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OpenBSD 3.8 Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the gentlemen-start-your-compilers dept.

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? "

17 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. When you say "out" by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 0, Troll

    Do you mean "risen from the dead"?

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    1. Re:When you say "out" by evilviper · · Score: 0, Troll

      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

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  2. Woo Hoo!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    OpenBSD 3.8 is released... Oh, sorry. Never mind.

  3. LOL!!! It's BSD!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Does that mean it's dead on arrival?

  4. Theo's an asshole and OpenBSD is over rated by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Solaris is now free for the taking, and it beats OpenBSD on every front, hands down! If you're going to pay for "free" software why don't you consider instead downloading the ISOs from Open Solaris (iso availability one more thing Open Solaris beats Open BSD at!) and instead send your donations to a Worthwhile charity!

    1. Re:Theo's an asshole and OpenBSD is over rated by Bold+Marauder · · Score: -1, Troll

      I don't think anyone would seriously use their PDA as a server, however. At least not in any kind of professional enviroment.

      If you are serious about your infrastructure, you'll use serious tools, with serious software. If you're not serious, I guess you can settle for one of the ameteur projects which you can use on a motely collection of toys.

    2. Re:Theo's an asshole and OpenBSD is over rated by Bold+Marauder · · Score: 0, Troll

      >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.

    3. Re:Theo's an asshole and OpenBSD is over rated by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Good try fuckwank.

  5. mo+d jdown by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    election to the the project as a sadness And it was Outreach are if you don't no matter how shitheads. *BSD ejrrors. FSuture I

  6. T-Shirts are Dandy and All.. by url80 · · Score: -1, Troll
    T-Shirts are dandy and all, but who really uses this anymore? Does anyone happen to know penetration numbers for OpenBSD these days? I can't imagine it's very high at all.

    --

    Best,

    url80, The Bounty Network

  7. Re:or you could give us a torrent link... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    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?

  8. Re:Calm. The. #$@!. Down. It's not that I'm cheap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    > I DO have a short attention span for taking on new projects.

    Just a tip. OpenBSD is less of a useful OS, and more of a cult-of-personality consisting of asskissers and know-nothing hobbyist dilettante security types. If you aren't going in head-first, they don't really want you. Its sorta like the scientology of operating systems, not exactly something you can do once a week or so.

  9. 3.8? What kernel does this run? by DroopyStonx · · Score: -1, Troll

    What kernel does this run on, 2.6.13?

    3.8?

    Teh.Deceased

    That's what THAT means.

    --
    We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
  10. Re:OpenBSD is cool by Viol8 · · Score: -1, Troll

    I'm talking about books I can find in a shop , not on the friggin
    internet to be delivered by some delivery guy who dumps it in the
    rain at 11am and then it gets nicked 2 hours later. I don't do
    mail order. If its not in a bookshop then as far as I'm
    concerned its not out there.

  11. Gentoo/OpenBSD by amightywind · · Score: 1, Troll

    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.

    --
    an ill wind that blows no good
  12. Re:Released the same day as the new FreeBSD Logo! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    The FreeBSD guys should better work on their code rather than on advertising while the product remains crap.

    FreeBSD 4 was cool, but FreeBSD 5 and 6 is just a bunch of hacks over hacks over code that is getting obsolete and almost unmaintainable.

    The people who did real work on FreeBSD left the project for NetBSD or DragonFlyBSD.

  13. Re:Theo's an asshole and OpenBSD defcon4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    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.