful)

    by scifiber_phil ( 630217 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @05:27PM (#9647680)
    I'm reading this on an openBSD system now. This is also the first time I managed to get on the internet using this system. I don't have much documentation other than the man pages. I'm hedging my bets a little on the whole SCO thing. I love linux, but if I must use BSD because of SCO, so be it. I am in general, pleased with the system, but I know my way around linux much better. The openBSD is on a dual boot machine, with the other os being Slackware. The OpenBSD install was somewhat of a stressful thing, as I didn't want to screw up the Slackware, and the install was a good bit different than a linux install.
  • Taken from the article :

    Below is a copy of my file ppp.conf which you can cut and paste, but you'll have to edit five settings. In particular:

    1) MODEM_DEVICE_NAME
    2) ANY_WORD
    3) PHONE_NO
    4) USER_NAME
    5) ISP_LOGIN_NAME
    6) MY_PASSWORD

    5 settings eh? Well there you go!

    Side note: my mate has been running openBSD as a squid proxy server for years now - only crash it had was when the hard disk developed bad sectors... didn't kill it straight away, but once the bad sectors hit the

  • The BSD secret (Score:5, Funny)

    by Artifakt ( 700173 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @06:03PM (#9648028)
    I'm going to spill the big secret we've been keeping from the BSD is dead gang:

    Beastie's horns double as neck bolts! It's alive! Alive!

  • Why I use OpenBSD (Score:2, Informative)

    by sleighb0y ( 141660 )
    #CLOUD# <-100Mbps-> *Invisible OpenBSD Bridging Firewall with Pf* <-100Mbps-> #HOST#

    Works great, and keeps speed with the network.

    A pretty good starter pc.conf is here [oswars.net]

    OpenBSD is also great becuase of:
    spamd [openbsd.org]

    AND

    CARP [openbsd.org]

  • Install takes only 5-10 Minutes even on FTP (Score:5, Informative)

    by HighOrbit ( 631451 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @07:49PM (#9648697)
    I just started using to OpenBSD about two weeks ago because I wanted something minimal to run on some old equip that I wanted to use as an X workstation. I had attemped OpenBSD a few months ago with an old 3.4 install floppy that wouldn't work and I almost gave up. But after 3.5 came out, I wrote a new 3.5 install disk, re-read the install docs, and booted up the floppy. 10 minutes later, I had a fully functional unix with X and FVWM (the default WM instead of TWM as on most linux X installs).

    So far I have been favorably impressed. I was absolutely blow away by the quickness of the install. The slowest thing about the install was the unfamiliar disk partitioning. Otherwise the only limit on speed was my bandwidth. The quick install means that there is no bloat. If you want it, install it, but you won't find useless packages installed by default like lots of linux distributions. Under Fedora, my old P3-450 used to be slugish and grind away swapping constantly. No it almost *never* swaps (at least not that I can hear)

    I found the default shell csh to unfamiliar. Having come from linux, the first thing I did was install bash (statically compiled version) using pkg_add and them I moved it from /usr/local/bin to /bin and then executed vipw to make it my root shell. The second thing I did was install fluxbox which I find more functional than FVWM.

    Even though ports "gets all the press" in BSD software management, I prefer to install binaries using pkg_add for most day-to-day packages that do not require customization. Do not underestimate pkg_add. It will resolve dependancies and install everyting that is a prerequisite for the package that you are asking for. It is the BSD answer to APT. It makes software installation trivial. The important thing to remember about pkg_add is to select a mirror and put a PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.yourserver.here/ into your .profile. I highly recommend using pkg_add over ports unless you absolutely need to compile something to get customizations/optimizations.

    Patching is all done by source diffs, so there will be some compiling there.

  • Metawire.org (Score:5, Informative)

    by azuretek ( 708981 ) <azuretek@YEATSgmail.com minus poet> on Thursday July 08, 2004 @09:13PM (#9649079) Homepage
    If you want to give OpenBSD a try without installing it head over to http://metawire.org [metawire.org]. They offer free OpenBSD shells, they've got a pretty big community and it's a great place to play and learn with OpenBSD.
  • Sweet! Keep it up!
  • As Benjamin Franklin once said, the only way for three people to keep a secret is if two of them are dead.
    You have to expect snickers from the BSD undertakers.

  • For a dead OS, it sure kicks butt (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gjallarhorn ( 746951 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @02:29AM (#9650211)
    It's kind of sad how any mention of BSD degenerates into a "is it dead yet?" discussion here on /.

    Seriously folks, BSD is a lot older than Linux, it has survived the rise and fall of quite a few inferior as well as superior OSes, it will survive Windows and it might even survive Linux. My point is: Who cares? It works, it is stable, it is fast, it is really free and it is available right now.

    Oh, and let's not forget the fact that when you download a BSD you download a complete OS, designed from the bottom up, not a kernel with a collection of userland programs from all over the place.

    Best of all: In the BSDs you don't end up tripping over the kitchen sink when all you wanted was to install a fast, secure and reliable server.

    Enough already. Read the review, take OpenBSD or one of the other BSDs for a test drive and make up your own mind.

    G
  • Is there a location that has info on how to tweak OpenBSD to be a good Desktop system?

    There seems to be a lot of work to get OpenBSD working as a decent Desktop system. It would be nice if somebody had all the steps needed on some website in a concise list.
    • so sayeth Danathar:

      Is there a location that has info on how to tweak OpenBSD to be a good Desktop system?

      check the OpenBSD Misc archives, there was a very long thread about this, and a 'howto' link posted in there somewhere.

    • Re:OpenBSD Desktop (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JonMartin ( 123209 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @04:17PM (#9656452) Homepage
      Is there a location that has info on how to tweak OpenBSD to be a good Desktop system? There seems to be a lot of work to get OpenBSD working as a decent Desktop system. It would be nice if somebody had all the steps needed on some website in a concise list.

      Well, it depends on what you mean by "a good desktop system". I think OpenBSD is a great desktop system pretty much straight out of the box (use it as my desktop at work and home). Pretty much everything you need you will find in the ports tree (most will have pre-built packages on the CDs). I've used Linux and OpenBSD side by side for some time and the only things I can do with Linux that I can't do with OpenBSD are: hardware 3D acceleration (no OpenBSD drivers) and running certain binary only Linux apps. I think the high security of OpenBSD is at least as important on the desktop as in firewalls these days. Imagine how much less spam and worms we would have floating around if everyone had nice hardened desktops.

      Here's what I do for my OpenBSD desktop:

      • install the msttcorefonts package (from ports tree) for nice fonts
      • install Mozilla (again, ports tree)
      • install my mp3 and ogg utilities (ditto)
      • install mplayer (ditto ditto)
      I really don't need much else. To see a full list of my packages look here [ualberta.ca]. If you want a pretty desktop I recommend installing the latest FVWM (2.5.?) and FVWM Themes from fvwm.org. Then hand tune your fvwm rcfiles.
  • ... OpenBSD is the One True Religion.

    Although NOBODY has ever "gotten" my OpenBSD Blowfish T-Shirt. [openbsd.org] The joke is as undecipherable as the Blowfish algorithm itself.

  • OpenBSD licensing policy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scatterbrained ( 144748 ) on Saturday July 10, 2004 @11:46AM (#9661395) Journal

    One of the things I like about OpenBSD is their policy [openbsd.org] of not accepting things with half-assed licensing into their base distribution.

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