OpenBSD, Reductionist Design

Duke of URL writes: "Sam Williams, of Upside Today has an article discussing OpenBSD's overall design philosophy, with good quotes from Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD project leader. Williams also covers how the OpenBSD project goes about supporting their financial needs (by selling t-shirts, CDs, and posters) and briefly covers their lack of desire to receive venture capital despite offers. "

Comments

Tired of people whining about OpenBSD CDROM Images

[Anonymous Coward]

People always whine about OpenBSD not having official ISO images available online. Think about it: If you are on a slow modem connection to the Internet, would you rather download a 650MB ISO image, or a custom created 100MB image that's exactly what you need? I thought so...Here's how to do it:

If you read the mkisofs man page, it's only a matter of setting up 2 options, one to point to the floppy disk image that you are going to boot from (for OpenBSD they are labeled *.fs, use cdrom26.fs for a CD) and then specify a _location_ destination for the boot.catalog.

So just set up the mkisofs like you would for any other CD, then use -b cdrom.fs and -c boot.catalog and you'll be fine. (the *.fs file path is relative to the other files). It couldn't be simpler.

Here's an example:

mkisofs -b cdrom26.fs -c boot.catalog -L -R -o openbsd.iso /path/to/openbsd/distribution/files

and cdrom26.fs is presumed to be at /path/to/openbsd/distribution/files/cdrom26.fs. (and yes there are other options, read the man page: http://www.openbsd.org's man page of mkisofs

If people would quit complaining, they'd realize that it's BETTER this way, as you can create customized cdroms. I make -current CDROMs for x86 and put every package and licensed file on there. It's great...

Oh and here's how you burn it:

cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=/dev/cd0c driver=mmc_cdr openbsd.iso

The cdrecord options are for either ATAPI or SCSI since we unified the driver in 2.6.

Give 2.7 a try, it's wonderful!! And DO buy the CDROMs, they help the project in so many ways...

Question: Why so many versions ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a serious question, why are there so many versions of BSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSDI, LameBSD, SecureBSD, WinBSD, etc etc

Linux AFAIK only has one version, RedHat (although other version known as "distros" exist, they are not 100% Official, like RedHat is.

The confusion about which BSD is the true "100% Official" BSD must be losing them users.

RedHat's 100% official RedHat site is at RedHat

Re:Not informative, just misleading.

[stripes]

So you should pick what you need from your Linux distribution, and don't install anything else. Or install OpenBSD if you want to. Just remember that a lot of free software is currently written with Linux as its primary target, so you may need to tweak it to get it going on OpenBSD.

Now you have the misleading comparisin.

The stripped down Linux will be just as sparse of features as OpenBSD (or more so if you do your job right). But who audited all that code for security holes? Who went over that code looking for buffer overuns? Who went back over that code looking for mis-uses of strncat?

OpenBSD isn't secure because they don't ship much stuff. It is secure because they only ship stuff they have secured. That ends up being not much stuff because it is hard to secure things.

Racecars don't have CD players. I can't make my car into a racecar by yanking out my CD player.

Comparing RedHat Linux to OpenBSD simply on the basis of how often security flaws are found in the entire distribution is misleading.

That I'll give you. RedHat has more users, and may be a more intresting target, so it may show more flaws. Except OpenBSD has made itself an extreamly tempting target by going "undefieted" so long, and being the chokepoint into more and more networks.

Still looking at the raw numbers is not as cut and dried as it looks.

disclaimer: I happily use both RedHat Linux and OpenBSD, so I know the strengths and weaknesses of both)

Apparently not. Then again we all make mistakes.

Re:all about marketing

[WhyteRabbyt]

To be honest, I dont see how BSD would 'suffer because everyone instantly associates open-source with Linux'.

I just dont understand that context of 'suffer'. The various flavours of BSD are being developed, much as the Linux kernel, without commercial or other constraints. The Linux kernel isn't being developed for RedHat, or Caldera, or whatever. Its being developed as a communal project, by people scratching a communal itch. And the developers of the BSDs are doing the same thing.

Are there fewer BSD developers because of Linux, then? Maybe, although I'd reckon that there a lot more than there were (say) three years ago. Plus Linux apps tend to be fairly straightforward to get running on BSD systems, so its not as though all that Linux development gives Linux some kind of edge.

So I dont get it. Yeah, Linux gets more press. But who the hell is doing Linux development for the press? And when did lack of press make a difference to bedroom coders?

Pax,

White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++