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BSDCon '03 Nearly Here (OpenBSD 3.4, Too)

Posted by timothy on from the such-euphony-from-three-little-letters dept.

robotdreams writes "Once again BSDCon showcases the BSD community's long history of innovative research, open exchange of ideas, and collaborative work. Tutorials this year feature: an intensive code walkthrough of the new FreeBSD 5.x release, debugging kernel problems on live systems, advanced BSD system and network security, and FreeBSD's new GEOM disk I/O subsystem." Since BSDCon runs from September 8th through 12th, you're probably either already going or out of luck ;) On the other hand, you're still early for OpenBSD 3.4, now taking pre-orders -- details below.

An anonymous reader writes "Pre-orders for the OpenBSD project's latest release, 3.4, are now being taken. This release will ship around November 1st. Significant enhancements have been made in this release, including i386 switch to ELF executable format, further W^X improvements for i386, ld.so on ELF platforms now loads libraries in a random order for greater resistance to attacks, inclusion of a static bounds checker to the compiler for basic checks on functions which accept buffers and sizes, strcpy/strcat function audit to replace with safer strlcpy/strlcat, ProPolice stack protection in the kernel, further manual page cleanups, large number of bug fixes and optimizations to the packet filter (PF) including packet tagging, stateful TCP normalization, passive OS detection, SYN proxy, and adaptive state timeouts, and many other improvements to the rest of the system.

Order a CD from the OpenBSD store. Ordering a CD helps support the project, as a bonus you get cool stickers, artwork, and an audio track!"

The same reader sent links to more information on this release, including new features, and the changelog between 3.3 and 3.4.

11 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. Soon? by JamesTRexx · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Will soon be widly placed on desktops... I think that's a bit much very premature. So far it's still Windoze, and the hype is Linux, so I think *BSD won't grow that much on the desktop market. Although I would like to see much more articles on using *BSD for the regular consumers. In the meantime *BSD will keep the important parts of the internet running. Oh, and no *BSD is dying comments please. It's getting really old and tired to hear that from close minded people...

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    1. Re:Soon? by nyteroot · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I would like to see much more articles on using *BSD for the regular consumers


      Why, god. Why is it that an OS must be usable "on the desktop", "by mom", or by "the regular consumers" in order for it to be considered "good"? First we had Linux, and then they mom-ified Linux. Now you want them to mom-ify *BSD too? Fuck that shit!


      There are server OSs. There are desktop OSs. Any attempt at combination is bound to fail miserably at one or the other and quite likely both.

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    2. Re:Soon? by MrHanky · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Why, god. Why is it that an OS must be usable "on the desktop", "by mom", or by "the regular consumers" in order for it to be considered "good"? First we had Linux, and then they mom-ified Linux. Now you want them to mom-ify *BSD too? Fuck that shit!


      I don't know. FreeBSD is a fine desktop/workstation OS. I use it on my laptop. However, it's not quite mummified yet (sorry, but we all have to have a reference to '*BSD is dead', don't we?). I recently installed it on my desktop as well, and wantet GDM as a log in manager. That was painful. After I finally got GDM to start at all, and managed to log in, I noticed I was root. This came as a surprise to me, since I had tried to log in as a user. I didn't bother too much with it, and installed KDM instead. It worked.

      FreeBSD might or might not work for the regular consumer, as a desktop OS. It doesn't rot away from normal use, like Windows does. But the ports and packages aren't necessarily working correctly, might need tweaking and so on. A FreeBSD install that has been set up by a knowledgeable nerd for its intended use should work fine, even for a mummy.
    3. Re:Soon? by evilviper · · Score: 2, Insightful
      There are server OSs. There are desktop OSs. Any attempt at combination is bound to fail miserably at one or the other and quite likely both.

      OpenBSD has been working fine as my desktop for years. I'm using Mozilla on OpenBSD on my Laptop to type this message right now.

      It's really quite easy to install, and you only need the tiniest bit of knowledge to setup X and install applications. I wouldn't say it's for "the regular consumers", but only because those people are horrified if they have to type-in a single word, rather than being able to click the mouse to do everything.

      With a simple shell-script, I could have an OpenBSD CD automatically install itself, configure X, and install and configure basic applications. That's pretty-much what Windows does, but Unixers expect more control and flexibility than that, so nobody bothers to do it.
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  2. Re:Oh and... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Oh, and she actually is not so hot at all

    Speak for yourself. Some people think she's hot.

  3. Re:removing some utilities by iamdrscience · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Are you serious? Their work can't be "locked down" -- no matter what any corporation does with their code they'll still have all the stuff they wrote available to them and that's what's really important.

  4. Re:removing some utilities by nyteroot · · Score: 4, Insightful
    . . .their work may be locked down and stolen by a corporation [at] any time.


    Ah! Such enlightening insight into the world of open source licensing!
    ..yeah, right.


    My dear sir, you are utterly incorrect. Were some corporation to "lock down" their source code (and I can only assume that by "lock down" you mean to re-release under a proprietary license) they would only be assuring that their version of the software would be utterly disregarded by the entire computer community, because (pay attention here) the free version would not somehow magically cease to exist! So on the one hand you would have the free, latest version. On the other hand, you would have the not-free, catching-up version. Gee, tough choice.


    Now what the BSD license does allow is for some company to take some or all of the source and reuse it elsewhere, under a proprietary license if they so wish, without giving anything back to the Free software community. Whether or not this is necessarily a bad thing is a philosophical matter. However, your assertion that a company could "lock down" the OpenBSD code is completely and utterly incorrect.

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  5. Re:removing some utilities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
    making enough money.

    Wrong. There's never enough money.

  6. Re:Why so late? by squiggleslash · · Score: 2, Insightful
    At a guess: a.out works. If it works, why screw with it?

    Remember, with OpenBSD the focus is on correctness and keeping the codebase free of bugs. Making drastic changes in areas where those changes are not absolutely necessary undermines that focus.

    I haven't seen 3.3 or 3.4, but 3.2, which is barely a year old, still runs BIND 4. The current version of BIND is 9. This gives you some idea of how the OpenBSD team things.

    FWIW, other versions of OpenBSD have switched to ELF. I run OpenBSD 3.2 on a SparcStation, and a quick "file /etc/ksh" reveals ksh to be "ELF 32-bit MSB executable, SPARC, version 1". I guess testing the system on obscurer platforms has paved the way for it to be released on the more dominant architecture.

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  7. Re:removing some utilities by tedu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    licensing, less gpl is always better if possible. we also now maintain the tools entirely ourselves. cleanliness -- they don't even know how to indent properly. :) in the case of grep, it was a major improvement in size of the binary (think floppy installs) because we use libc regexp, not 3 different special edition text searchers made just for grep.

  8. Re:thank you for supporting troll kind.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    people like you are the cancer of the Internet, just like spammers. actually read what the person in the previous most was saying. it is mostly true. he/she seemed to hit a nerve with you at least, you responded. i find it funny that a troll is telling someone else to fuck off and die, you have got it backwards buddy. you have nothing good to say about the subject at hand (bsd), so your presence is not welcome. i actually feel a bit sorry for you that your life is so sad, this is all you have. you seem to feel insecure or threatened by other operating systems besides your own. seek professional help. you can express what ever you want, but there is a right time and place, which you are having trouble understanding.