OpenBSD 4.4 Released 235
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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
>> For user-friendly answers, the *BSD documentation is very extensive (try the FreeBSD handbook,...
Sadly these days people do not read documentation, and just expect there is somebody out in the forums that will respond something, not necessarily correct, just in order to make the system work (and no, it doesn't matter how it actually works).
So responding to GP, I assume that openBSD is actually targeted for another world.
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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)
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An ex-boss liked to point out that "assume" makes an ASS out of U and ME.
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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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If someone writes the same question about one particular piece of software the eighty-fourth time, chances are good that they're not familiar with mailing list etiquette and how to research their problem. Flaming them makes you look like an ass and they won't even understand why they
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Theo is no better or worse than many in this game. His professional demeanor may need serious work, but his (Free and Open) OS doesn't. THAT is what matters most to someone like me... who learned the ha
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.
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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But then, every time I try to use it, I run up against the OpenBSD developers, who are an arrogant bunch of elitist assholes
Really? I wrote an article about an OpenBSD release a year or so ago and interviewed a number of the developers. I found them to be helpful, informative and courteous. As an OpenBSD user however, I have had no contact with the developers at all.
Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Truly, this is the year of BSD on the desktop.
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That's why I stick to FreeBSD. The projects, Free/Open/Net are fairly well tied together, so you get a lot of similar advantages with each (though each has it's own specialty). With FreeBSD, the mailing lists are VERY civil and VERY helpful.
That being said, having used it, OpenBSD is also a superb operating system, and I am very glad it is alive and kicking [the collective asses of many other operating systems].
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
But Netcraft confirms it! Are you going to argue with Netcraft?
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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.
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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.
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3.5.9 is included in 4.4!
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
They audit every line of code they ship, including the external stuff they don't write. It is one of the most secure operating system distributions because of this policy.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
No, they don't, they audit base, not ports.
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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They audit every line of code they ship, including the external stuff they don't write.
Bollocks.
They only audit the base install. The ports tree is almost completely unmaintained.
I am the author of some software [jussieu.fr] that ships in a number of OS distributions. In September 2005, I found a serious security bug in my code. I immediately notified the project's mailing list as well as all of my downstream distributors I was aware of. Debian, SuSE, FreeBSD and others that I forget immediately released an update. OpenBSD left the old, buggy version in the ports tree for three months.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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You jest. Porting new KDE versions isn't as easy as it sounds. Most BSDs have a bunch of patches in the ports tree and they all have to be updated. It can be a lot of work. Even though OpenBSD is much bigger than MidnightBSD, they still don't have the same volume of help that some of the linux distros have for ports work.
Not to mention that many open source projects are hard to get patches upstreamed to. Some linux developers in particular give us BSD folks a hard time on that front. The more obscure
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Well, were the fixes in 3.5.10 applicable to OpenBSD?
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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.
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Doubt it. They seem to have made it clear in the past that once you veer off into other people's code, you're pretty much on your own as far as bugs or security holes go.
A site geared towards Linux user, to learn OpenBSD (Score:5, Informative)
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Unlike Linux, the BSDs don't come preinstalled with tons of third-party software you didn't ask for, because there's a clear separation between the base UNIX operating system and the ports/pkgsrc collection. If you're too damn dumb to go into /usr/pkgsrc and take the 2 minutes to install Bash, I think BSD is probably above you. Stick with Ubuntu.
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I'm not that dumb. It is just starts eating into my production time quickly.
I can make out of fresh install of Debian something useful within half of an hour. And I can easily maintain it that way (weekly "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" rarely takes longer than one minute).
With BSD it never was the case: one or two days are spent on making out of the system something more useful than M$DOS. Later on, patching is also relatively time consuming.
P.S. And broken ports are also not rarity.
Re: (Score:2)
First time I installed FreeBSD (without any previous *nix knowledge) I had a server running in 5 minutes.
Adding the packages was a no-brainer through sysinstall. Updating I do through compiling (portupgrade) but can be done just as easily by specifying to use packages only which is just as fast as using aptitude.
I've seen no difference in ease on installing and maintaining Linux and BSD systems.
Windows systems on the other hand...
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Even Linux man pages (more or less all of them) have by now info how does/doesn't particular tool/call conform to POSIX.
As long as Linux insists on shipping tedious GNU info pages instead of normal man pages, I'm NOT interested.
As much as I wanted to try BSDs, unfortunately, most of them (OpenBSD included) remain kind of toy for basement kids who do not know anything better.
Son, I think you need to read more and talk less.
Re: (Score:2)
Even Linux man pages (more or less all of them) have by now info how does/doesn't particular tool/call conform to POSIX.
As long as Linux insists on shipping tedious GNU info pages instead of normal man pages, I'm NOT interested.
Show me single Linux distro which removed man.
The "info" weirdo is for GNU tool only. All normal software is pretty happy to live in man pages.
Re: (Score:2)
1
Even Linux man pages (more or less all of them) have by now info how does/doesn't particular tool/call conform to POSIX.
As long as Linux insists on shipping tedious GNU info pages instead of normal man pages, I'm NOT interested.
Show me single Linux distro which removed man.
Show me a single Linux distro which has a man page for either bash or grep, two tools you mention. For that matter, show me a single Linux distro that has documentation that is even remotely as good as OpenBSD's. OpenBSD's man pages are truly beautiful.
The "info" weirdo is for GNU tool only. All normal software is pretty happy to live in man pages.
Well, not bash, grep, tr, cut, join, paste, make, cc, bc, awk, gdb, the C library, less/more, m4, ncurses, sed, tar, which, who...yeah, all the "normal" software has man pages.
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As long as bash is not default shell, less is not default pager and VIM is not default text editor - I'm NOT interested.
Lucky for you, less is more and pdksh isn't a bad shell (not everyone loves bash..). In the BSD realm it's extremely easy to add a package or even compile it from scratch via ports, so even vim is within your reach! If you don't like messing with defaults, might I suggest that neither openbsd nor linux are for you?
And find doesn't search by default in current directory.
Hmm.. OSX, Solaris, Free/OpenBSD all seem to require directory specification in find. I thought I remembered it being required in linux as well--when did linux distros change?
And grep isn't recursive.
hint: "-R"
And, for **** sake, where is POSIX conformance statement??? Even Linux man pages (more or less all of them) have by now info how does/doesn't particular tool/call conform to POSIX.
Exactly whe
Re: (Score:2)
Lucky for you, less is more and pdksh isn't a bad shell (not everyone loves bash..). In the BSD realm it's extremely easy to add a package or even compile it from scratch via ports, so even vim is within your reach! If you don't like messing with defaults, might I suggest that neither openbsd nor linux are for you?
Reminds of the saying: "Linux is for those who hate Windows, BSD's are those who love UNIX".
Solaris is also heavily criticized by the Linux crowd for not mindlessly following the GNU "standards" - OTOH Sun has done a much better job with backwards compatibility than Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
Solaris is also heavily criticized by the Linux crowd for not mindlessly following the GNU "standards"
I would be last to push "GNU standards" as GNU tools are also by now quite old. If you would check Savannah where most GNU tools are maintained, you can easily find for any tool bug report with flamewar where maintainers try to fend off people proposing new features.
Problem is that GNU now is also stuck in some past.
If you would look closer to Linux installations, you would notice that only few pieces of GNU software are left in. And the list of the GNU software is pretty constant, while Linux univer
Re: (Score:2)
As much as I wanted to try BSDs, unfortunately, most of them (OpenBSD included) remain kind of toy for basement kids who do not know anything better.
You wouldn't be attempting a poorly researched troll, would you? I think I just wasted my time :-/
You didn't. It is nice to know that BSD though slowly is also moving somewhere.
I tried *BSD last time about 2.5 years ago (thanks to free VM software it is quite easy) and situation wasn't much improved compared to when I tried FreeBSD about 8 years ago: you still had to do too much hand waving to have a working system. By "working system" of course I mean system which I can use to do my work. Out of box, BSD is sort of M$DOS: bare command prompt, where you need to install and configure everything befor
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It is nice to know that BSD though slowly is also moving somewhere
Everything in my email has been true of BSDs for a LONG time. POSIX conformance statements, recursive grep, less is more, etc.
I do not like BSD. I do not like Unix. But I like Linux.
I think we have differing conceptions of what unix is.
BSD is good as development community. It is good as technology preview. But that's about it. Using it do some work in business is quite complicated due to very steep learning curve.
I stridently disagree with this. As I and others have been attempting to say, if you actually look at the man page, look at documentation, etc, the BSDs have a huge advantage over pretty much all linux distros. When I first started playing with linux/bsds, I think the first one i used was an ancient slackware, then some redhat, de
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It is incredibly trivial to change these things. I'm the most lazy admin ever, and it took me five minutes from install to changing the default shell to bash.
Changing the default editor doesn't take much longer, nor does changing the pager.
Don't like how the userland tools work, you can find the gnu tools fairly easily.
No posix compliance statement is necessary, it's redundant in *BSD.
Having used both Linux (Gentoo, [k]Ubuntu, Red hat/Fedora Core, etc) and *BSDs extensively, I have the same oppinion of Linu
One Day.. (Score:4, Funny)
Death "SO DISAPPOINTING"
Silent Money Maker (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you're putting in 10GbE NICs, I guess, though that's getting a wee bit too bleeding edge for my liking in terms of support in OpenBSD.
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Crap! I'd better remove my sig right away.
Re: (Score:2)
Theo is considerably nicer to deal with than the majority of GNUlots. Personally, I like the guy. Like Linus, he takes no shit and dishes it when he feels it's warranted. I've had more issues with Ted Unangst than Theo...
Re: (Score:2)
deraadt's the dickhead for not inviting me to tea and crumpets last week
Seriously? That's just not on. Time to switch to NetBSD...
OpenBSD child (Score:2, Offtopic)
Package security? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
4.4 song (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
This is not flamebait. I encourage moderators to read the guidelines at http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml [slashdot.org]
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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.
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The new metamod isn't very meta.
That's like saying that water isn't very dry. The new metamod system is totally NOT meta at all -- in fact, it's completely braindead.
The old one was tolerable, but what I'd really like to see is a 'This comment should have been moderated xxxxxx' style system.
I would also like to see a -1, Wrong moderation.
I would also love it if people would actually think about what 'Redundant' actually means and would understand that 'I don't agree' != 'Troll'.
*/me prepares to be moderated -1, Wrong*
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The new metamod system is totally NOT meta at all -- in fact, it's completely braindead.
Agreed. I used to metamod all the time, but I refuse to touch the mess that is the new metamod system.
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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SMP may have been there for awhile, but is SMP and software RAID supported yet? When I last checked (which was admittedly a long time ago), the only way to get both SMP and software RAID was to compile a custom kernel.
This might not sound like a big deal, but OpenBSD developers aren't very friendly towards people who compile their own kernels. They're certainly not supported, and you're lucky if you get any replies past the standard "custom kernels are not supported, so stop using one" message.
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He's interested in humans. Disconnected, yes, but not really an asshole. He is also freakin' brilliant at what he does, so that would be a huge compliment. He's basically suppose to be Sherlock Holmes. And who wouldn't want to be the Holmes of Software? :)
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I look forward to them finding a character that can be even more humorous, more unapologetic than Hugh Laurie for that role.
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House may have a step-brother, as he isn't biologically related to his mother's only husband.
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I didn't realise people still use lunix [wikipedia.org]. Perhaps the problem is your hardware being to old instead of a driver problem?
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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.
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:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:5, Funny)
In other late breaking news, 100% of Coke drinkers prefer Coke to Pepsi.
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.
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.
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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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).
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Apple regards the open source community as a convenience, not as partners.
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woo! Only three posts into the topic and we're already into the age of freedom debate, way to go for starting the forest fire of a flamewar.
Don't worry about me though, you just keep beating that rotting dead horse corpse.
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Although GPL is not free in the BSD sense, there are people like myself who would be happy to dual license my code under both GPL and BSD.
Don't ask, don't get.
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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No, the UltraSPARC T2 was released in October 2007.
Re:why bother with 6 month release cycle? (Score:4, Informative)
Copy-pasted from Wikipedia! (Score:2)
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Of all the ways to moderate this, for once "offtopic" isn't the right one ;)
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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: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I think having to do it with that frequency is a legit complaint. Say there's CARP and everything works fine -- I'm still spending time on upgrades more often than I'd like.
Feature-neutral security updates for more than a year would be welcome.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
if your systems are designed such that a $10K/min single point of failure exists in the first place, you have a bigger problem than upgrading OpenBSD once or twice a year. Seriously, look into redundancy - it's the hip new thing with the kids [google.com] these days.
(probably not your fault; I've inherited networks like that more than once myself. still, claiming that OpenBSD's refusal to support anything but the current and most recent release is the reason you can't use it is disingenuous. If you're in a production en
Re: (Score:2)
Actually when you POKE something you're just writing a value to memory. See, well... If you POKE a sleeping bear you'll certainly keep that valuable lesson in however long you retain your memory.
Re:4.4 (Score:4, Funny)
Re: relics from the 1970s (Score:2)
I suspect you'd agree that there's nothing wrong with using a stable OS. There's everything wrong with trying to "re-invent the OS" every few years using some wet-behind-the-ears college grads, and still -- after 25 years -- not being able to ship a dispatcher that can handle a spinning process without roaching the whole box. Yes, I'm looking at you, Windows. OS/MFT could handle a spinning process. Even CTSS could handle a spinning process, and that was written in 1960.
As far as the old saw that Unix/Li