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OpenBSD Hackathon
A secretive reader contributes: "Once again, almost all of the OpenBSD developers got together for a full week of intensive coding. Pictures from the hackathon are available for people who want to see how the developers of this fine OS look like. Theo de Raadt announced on the mailing list: 'There is a reason why such a flurry of commits is happening. Once again, we are doing a hackathon; this time in Calgary, for a full week leading up to usenix. Thus far, 32 people have arrived, and are hacking away in a hotel conference room, working on various things, but more people are still flying in from around the world ...'"
I have a dual machine at home (An old beat up dual Celeron 366 Abit BP6) running FreeBSD 4.4. I had problems with it. It seems every time I tried to cvs update my ports tree to get such things as sudo, it would blow up the tree so badly I'd have to remove it and cvs get it again. That happened three times.
I never upgraded it to 4.5, as I worried it would blow the whole damn thing up and I'd lose my 30gig of mp3's. It runs decent with 4.4 as a samba server and running the streamer portion of my personal icecast server (piped through libmp3lame to downsize the mp3's to 96k/sec CBR).
I had grown tired of Linux distributions. Redhat insists on installing all sorts of useless crap, I have never gotten debian to work right for me (I just want to compile my own perl without apt continually trying to install it's own, is that too much to ask?). I installed OpenBSD 3.0 on a spare box in December and never looked back.
It works better than FreeBSD, for me, and is nicely tunable just the way I like it. I didn't need linux, this was the way to go.
Now that I'm looking at a new server, possibly to get big hits, I want SMP. Gentoo linux is linux done the BSD way. ports, cvs updates, slim. I've now got the choice between Gentoo with SMP and OpenBSD without. Since it's going to be aimed at MySQL and will have pf or iptables rules limiting access to the net at large, I'm not incredibly concerned with the security as I would be if this was a shell box. I'll have the only login. I'm torn. I love OpenBSD, but I think my needs may be better met with Gentoo at this juncture.