OpenBSD 3.7 Released

pgilman writes "It's official: OpenBSD 3.7 has been released. There are oodles of new features, including tons of new and improved wireless drivers (covered here previously), new ports for the Sharp Zaurus and SGI, improvements to OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, CARP, PF, a new OSPF daemon, new functionality for the already-excellent ports & packages system, and lots more. As always, please support the project if you can by buying CDs and t-shirts, or grab the goodness from your local mirror."

Comments

How's the install?

[m50d]

Manually creating a BSD disklabel is not to be taken lightly. If you're experienced you can do it, but it's very far from friendly. Anyone know if they've done anything to make it easier?

Re:How's the install?

[Anonymous Coward]

buy the CD. Dedicate 1 HDD to OpenBSD. Then follow the printed instructions. i avoided OpenBSD for a lond time because of FUD like this. Found out that it is probably one of the best *nix distros there is. Simple, well documented, and WORKS. Also the pors tree is clean and smooth. Almost as easy as apt-get.

Re:How's the install?

[ignorant_coward]

Yes, people who say OpenBSD is hard because of the non-GUI installer just end up making themselves look lame. OpenBSD really is not that hard to install, and I actually prefer it to Red Hat's do-as-we-want-you-to-do installer.

Re:How's the install?

[Homology]

Manually creating a BSD disklabel is not to be taken lightly. If you're experienced you can do it, but it's very far from friendly. Anyone know if they've done anything to make it easier?

It is confusing when you come from i386 and have used Linux. It was, at least for me, quite confusing the usage of the word "partition".

To simplify, on Linux on i386 for each file system there will be a partition (DOS type). On BSD you commonly create a primary DOS parition using fdisk, and then use disklabel to create different filesystems on that particular DOS partition. "Primary" beacuse BSD may only boot from a primary DOS partition (at most four of those).

Now, when you enter fdisk you are asked to "parition" your harddisk(s). Then you enter disklabel and are asked to create new partitions. WTF? I just did that! Enter the term "slice" that is not quite the same across the BSD. Erh, you won't see the word "slice" in the man pages, though.

Not sure if OpenBSD 3.7 still have this usage of partition, though.

In any case, I'm a happy user of OpenBSD since 3.2/3.3.

Growl

[iamdrscience]

OpenBSD, OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, CARP, PF, OSPF

Do BSD-folk have some strange aversion to pronouncable acronyms? Only 1 out of 7!

Re:Growl

[DavidBurns]

Expanding on a previous comment: A 1970's IBM project, System/R, developed "Structured English Query Language" shortened to "SEQUEL", and later changed to SQL. The CORRECT pronunciation of "SQL" is still "sequel". Saying "ess kew ell" is the sign of a newbie. Not that there's anything wrong with newbies, until they get fresh about things they don't know about. See e.g. http://www.faqs.org/docs/ppbook/c1164.htm

Try the Torrent!

[cjsnell]

Check out the Unofficial OpenBSD Bittorrent Page. If the torrent isn't here, it will be, soon!

Re:Good!

[MightyMartian]

BSD is direct Unix herritage, Linux is the bastard COPY.

William the Conqueror was a bastard too, and you'll notice that you don't have anyone on the English throne named Ethelbert or or Athelstan.

Re:But, but...

[hobbesx]

Is OpenBSD a better choice?

Maybe. What color is your mouse?

Hmm

[rsax]

I wonder what's the reason for not signing the checksums.

ftp://mirror.sg.depaul.edu/pub/OpenBSD/3.7/i386/

OpenBSD clusters make my heartbeat faster...

[Yannic]

Here's the plan:
1. Set up High Availability router with pfsync. (using computers rescued from the trash)
2. Set up a HA Network RAID system using DRBD or something similar. (using more computers rescued from the trash)
3. Build a Kerrighed or OpenSSI Single System Image cluster. (using the latest and greatest computers one can rescue from the trash)
4. ???
5. Profit! (and thus, have enough money to actually buy equipment)

I've already set aside Tuesday evening to upgrade my bandwidth throttling OpenBSD router. I set it up the day before 3.6 came out, so I didn't feel like upgrading until now. I'm tired of the typical hardware failures you tend to get out of computers people throw out (maybe that's why they threw them out in the first place) but mostly I'm looking forward to getting a learning experience hundreds of times more valuable (personally) than getting my MCSE 2003.

\/\/\/

Re:Neither irony nor sarcasm

[Anonymous Coward]

The first trollish reference was to the fact that OpenBSD is much more secure by default then any distro Linux. The second was to the fact the OpenBSD is much more stable then any disto of Linux.

How is this a troll? It's true. Anyone who is suffuciently familiar with the innards of both will tell you that, no question.

I'm primarily a Linux user who does some OpenBSD on the side. I don't use GUIs that much, I configure everything by hand, and I do a lot of coding. I've written kernel stuff.

I can tell you that it is clear that OpenBSD is simpler, more consistent, and just plain makes more sense than Linux. Coming from Linux, OpenBSD is more than a joy to work with.

Linux is very ad-hoc. It just sort of "grew." It was developed in many places by many people, few of them working together with the big context of "the Linux system" in mind. The pace of development is very rush-rush-rush, and for example many times, the approach of the kernel developers is "let's shove this out to userland and let distributors worry about writing a script to make sense of it."

OpenBSD is the opposite. People working on OpenBSD core packages have a specific kernel, userland, config script, etc., etc. in mind. There is a concept of "the OpenBSD system" and it is fairly consistent. People are working together to acheive that goal. The pace of development is more relaxed, and the people working on the userland are some of the same folks writing the kernel. So you don't get the sort of ad-hoc interfaces that make no sense to anything but a shell script (i.e. iptables), you get something which at every level, the user can get an idea how it works (i.e. pf).

Or take wireless. Until recently I had a Linux box set up as a wireless access point. To do that I had to play around with different kernel modules, some of them shipping with the kernel, some of them not, ad nauseum until something worked. This was very annoying.

Awhile ago I put the very same wireless card in an OpenBSD box whose software had not been updated in a few years. The card just worked! Without rebuilding or changing any config files, the card was detected.

Then, I put a 2-line file in /etc, made some changes to the DHCPD config file, and much to my surprise, it functioned as a wireless access point. Effortlessly. Having struggled with this in Linux (where it is much more painful to do), I had much appreciation for this.

The fact is, OpenBSD just does things the Right Way. People say OpenBSD's big strength is security, but that's slightly missing the point. OpenBSD's strength is correctness. From correctness yields stability, security, and all around ease of use.

You can call me a fanboy, but I say OpenBSD wins hands down against any Linux distribution, with the only exception being that Linux generally supports more hardware, quicker.

Re:Decent firefox port ?

[dolmant_php]

3.7 comes with 1.01. Current version is 1.0.4.

Re:Yes, you are a fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the typical response of a BSD fanboy when comparing his/her BSD with "Linux", not with a Linux distro. Let's do a real comparison. I'll use RedHat Linux and Debian in most examples.

If you'll look at my post I said I'm primarily a Linux user. I use Debian mostly. I like it a lot. It's much better than most Linux offerings. But it's no OpenBSD. Part of the reason is because it inherits the problems of its upstream sources, including some of the design decisions of the Linux kernel.

You can say EXACTLY THE SAME about the Linux distros I mentioned. Both RedHat and Debian have their own "generic kernels", core pkgs, etc.

This is not the same. Red Hat and Debian mostly pull from upstream sources which do not develop together. For most of OpenBSD userland, the upstream is the same as the package maintainer.

Even the packages that ARE from external sources are better integrated.

(By the way: for every Linux distro I've used, the default kernel always lacks something or doesn't work in some way, and I always end up building a custom one. With OpenBSD, the default kernel is much better than any default Linux kernel I've seen.)

If you disagree with my accessments on integration, I encourage you to look at a base OpenBSD system, and a Debian base system, compare the two, and I think it will be very clear which is better integrated. Look, particularly, at the headers, and the interfaces between kernel and userland, some of the manpages for kernel features, and this is easily apparent.

And remember, I'm writing this all as a Debian user. I use Debian much more often than I use OpenBSD.

As for your last argument, about how many people use Linux: This proves nothing. I can just as easily say, "Look how many people use Microsoft Windows! Obviously, it must be better!"

I can't hear you very well through that hat

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if you are really aware of it, but note that the link you gave mentions the story behind the acronym SQL, which certainly used to be SEQUEL before and had to be changed for legal reasons, but doesn't mention the pronunciation of SQL at all. Actually it _is_ "Es Queue El": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL.

If you read the documentation of popular relational databases, it's quite possible that you find a paragraph regarding the pronunciation, and in that case you'll find they follow the ANSI convention. [1] [2]

I know when I started using RDBMs years ago I read about it, and ever since whenever I see someone pronouncing SQL as "sequel" the first thing that comes to my mind is "newbie". I suspect from now on one more thing will come to mind: a prick who wants to sound clever when he's actually an ignorant.