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CompactBSD for Embedded Projects
miggidy_mac writes "FatPort (a wireless Internet service provider in Vancouver, BC) just released CompactBSD. It's a set of tools that allow you to build your own customized, lightweight distribution of OpenBSD and then burns it onto compact flash (or similar) so that it can be run on an embedded PC platform (like FatPort's own FatPoint). CompactBSD takes the security and networking features of OpenBSD that we know and love, and combines them with ease-of-build and small footprint, which is great for embedded devices. Check out the project on SourceForge."
There's so many fucking forks for BSD that it shall now be called a comb. The wheel has been reinvented so many fucking times, that I don't even think people remember what a wheel looks like. They're so busy making yet another BSD variant. How soon until we have a BSD variant that is geared towards BSD programmers seeking to make BSD variants?
I don't know. This seems awfully familiar to PicoBSD. I guess that any "new" implementation of old technology gets press. As the adage goes, everything old is new again.
... the leave out the experimental sshd code
that openbsd loves to run by default, and
contributed to a remote root explote. Me, I'd
prefer old 2.x era sshd.
Gotta get this bad boy running on all those Javastations in my back room.
Soekris Engineering PC104 sbcs designed specificaly for Free/Net/Open BSD and the occasional Linux. Very nice they be.
BSD? what's that?
Discreet! So no one can tell that you use it!
example.org - powered by Linux!
Debian?
It is official; Netcraft confirms: CompactBSD is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered CompactBSD community when IDC confirmed that CompactBSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that CompactBSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. CompactBSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict CompactBSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: CompactBSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for CompactBSD because CompactBSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for CompactBSD. As many of us are already aware, CompactBSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
CompactBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time CompactBSD developer Ken Simpson only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: CompactBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put CompactBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 CompactBSD users. This is consistent with the number of CompactBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of FatPort, abysmal sales and so on, CompactBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that CompactBSD has steadily declined in market share. CompactBSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If CompactBSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. CompactBSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, CompactBSD is dead.
Fact: CompactBSD is dying
...yet again...
Because *BSD is dying, we built it small, to fit a tiny casket.
Truly an American (and Canadian) icon.
I'm not sure you can claim that any given subset of OpenBSD has the same level of security as the real thing. Presumably they're only including code that's been through a security audit, but how tested is any given configuration going to be?
--
E_NOSIG
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Iv'e been looking for a sbc with almost the exact same specs as this, and have been totally frustrated with the fact that very few exist, and most of the ones that do are either super expensive in low volume orders, or don't have everything I need.
Just wanted to thank ya, looks like a helluva nice peice of hardware, not too bad on the wallet either!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I hope this spreads the use of BSD in embedded environments. BSD is so cool.
I'd love a floppy disk version of BSD.
I'm looking for a PC104 or similar system for a project i'm working on. I'd like it to be BSD based (Open or Free is fine), a VGA or SVGA out. I'd like to be able to have digital ins/outs as well as analog inputs as well. Networking would be a plus, but not necessary. Ideally, i'd like to write a GUI for this application using QT (or similar toolkit). A tinyBSD like this is a good start. Has anyone else done or know how to do something similar? Thanks in advance...
I doubt a company will spend millions developing hardware without protecting their IP. NetBSD is free as in beer and will remain king of the BSD embedded space.
why is BSD dying and why is linux taking over? I personally like both of them and have no real preference for one.
It's actually really nice to see that there is some BSD-embedded activity around ... i mean all the linux embedded hype is not really all that great, so it's good to see some other free os in the same corner!
Anyone know if/how well this unit can do SSH tunneling?
PC104? really? You should call Soren and let him know....
Microsoft Platform Builder is a pretty good tool for configuring and building a Windows CE customized OS. It seems that CompactBSD's CLI environment is really a huge backstep in platform configuration tools.
Leaving aside any arguments about BSD and WinCE, of course.
I have been pwned because my
Isnt FatPort releasing CompactBSD sorta like Tony Little selling Krispy Kremes?
Knowing that BSD and other *nix systems usually don't like hard power-downs (this may have changed since the last time I used linux), would they really be the best things to be using in embedded devices? I mean, I know windows is the end-all be-all of EVIL(TM) operating systems, but hard-crashes and hard-rebooting them wouldn't damage them as badly as the horror stories I've heard about *nix systems. Just a question.
tonight.
One has to wonder if something like this can be taken from the PC to the embedded space in general. I'm sure Wind River (the owners of BSDi) would be annoyed by something like that.
All the embedded devices that were supposed to take off have died a dotcom death. There's the Netpliance I-Opener, the... Oh nevermind, I forgot this is Slashdot and everybody already knows about every hackable I-Appliance loss-leader hackable goodie released prior to IPO $$$ drying up.
I guess a nice small flashable *NIX distro would be great for making your own homebrew NAT box or router, but isn't there already a Linux distro (Linux router project? Must oogle google for that one later...) for this purpose? Oh well, diversity breeds creativity (according to a Disney employment ad, and the mouse never lies) so this has to be a GOOD THING.
Seriously though, one of my friends runs FreeBSD on his NAT box/file server and keeps touting it as better/easier/faster/sex life improving/more robust than Linux. Since I've set up MY Linux NAT box/file server, I haven't had to mess with it much and I really just think of it as a steady workhorse that does its job day after day without much fanfare. The only thing I can imagine BSD could improve is my sex life, but it's not working for my friend either so I think he's a liar.
In summary...
Small specialized BSD, Beer and Linux = Good
RIAA, DMCA, AOL and FIRE = BAD
OpenBSD is not dying. It's not dead. Its a very nice flavor of UNIX. These things are not the problem. The problem IS OpenBSD's security. They are simply not secure. I will explain, please don't flame until you hear me out:
1. cvs.openbsd.org was compromised in December.
2. The entire OpenBSD tree was modified.
3. Theo does not disclose security vulnerabilities
as he should. Theo did not willingly disclose the
compromise. Only due to pressure from his peers
was anything mentioned. There has been backdoors
in the kernel, openssh, and numerous other areas
since OpenBSD 3.0.
4. The integrity of OpenBSD can no longer be trusted, one would have to audit the base distro
and OpenSSH to understand the true nature of this
problem. The backdoors being inserted into the code are not obvious. They are carefully obscured as "bad coding practice" - these items have been audited and fixed before, but the code in question
was modified AGAIN. Theo simply cannot reaudit the
entire tree again in the amount of time required.
5. OpenBSD developers are aiding in the entities attacking it. They are inserting these changes willingly into the tree, so no matter how often Theo audits, there will always be a backdoor. He would have to fire almost his entire staff to get the moles out.
6. OpenBSD's kernel is remotely exploitable. Enough said.
I have migrated my entire network away from OpenBSD. I urge someone to take up the project and audit the code, and fork it off. It's a great idea, a great package, and very lightweight, but it is no longer secure.
Yeah, same here. They've got very neat boards indeed, and reasonable too.
:-)
Thanks dude/ette(?)
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
Sorry, you missed it
'Twas the night before Goatse, when all through the house
Not a penis was stirring, not even with mouth;
The Giver was hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Goatse soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of anal sex danced in their heads.
And Katz in his 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a fuck in the sack.
When up in my anus there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see Katz start to splatter.
Away to the bathroom I flew like a flash,
Tore open my anus and looked at the gash.
The moon in the glass had a vibrant red glow
Gave the lustre of sunset to my nutsack below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer!
With a little old driver, so lively and quickse,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Goatse.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
"Now, TACO! now, JAMIE! now, MICHEAL and TIMMY!
On, CHRISD! on HEMOS! on, PUDGEY and CLIFFY!
To the top of the ass! fronts to the the wall!
Now pound away! pound away! pound away all!"
As faggots that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with a hetero, mount the next guy,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of sex-toys, and Goatse pics too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The moaning and pawing of each little poof.
As I drew in my ass, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Goatse came with a bound.
He was dressed as a furry, from his head to his feet,
And his clothes were all tarnished with urine and shit;
A bundle of sex-toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a hooker just flapping his sack.
His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His ass cheeks like roses, his cock like a cherry!
His cute little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his scrotum as white as the snow;
The stump of a blunt he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and was a bit smelly,
He shook, when he wanked like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him beat off himself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings with smelly big turds,
He layed a big log right under my nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like a fucking great missile.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"HAPPY GOATSE TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!"
Okay, so the X-Box/linux hack is pretty cool,
but how about hacking a digital camera?
Boot from the memory card/stick
and plug in your USB keyboard/mouse.
Tell me that wouldn't be cool
(in a geeky kind of way)
Umm....are you new here?
On slashdot, old news is new news at least twice a week :)
recompile.org
Your friend is obviously coming on to you in the hopes of improving *both* of your sex lives.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
There are about a half dozen similar projects out and about at the moment. For one, there's the myBSD project that's creating a fifth BSD distro for very specialized projects. I personally am working on a customized version of FreeBSD, called PortoBSD, built to boot off of a CD directly into a complete OS (portable email station). This is by no means particularly special.
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life- the terror of art. -Franz Kafka
Anyone see the specs? Who still makes 386 chips, not to mention a 300mhz version?
-Meyer
who said BSD is dying? FreeBSD kicks ass, i've been using it for almost 4 years
SUV's support terrorism !
emBSD has been around for a while, and is built on OpenBSD too. -Yes, it's targeted towards firewalls, but can be used for more.
Another more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
BSD - For the much much ... slower PF trolls.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
It is also worth checking out IEI. Check out the embeded single board computers. Embeded SBC There is quite a variety of socket370, transmeta, and NS Geode boards. For ordering boards in Canada contact Tri-M. Not all boards are listed on the website but most are listed in the pdf price list(in USD). I have not ordered anything from these guys yet. I am considering a ISS-102R-300 board, with 3 ethernet, and NS Geode 300mhz, for $275 USD. Or possibly one of the compact socket 370 boards.
a port of *BSD or Linux to my digital camera?
Is there any way that would ever be possible? Can you boot from flash ram on those babies?
If you click the link, the site says License "GPL" How can a "BSD" be GPL?
WISP-Dist has similar targets, and runs on 8 Mb flash/16 Mb RAM.
It smells like something is dead.
What We Can Learn From cars+fuel
Everyone knows about cars+fuel's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of cars+fuel, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save horses+hay from a similarly grisly fate.Let's not be overly morbid and give cars+fuel credit for its early successes. In the 1900s, Ken Thompson and Henry Ford both made significant contributions to the transportation world on the cars+fuel platform. In the 1910s, Ford saw cars+fuel as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the Model T cars+fuel product, gave the cars+fuel company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar cars+fuel's progress. In 1922, Generl Transport filed suit against Ford Motor Company, claiming that proprietary transportation fundamentals agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, cars+fuel filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While Generl Transport and Ford Motor Company lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various cars+fuel distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1925, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the Netcars+fuel project, formed his own rival distribution, Opencars+fuel, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of oil-based gas from the Opencars+fuel distribution.As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, cars+fuel's base became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each cars+fuel distribution make transportation fundamental sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT [mit.edu] found cars+fuel's terrain movement implementation to be "very poorly performing compared to all-terrain horses' hooves." Even cars+fuel's acclaimed oil-based hay replacement stack has lagged behind, according to this study [rice.edu]. Problems with cars+fuel's base were compounded by fundamental flaws in the cars+fuel design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, intelligent, living horses are inherently superior to complex, mechanical, dumb cars in transportation development. cars+fuel developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that mechanical cars and fuel engines lead to "faster and cheaper transport". Don't believe their hype - cars+fuel's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that cars+fuel managed to make were nullified by the cars+fuel license, which allows road-builders and car companies to profit, and not give back to the horses+hay community. Fortunately, horses+hay is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL, meaning that anyone can reproduce horses, but only car-companies can produce cars.
The failure of cars+fuel culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the Freecars+fuel core team. They both believed that Freecars+fuel had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, cars+fuel had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As horses+hay gains market share and as cars+fuel sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to cars+fuel's demise.Steven Woston
Lead Programmer, J-j-j-julius SoftwareThe FatPoint is also known as OpenBrick in Europe. I made a Debian image wich can fit on a compact flash and wich can also do a wireless access point. That's really impressive all we can do with this little box.
Mod this up, please. Someone obviously did not agree with the truth. Sometimes I wished that GOBBLES or someone would post here, set a few things straight.
I have to agree... I started using FreeBSD back with version 2.1.1 (ouch!)..
It's come a long ways since those days.
For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Just kidding :-)
This should receive wide adoption. I know one of the reasons some companies don't switch over to an embedded Linux (Lineo, uC, etc) is because of the licensing and the desire to keep their intellectual property closed source.
I know that there are lots of "tiny" Linux distros. But is there any that match or exceed that of "compactBSD" ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I am 27 year old open source developer
Then a prostitute is the only way you will ever even see female genetalia. The only alternative to a prostitute is to find a fellow open source developer and have gay sex with him.
2. The entire OpenBSD tree was modified.
Got any proof?
there is also see www.microbd.net [microbsd.net] a project that is very alive and current with some new twists
Why waste your time preaching to the choir. Most guys in-the-know realize BSD is no longer viable. The latest Netcraft figures show that BSD is something like 9/10 of 1 percent of operating systems tallied. That is pretty small, insignificant really.
If you take a look on the fatport site, they have a picture of something that looks very similar to a Soekris box.
Anyone know what this is?
Is this just an add trying to sell hardware?
Points us to the SourceForge page, where there are: 0 Bug listings, 0 Support Requests, 0 Patches, 0 Feature Requests. The Notes page is empty, there is no project home page, and it only has 5 downloads.
Yes - let me rush to install this on my critical embedded systems. This story should not have been posted - on freshmeat, fine - on slashdot, it's stupid.
I don't necessarily trust CVS for accuracy, but "cvs.openbsd.org" is not the only reference copy of the OpenBSD sources. "Inserting root holes in OpenBSD kernel" is like inserting holes in the old testament of the bible... you can change one copy at one site, but people are going to notice and figure out when/what was changed in short order.
If you still can't get your mind around how this could be untrue, check out:
http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/bugs/0206/msg001 37.html
Look at the SourceForge page: It's GPLed. This means it's not a BSD.
Yes, and for all practical purposes, given all the hype surrounding Linux it will never dominate the market without being more coherent... what distro should a company go with?? RedHat? Caldera? Lycoris? Suse? Slackware? Mandrake?
Helicopter crash, dead stinking flesh, *BSD dead.
Subject line says it all.
Slashdot *BSDead crowd is right. *BSD is dead. After seeing key developers leaving the core I decided I had enough also. I am a realist. There is no future for *BSD so it would be stupid to waste any more time on it. Better just format your *BSD partitions and use Linux. It's crazy, vital and goodlooking.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Linux is 95% hype. A lot like Windows in that respect.
..that's what life is all about. *BSD IS DEAD AND BEATEN.
Yeah, I did. It's called cemetary.
He said "open source developer"... so, he probably works for free, meaning he doesn't have any money... so forget the prostitute, they like getting paid.
So I guess its the gay sex with a fellow unpaid open source developer...
is there some reason we're supposed to care about openbsd? seriously, just set inetd_enable="NO" on NetBSD and you're good to go.