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."

Comments

Sparc64. . .

[bplipschitz]

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].

Few errors

[the morgawr]

Though it's not the author's fault entirely (he is in a hurry), some of the bad experiences he had could have been avoided if he had followed the documentation and not assumed that OpenBSD is the same as Net and Free.

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.