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Review: OpenBSD 3.4 SPARC64 Edition
'It's me' writes "Tony Bourke is reviewing OpenBSD 3.4 for SPARC-64. He discusses installation, the feel of the OS, its desktop, its performance, a MySQL problem he stumbled on, development tools and hardware support, firewalling and more."
Oh where, oh where is my BSD?
It was an upgrade to 3.3.
It's gone to heaven, so I've got to be good,
So I can see the OS when I leave this world.
I'd started to load it in my roommate's Dell,
the hard drive was taking it pretty well.
During the load, it crashed the heads,
the distro was stalled, *BSD was dead.
I couldn't stop, so I yanked the cord.
I'll never forget, the sound , oh Lord--
the screamin' drives, the speaker's blast,
the painful scream that I-- heard last.
Oh where, oh where is my *BSD?
That load took it away from me.
It's gone to heaven, so I've got to be good,
So I can see *BSD when I leave this world.
When I woke up, the sparks were pourin down.
There were admins standin all around.
Some burned-out chips had fallen on the tiles,
but somehow I found my disc of files.
I lifted the CD, the devil winked and said,
"Load me darlin just a little while."
I held it close, I kissed the label--our last kiss.
I found the love that i knew i had missed
well now it's gone, even though I loaded it right
I lost my *BSD and the Dell-- that night.
Oh where, oh where is my *BSD?
I tried to load it yesterday.
It's gone to heaven so I've got to be good,
So I can see *BSD when I leave this world.
When I next went to Slashdot, where so many had trolled.
Any so many times "BSD's Dead!" was told.
Tears fallin' on the keyboard, I checked "Anonymous"
and I eulogized *BSD, in memory, of us....
When I logged on next, my post was modded down.
In my heartbreak and sorrow, treated like a clown....
No matter what the mods do, it's in my heart and head
We'll always know "*BSD IS DEAD!"
Oh where, oh where is my *BSD?
I tried to load it yesterday.
It's gone to heaven so I've got to be good,
So I can see *BSD when I leave this world.
It's a dupe.
OpenBSD is great.
It recognized my NIC and worked very well.
The firewall features are very valuable and robust.
Conclusion: Linux is not ready for the desktop.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
...but a little late, considering that 3.5 is due to ship tomorrow.
If you agree with any of this, feel free to repost it in the future.
* If "Linux" just refers to the kernel and not the operating system, how can "FreeBSD" refer to the operating system (userland tools, standard libraries, etc.) and not just the kernel? Face it, "GNU/Linux" looks and sounds ridiculous.
* If you expect companies to follow the copyright of the GPL, you should support the RIAA going after infringers of its copyright. If not, you're a hypocrite.
* There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company being upset that its product is being pirated freely over online networks. Try getting a real job sometime and see what it feels like when your work is everywhere, and you start worrying that your days are numbered. Does John Carmack want you to "sample" his new game via the "free advertising" happening on eMule?
* OSDN-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk about.
* Speaking of OSDN--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with OSDN, it's a-okay.
* Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.
* Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.
* The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.
* Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember The Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off like he was some sort of stalking victim, which made it all the more bizarre.
* The moderation system is broken. If you mod someone as "Overrated," you can't be metamodded. People abuse this all the time to gang up and knock you down into oblivion.
* Somehow, user-ran executables are always a "New Microsoft Hole" (actual article headline). Meanwhile, LinuxSecurity [linuxsecurity.com] posts weekly security advisories for all the Linux distributions. You never, ever, EVER see any of these mentioned on Slashdot--bizarre things like arbitrary code execution via MPlayer.
* Microsoft is supposed to be some sort of non-innovative rip-off artist. Meanwhile, the same people posting those comments do it through KDE with taskbars, sidepanels, start menus, similar print dialogs, and an integrated web/filesystem browser. Effectively ripping people off then criticizing those who came up with the ideas in the first place.
* Linux is "ready for the deskto
I found the article rather interesting! And if anyone had bothered to read the previous article they would realize that this guy is doing a series of articles based on the same Sparc box and a variety of operating systems (perhaps all the ones that will run on it and are freely available). To bad his doesn't seem to be a developer because he doesn't touch on anything at all in that arena and I would have been mildly interested in comparisons.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I run OpenBSD 3.4 on an Ultra1 and an Ultra2 with no problems whatsoever. Granted, they are machines at home that the kids use [for doing homework, playing games, surfing the web], but they hold up well, are relatively quiet, and aren't going to get easily hacked.
The main reason I run OpenBSD on these machines, is that the graphics support was superior to NetBSD [which I run on an old SS20], and FreeBSD doesn't support the SBUS [yet].
Hello everyone!
You may know me as the "troll" that posts the "BSD IS DEAD" and all of the "FACTS" to every BSD story on Slashdot. Many people wonder why I do it. The answer is that BSD is detrimental to the open source community.
As a Linux advocate, I have taken upon myself the duty to convince Slashdot readers that BSD is dead and that Linux is the future. If BSD were to gain a bigger marketshare, corporations such as IBM and Sun may be distracted from their interest in Linux.
If you know any BSD users, you must convince them to convert to Linux. These people are slowing down open source developement because developers are distracted from working on Linux programs to make them work with BSD. Imagine how great Gnome/KDE, Mozilla, and Apache would be if the developers didn't have to waste precious time writing code so that it would run on BSD. We need the entire open source community to get behind one operating system so that developers can focus on achieving our goal, OS dominance.
We can all agree that Microsoft has to go. We cannot allow any other proprietary operating system to take it's place. That narrows it down to the open source operating systems, of which the 2 major options are Linux and BSD. Since Linux already has the larger marketshare, we need to kill off BSD. Once we convert all the BSD developers to Linux, we will have a stronger army.
So what can you do to help? Easy. Find BSD users and developers and convince them to switch to Linux. Do so by any means necessary. You can start out being nice, but be persistent. Don't give up. In the end, they will thank you for enlightening them.
There can be only one open source operating system. Divided we fall. Together we shall rule.
As a great man once said, "Let us never forget the duty, which we have taken upon ourselves."
For example he tried to run the various X configurations utilities. The FAQ clearly states that there is a WORKING example configuration that you should start from in /usr/X11/README .
Furthermore the FAQ also states to not compile from source unless absolutely nessessary. If he had used packages, he might not have had the problems with the databases that he had. However there was a MySQL glitch in 3.4 (I think, it could have been 3.3) that was fixed in stable. Also, the 3.5 snapshot from the 29th had some serious problems (people were told not to use it). Doing a little more homework would have avoided these problems; it's all documented.
While overall the article was very interesting, I am disappointed that his haste caused him to have problems where he should not have.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest 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 further 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.
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 hobbyist 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 dead
Hello everyone!
You may know me as the "troll" that posts the "BSD IS DEAD" and all of the "FACTS" to every BSD story on Slashdot. Many people wonder why I do it. The answer is that BSD is detrimental to the open source community.
As a Linux advocate, I have taken upon myself the duty to convince Slashdot readers that BSD is dead and that Linux is the future. If BSD were to gain a bigger marketshare, corporations such as IBM and Sun may be distracted from their interest in Linux.
If you know any BSD users, you must convince them to convert to Linux. These people are slowing down open source developement because developers are distracted from working on Linux programs to make them work with BSD. Imagine how great Gnome/KDE, Mozilla, and Apache would be if the developers didn't have to waste precious time writing code so that it would run on BSD. We need the entire open source community to get behind a single operating system so that developers can focus on achieving our goal, OS dominance.
We can all agree that Microsoft has to go. We cannot allow any other proprietary operating system to take it's place. That narrows it down to the open source operating systems, of which the 2 major options are Linux and BSD. Since Linux already has the larger marketshare, we need to kill off BSD. Once we convert all the BSD developers to Linux, we will have a stronger army.
So what can you do to help? Easy. Find BSD users and developers and convince them to switch to Linux. Do so by any means necessary. You can start out being nice, but be persistent. Don't give up. In the end, they will thank you for enlightening them.
After we destroy BSD, we will need to focus on a single Linux distribution, Fedora. The other Linux distributions are wasting time and causing confusion. We need everyone to focus on Fedora so that it can be made the best operating system ever!
There can be only one open source operating system. Divided we fall. Together we shall rule.
As a great man once said, "Let us never forget the duty, which we have taken upon ourselves."
Part of the reason why Linux is so popular is it supports almost all hardware out there. BSD is great and preferable for me in many places because if its simplicity and its more standard.
I tried OpenBSD in my Ultra5 a while ago, before the first of these two reviews came out, and it ran much faster than Solaris. I have a SCSI disk in there, so it was an impressive firewall, except it didnt see the ATM card.
Also needed to install OpenBSD (I'm used to OpenBSD's simplicity) on my spanking new VA Linux 1000 webserver, but I was using a Promise SATA card in there to run the SATA disk. Only Linux can read the SATA, so I had to revert back. BSD is great but (1) You have to have the hardware it supports (2) You should only need the functions your version of BSD supports.
I'd love to see FreeBSD support SATA cards (Promise TX2plus) and have facilities like Linux UML or Solaris zones, unlike chroots. In the short run, Linux is there, in the long run BSD will be used unless Linux becomes real stable, and is standardized, or the Slackware development is continued.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
cold and stiff
Tony Bourke is reviewing OpenBSD 3.4 for SPARC-64.
Would someone please give this guy a Solaris CD already?
He's reviewed _everything_ else that runs on his eBay-purchased US5. Let it go.
--saint
You have demonstrated your ignorance to all.
Bravo!
I'm so upset, I'm going back in time to stop running X, KDE, GNOME and the festival of apps I've used on BSD since 1994. Did Linux have a network stack yet then? /me forgets.
the last "editon" of ezine.daemonnews.org is from march. Think they'll manage to put one out by july?
Guys, why don't you change the url to quarterly.daemonnews.org --hell, beat the rush and skip to yearly.daemonnews.org if you like.
But BSD isn't dying. Remember that, folks, that's crucial.
The point is that *BSD is dying. There is no use supporting
something that won't be around in a year or two.