OpenBSD 3.8 Released

Cowards Anonymous writes "OpenBSD 3.8 is out. It comes with improved hardware support, some improvements to the OSPF daemon, some new RAID management tools, among many others. Even if you plan on installing via FTP, why not order a CD copy, tshirt, or poster as well? "

Comments

When you say "out"

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Do you mean "risen from the dead"?

Re:When you say "out"

[evilviper]

I use it on my laptop and have no problem with this alleged "weakness" you speak of.

Really? How's the ACPI support on that laptop? Oh, right... non-existant. How many times can you hot-plug USB devices (on average) before it dumps you into the UKC> (kernel crash debug) prompt? How's the cardbus support? Does it lock-up your system on boot-up, or only when you plug-in a card?

I don't think you've used it for anything but a firewall, and that's where your views are skewed.

You couldn't be more WRONG. I used it almost exclusively as my desktop for YEARS. Since about 2.4 IIRC, up to 3.6, before I finally switched to FreeBSD. My annoyance with OpenBSD was borne out of many, many years of systematic frustration with it. And I still use it for firewalls and one of my fileservers, although I'm likely going to replace it with something else when security updates cease, and I have to chose between upgrading and manually merging config-file changes, or installing clean.

But it makes a decent workstation too. And it gets better with every release.

For varying levels of "decent". My standard of "decent" is clearly a lot higher than yours.

As recently as a year ago the port of Mozilla/Firefox was damn-near unusable. Unless you loaded-up all of KDE to use Konq (which still isn't a very good browser IMHO) there wasn't a single decent, non-crashing browser available. I suffered through using the incredibly buggy and tiny-font-inducing Netscape 4.X for far, far longer than users of any other OS. Other browser projects simply could not compile on OpenBSD.

I think it was only 2 years ago that OpenBSD first got a working port of MPlayer. And even then it barely worked. Even today, there's still no VCD/SVCD/Mode2 support on OpenBSD.

There's been plenty of driver problems, too. Soundcard drivers that would lock-up the system after a few minutes. DVD-ROM drivers that would freeze-up at about the 7GB mark for no good reason. Network interfaces that would go down for no reason. An XF86 distribution that was lacking modern videocard drivers, requiring a recompiling of the kernel to get a compiled-from-source X11 working. Non-existant USB support for a long-time after it was widely in-use. And many, many more things that don't come to mind immediately.

As far as improvements, OpenBSD does technically "improve" from one version to the next, as bugs get fixed and features get added. However, there's always a new and equally bad bug added, and plenty that just get passed-down through the versions for years.

Back in the FreeBSD 4.x days, I would call it a toss-up between the two BSDs (and that's mainly why I used OpenBSD), but 5.X has been a huge improvement. Much more user-friendly, less crufty, more hardware support and features, etc.

3.8 was a very easy upgrade, very comparable to say, upgrading a Debian stable release.

I've tried upgrading OpenBSD before. It's mostly smooth, but there's always some major "gotchas". Upgrading from about 3.4 to 3.5 (IIRC) while files from the new XF86 were installed to their correct location, the OLD XF86 install was still the one that would start-up, and the one programs were linking against. This wasn't noticable right away, but once you try to install a package that depends on X, it fails. Once you try to compile a port that needed the newer X11, it would spew out endless errors. Fixing that problem by hand was not easy. It would have been easier, and faster over-all, to install from scratch, copy over the config files, and re-build all the ports to get a working OpenBSD system. I'm willing to bet you've seen problem from your upgrade, that you're just selectively leaving out. The same goes for your OpenBSD experience as-a-whole. Zealotry is bad.

Anyway, as NetBSD and OpenBSD share a lot of code,

No, they shared a lot of code

Re:or you could give us a torrent link...

[Anonymous Coward]

Theo decides to release all of their great work under the BSD license so that everyone
can benefit from the tools, no questions asked. That's not enough for some people though,
complaining that there are no torrents. Maybe you would only support OpenBSD if they emailed
you a personally pressed copy for no charge?

Re:Theo's an asshole and OpenBSD is over rated

[Bold Marauder]

>Yeah... I totally agree. I don't know why OpenBSD feels the need to support "toy" platforms such as the sparc and sparc64 systems... they're total shit.

I wouldn't say that the platforms are total shit, though if your only experience with them is using Open BSD on them I can see why you wouldd get that impression (and trust me, you have my deepest sympathy). You might try using something by the people who actually make both the hardware and the software which is designed to fully support and take advantage of it.

Now that Solaris is free; price and licensing are no longer considerations which should hold you back.

Gentoo/OpenBSD

[amightywind]

OTOH, I also love Debian. I think it's the best userland package management system I've ever seen. It's less flexible than BSD's roll-your-own userland, but far easier to manage.

If you like debian you'll love Gentoo. emerge, rc-update, etc-update can give you a fully up to date distro every day. The whole idea of major releases goes away.

Re:Theo's an asshole and OpenBSD defcon4

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong on all counts about Solaris.

No OpenSouce filesystem is as stable as Solaris'.

No OpenSouce OS meta-disk management is even as close or reliable as Solaris'.

OpenBSD still doesn't have binary updates which makes safe administration impossible.

Solaris 9 is quite good let alone 10 or Nevada. I'm sorry if stable, well behaved scheduling and real profiling and debugging make you upset.

NFS works on Solaris, does not on most OpenSouce crap except FreeBSD.

Solaris may be ugly as hell, arcane in a way, but it works. It works, it is very scaleable, it oft exhibits uptimes as long as you can provide power. I have never found a reason to complain about Solaris where it really counts: uptime, stability, data integrity and scalability.

So Please don't malign Solaris until after you know what you are talking about which from the looks of your comment will be never.