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More on OpenBSD 3.7 Release
putko writes "As previously reported, OpenBSD 3.7 is released. Here's some interviews with the people behind the release about the new features, including information about which companies are complying with requests for documentation and permission to freely distribute required firmware, and which are not. Ralink Tech and Realtek 'GOOD,'Intel 'BAD.'
The next time I build/buy a wireless product, I'll want Realtek or Ralink Tech inside -- because getting software to work with it will be easier. Ralink Tech and Realtek are Taiwanese, by the way."
It's actually OpenBSD ln(3)*(3+1/e)
The crappiness of the RTL8139* chipset is legendary. Do they actually make anything good?
The dupes!
Are there actually any Free 802.11g drivers for Linux? Last time I checked, the only one in the kernel was prism54, which is useless for any device you can buy at the moment. :(
If I post "its good that linux is still going" in a linux thread will I get modded up for that? And "BSD" isn't still going, the last release was 4.4BSD lite way back when. There are a few different OS's based on that code, they each have their own names, their own developers, their own goals, and they aren't all going to magically die all at the same time somehow.
Have any of you noticed the the hardware producers are standing in the way of open source software ? If you intend to install a Linux BSD or SunOS, drivers for the videocard`s, LAN card`s, TV Tuners, digital camera`s are very hard to find. On the driver CD suplied by the vendor you will find only drivers for Windows. So the point of this news should be not who are able to distribute the firmwares then why are they not suplied by the vendor on the install CD and why can`t they be included in the OS.
Think like a hacker, act like a hacker, but never become a hacker !
But I thought that BSD was dead?
No, but your joke is. I hate it when people bust on BSD like that. It's not dead. It might not be very relevant anymore, but it's not exactly dead.
That was the most depressing writeup I've ever seen. It literally jumped from topic to topic after every sentence. Hey, since we're talking about Taiwan -- China just lifted its longtime ban on tourism and agricultural trade with Taiwan. That's good because another thing that happened recently is we went bike riding!
Intel denies help with firmware, yet they donate coders to the Linux kernel (maybe *bsd's too, haven't checked out)
I guess it's safer for them to donate developers than to give away what i guess they think they have ("trade secrets")
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
All the packages in OpenBSD 3.7 packages directory are bad. They all expect libraries of previous releases, makes me think they were simply copied from 3.6, and older in a few cases. I had to make links to libc.so.39 as libc.so.38, libc.so.37 and libc.so.36 to make various apps work, same for ssl, crypt, libstdc++ and a bunch of other libs.
At least the core OpenBSD 3.7 is complete and I imagine the packages will be brought up to date in time. Till then, compile your own or use ports.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I work in a company that most of you probably know very well. Let's just say that it's a normal modern company, nothing unusual. Some time ago, I received the email first thing in the morning from the IT department. Our network would be undergoing a major overhaul to correct the ad hoc growth it had experienced in the last year, and starting next week Internet access would be sporadic. There would also be a new firewall and security measures, replacing the old OpenBSD system I'd managed to get installed last Spring. Happy for the heads-up, I went to work right away to make sure Linux had no place on our network. This was not the first time that I had faced this threat.
One day about a year ago our network guy gets asked to draw up firewall plans for this subnet of servers we have. Our network guy was your typical GNU-slinger save that he had a cascade of flowing hair down the back of his head and not a beard hanging from his face. And yeah, you can guess what he thought those firewalls were gonna run. Fast forward two days. I'd caught wind of the plans and had charts, graphs, and comparisons written up detailing OpenBSD and Linux security. Since this GNU guy had a mullet and dressed like a slob, I got taken seriously. Not to mention my data, impenetrable by any hippy "logic." OpenBSD was the more secure, even to the beancounters and idtiot management. So thanks to me, our firewalls happily run OpenBSD and not Linux, which would have buffer-overflowed into no-man's land every other hour. The Open Source Mullet gives me a lot of dirty looks lately.
Since the Open Source Mullet had been canned, a new threat had arisen at my workplace: the Fat Perl Hacker had assumed most of the Open Source Mullet's system and network administration duties, and it was no mystery to anyone at my workplace that he had a hard-on for Linux tucked away under his enormous, cascading gut. Since he was a major suck-up and workaholic, he had a lot more credibility than the Open Source Mullet this would be a real challenge for once. Dealing with the Open Source Mullet had been cake.
That night, I went to work on my strategy. First, I would document the changes in Linux and OpenBSD since a year ago when we last went with a security plan. Linux was still at version 2.4, while OpenBSD had raced from version 2.8 to 3.1 a major revision! This was good so far, and I included the relevant diffs for each. I wondered what the Fat Perl Hacker was up to and pushed ahead with my preparations.
Tuesday morning, I went to talk with the VP of Operations, who had final say on the network project. I wouldn't leave anything to chance. But after chatting with him for a few minutes, I learned of a major monkey-wrench I hadn't expected: instead of a Unix firewall system, he was planning on installing a dedicated firewall box running Windows XP. Thankful for my fortuitous social engineering, I went back to my desk and began making over my strategy to deal with this new threat. Not only would I have to deal with Linux, I'd have to eschew the Windows option now.
Sitting in front of my iBook after work, I realized that taking on Windows XP in the same manner I was going to deal with Linux would be foolish if not wasteful. Obviously the Windows option was not about numbers, anecdotes, or experience. It was a bean-counting decision and all of the security statistics in the world wouldn't matter. Since I hadn't the foggiest about how our accountants viewed the whole operation and didn't have time to learn, I'd have implement a rapid-fire real-life assault on the Windows box, which was sitting on the VP's desk awaiting its place on the network. It was time to put on my Black Hat, and that night I stayed up until 02:00 researching Windows XP vulnerabilities. Linux would have to wait.
With just two days before the network changeover was to take place, I marched into work Wednesday morning knowing that what I did in the next few hours would decide the fate of our network security. To my su
Stupid troll. The companies are only providing *documentation* - the code is written by the OpenBSD team (who are major paranoia freaks).
You werk for microsoft!!
Anyways, what kind of dumbass troll is this? Sometimes Slashdot completely reminds me of Mos Eisley, full of dumb pricks just asking to be shot.
Oh, no, wait. That was AT&T, in their bid to have BSD declared AT&T proprietary, on the grounds that BSD coders may, potentially, have seen AT&T Intellectual Property and therefore be encumbered for life, along with everything they wrote.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Notepad is a Windows programme, if you want Windows you should try running Windows.
And of course, Windows doesn't have crashes either.
I'll admit it, I'd not read this troll before, but it's not funny or even very well done. How long as OpenBSD 3.7 been out? Two days you say? So how many days is a "few" then?
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Ah! This must be the latest cookie-cutter troll. Was posted with Linux in place a few days back.
A number of OpenBSD developers will be speaking at the CUUG meeting on tuesday the 24th. It's extremely interesting to see them discuss the stuff they do, and it's a good opportunity to ask questions.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
The 3.7 tree had been frozen 2 months prior to its release.
OMG TEH TAIWANESE ARE COMING
Maybe we should just nuke the entire country to be safe?
So use windows :)
Nobody forced you to install OpenBSD... you made that choice by yourself, and you have only yourself to blame.
I understand your point!
;)
I just spent almost 3 hours (I know there should be a better way to handle this, but hey I am human) to upgrade OpenBSD 3.7.
I do not have a CDROM on the laptop, so I did a remote installation.
I used the instructions from http://openbsd.org/faq/upgrade37.html
So I did a pkg_info > packages_installed, and then I removed all packages. Oh I forgot that I had installed the jdk-1.4. Oh well, I will recompile and download all the sources again from Sun.
Next, I installed the kernel and reboot as specified. So far so good.
After rebooting the machine, I had extracted all the files according to the instructions. Good but I had to go the server because the PC card, which has my wireless card is not detected on my laptop. Well, there is no problem because I have done it in the past. Recompile a new kernel with the appropriate memory ranges for my laptop.
After installing the new kernel and rebooting, I am about to install the new packages, which I did manually since I could not find any instructions on how to do it automatically, which by the way I have 107 packages. Yes, I know there are bunch considered dependencies.
After installing all packages, which is somewhat painful due to the manual and network bandwith requirements, I reboot to check that everything starts fine. I know that I could start the processes manually, but I wanted to check if they started automatically.
Oops, there are some errors, openldap changes (attribute errors due to version changes from 2.1 to 2.2)and missing modules for apache.
The bottomline:
3 hours downtime for email, pf not working while I was recompiling because it did not start since it did not detect wi0 (+1 hour without a firewall). I have to troubleshot multiple services as opposed to an incremental upgrade of the services, which it is supposed to make sense (ala portupgrade?). I think there should be a better way to do upgrades on OpenBSD. I understand that CD sales are part of the revenues for the OpenBSD project, but that does not should stop them to ease the upgrade process.
Well, I have to reinstall jdk-1.4 to make the servies that run on Java available again. Thank god this is for home only! I may be fired if I did this at work
There is a difference, snapshots are not expected to be as stable because they're there for testing purposes.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
"An employee suggested to me that we load 3.7 on a few machines here as an evaluation. [...] I made the employee uninstall 3.7 from the machines and lets just say he's not with us anymore."
You kicked an employee out because an evaluation that he suggested didn't work out? That is, pardon my French, completely fucked. The whole reason you do evaluations is so that you don't end up in a position where new products put people's job on the line.
Apart from anything else, from now on if an employee suddenly discovers a product that at a stroke will double productivity, halve costs and save small kittens from drowning, do you think they're going to tell you about it? No, they're going to hide behind conformity, in the hope that that way they'll keep their jobs.
Congrats, you've singlehandedly halted improvement of your company's computing infrastructure. I'm sure it'll mean far less trouble for you, right up to the point where an innovative competitor buys you up and fires everyone.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html
We need more support and BSD and Linux etc need to come together on this. I see the article and while it is great wifi is more supported we need more than just wifi we need a site like http://www.pricewatch.com/ that is complete with data and grade the manufactor ( A,B,C,D,F ) based upon cooperation etc. While I applaud Theo for what he has done we have a long way to go and I think Slashdot could put up such a site and even earn revenue from it ! Think of the PR ! Also I am running 3.7 and way to go Theo Happy B-day !
BSD coders did work direclty with AT&T sources, there's no debate about that fact.
I wish HW manufacturers would just release the specs, because it's usually possible to hack it anyway, and closed firmware doesn't give them an edge in the marketplace, for the reason I state in the topic. I think one obstacle in their minds is that if the HW dies while using untested (by them) firmware/drivers, they might be liable. Simple enough--just state in the warranty that it only applies to officially released firmware/drivers. Maybe then we can all get on with our lives instead of living in paranoia.
Don't give the PRC(People's Republic of China) any ideas...
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
This has got to be fake. I mean, come on, they were using some desktop environment, right? KDE? GNOME? Something like that? All of which have multiple lightweight text editors (Kate, gedit, and all the rest).
As for the OpenOffice database corruption. That would suck for sure. I wouldn't be doing "evaluations" with live production data. That would just be moronic.
OpenBSD is a poor choice for the desktop though.
Does CrossOver Office work on OpenBSD?
yea they might nuke you back for touching their territory.
Does CrossOver Office work on OpenBSD?
No it doesn't. Linux emulation on OpenBSD is not complete enough to support CrossOver Office.
AT&T lost that suit and BSD became 100% free in the early 1990s.
To be 100% precise, the original port by William Jolitz and his wife to the i386 architecture (probably one of the smallest BSD development teams of all time, and probably the least-credited for the work they did) had potentially encumbered code.
Most of the "potential" encumberances were header files and a few relatively minor bits of code that AT&T could easily have just released to the public. However, AT&T wanted to play dirty, and decided that ANYONE who saw AT&T code was "encumbered" and that therefore any code later produced must also be encumbered.
As was noted by commentators at the time, this means that those who use constructs such as "for" loops that use the ++ operator are in violation of AT&T Intellectual Property terms, as this specific practice originated from a book by an AT&T coder.
AT&T did lose their lawsuit against iBSD, but iBSD folded not long after because of the suit, IIRC. (The suit actually came about, not because iBSD were using AT&T stuff - the Jolitz' had been doing so for some time by then - but because they were selling it and not giving AT&T any kickbacks.)
Interestingly, as part of the SCO vs IBM case, SCO want to revisit that decision and get it overturned. Again, it seems to have little to do with Linux actually including any of this supposed code, but because IBM and SGI are making money from Linux and SCO isn't.
Personally, I think anyone who demands kickbacks of this kind should be banned from visiting any website other than MSNBC's weblog. Well, at least they'll find kindred spirits there.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The "BSD-is-dying troll" is:
[ ] an idiot, [ ] green, [ ] bored, [ ] Pixar animated
And therefore should be:
[ ] shot at dawn, [ ] sent to work at SCO, [ ] enlisted
Besides which, the troll is so ancient that:
[ ] Archimedes discredited it, [ ] It underwent heat-death prior to the birth of the solar system
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
-1, Drug Induced
Why is there so much trolling on this article? It's not normally so bad.
Dude, that was such a blatant troll, and you got reeled in, hook, line and sinker.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The FreeBSD documentation states that it was not completely free of AT&T sources until the 2.x release.
Henning Brauer: Nobody ever gave us anything back. A plethora of vendors ship OpenSSH--commercial Unix vendors (basically all of them), all of the Linux distributors, and lots of hardware vendors (like HP in their switches)--but none of them seem to care; none of them ever gave us anything back. All of them should very well know that quality software doesn't "just happen," but needs some funding. Yet, they don't help at all.
That just blows. A while back the OpenBSD team had to raise funds to acquire Dell hardware so that their CVS server could scale up. The CVS server that holds repositories for all Open* projects. You would think that one of these companies would have just donated the hardware. But nope.
Not often you see that combination of words when referring to network cards...
"Last time I checked, the only one in the kernel was prism54, which is useless for any device you can buy at the moment."
How do you mean useless? I have a Netcomm 802.11g PCI card which runs on a Prism54 chipset, and it works perfectly. Ubuntu has always detected it and set it up during installation without a problem, with or without WEP.
Does the help from Realtek mean that open source operating systems (i.e. Linux/BSD/ReactOS etc) will be able to better support the RTL8180 WiFi chipset? (if so, thats GREAT because I own a RTL8180 board :)
he blames Apache for beeing non-free,
kills support for apdaptec controllers and seem to consider himself as the only true free software apologete - don't take him too serious - even debian includes the newer, blamed versions of apache.
Blocking a server because it sends to an email address that you deliberately put on a website for spam engines to find is extremely short sighted and will cause you to not get some number of legitimate emails.
The reason is that more and more spam detection software is starting to use callbacks to verify email addresses. So when a spam email goes to somebody elses email server and they do a callback to verify the faked sender email exists which was harvested from your website, your email server would block that remote mail server for 24 hours even though they did not send a spam email to your server. They only were verifying the email address.
I see this on a daily basis from multiple sites where a server mistakenly blocked a mail server when they did not send spam... They only were doing a callback on the mail address to make sure it exists(milter-sender is one such spam detection scheme).
I feel sorry for all the people who will read this and implement the new spam detection software as you explained it. They will end up blocking servers they shouldn't.
Here's a quote:
"And to the Linux "vendors" that regardlessly ship non-free firmware images with their OSes, I'd say that they are playing against their camp. Why would vendors ever change their policies if such things are accepted by the open source community?"
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Does CrossOver Office work on OpenBSD?
:-)
It all depends on what you define as "desktop"
The OpenBSD FAQ states clearly that they're not trying to overtake the world. OpenBSD is an excellent Unix-like system, and it looks works and feels just like any Gnome or KDE desktop would.
Right now, for me, the biggest difficulty I'm having is with source code full of Linuxism that present difficulty when compiling on OpenBSD for compiling on Unix, because some Linux fuckheads forget they're supposed to be on Unix (I'm sorry, I feel strongly about this...)
"Desktop" for me means "programming language", "scientific applications" and "mathematical software." And when I say "programming languages", I don't mean C, Python, Perl, etc. But Qi, Common Lisp, Haskell, Mozart, Mercury, etc...On all that stuff, I am having some difficulty on OpenBSD because of the said "writing for Linux" mentality (so I keep Debian around...). But I think the trend is for things to get better...Look at FreeBSD, they have everything you have on Linux...
You can't blame BSD folks for that, you have to educate people about Unix.
But if you feel you need CrossOver Office (and you might, for legitimate reasons), you haven't really given up on your Microsoft dependency, have you? So why sweat it?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
ORN: A lot of companies have been using OpenSSH in their products (Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Apple, GNU/Linux vendors, etc.). Did they give anything back, like donations or hardware?
Henning Brauer: Nobody ever gave us anything back. A plethora of vendors ship OpenSSH--commercial Unix vendors (basically all of them), all of the Linux distributors, and lots of hardware vendors (like HP in their switches)--but none of them seem to care; none of them ever gave us anything back. All of them should very well know that quality software doesn't "just happen," but needs some funding. Yet, they don't help at all.
This seems like a stupid comment. You do work and the license it under the BSD licence. You cant complain that these companies comply 100% with the license. If you want money for it, start a company to develop that software and then sell it. You can't say "software should be free" and then complain that others dont pay for/contribute to it.
When will OpenBSD finally boot above cylinder 1024 or whatever? I am very serious about this because I love OpenBSD and would like to see it on more desktops. It has progressed much in the last 10 years.
Do we have to wait for version 5.0 before Theo "gets it?"
Rob
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=127944&cid=106 91304
EAT A DICK YOU GODDAM FUCKING HONKEYNIGGER!!
Gayness filter encountered. Taco aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many asscaps. It's like GETTING FUCKED IN THE Taco aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many asscaps. It's like GETTING FUCKED IN THE ASS.