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OpenBSD 4.0 Pre-orders are Available
fuzzyping1 writes "Pre-orders for OpenBSD 4.0 are now available in the online store. Five architectures on three CDs in a soft-shell DVD case. Check out the highlights of OpenBSD 4.0. This new release includes support for many new wireless chipsets, the UltraSPARC III platform, a new load-balancing feature for network trunks, and much, much more."
One thing that bothers me about hardware RAID support in linux is the lack of a single set of management/monitoring tools that will work with every driver. With OpenBSD 4 you can just use sensord.
OpenBSD doesn't have quite the hardware coverage Linux does in this area, but who wants to use stuff like aacraid anyway when you have to troll the net for closed-source Dell tools to check your array status?
Anyway, thanks again, OpenBSD team. Good work.
Hands in my pocket
Wow. Seriously, wow. That MUST be deliberately misleading.
The BSD licence means that the authors can't, even if they wanted to, withhold security patches from you and nobody else. You can just get the patch from someone else who has it.
Furthermore, OpenBSD asking for donations is no difference from Mozilla getting donation, OpenOffice getting corporate support or MySQL having a corporate company employing its development team. In fact OpenBSD's model is probably less influenced by profit agenda than all of the abovementioned projects.
What's more, they manage to keep up with OpenBSD's reputation of begin perhaps the most secure operating system available to consumers, bar none. And all this in their spare time, putting up with FUD like what you've just spouted, and not getting half the recognition they deserve. If you ask me, they are the knights of the open source world. Or something.
I hate printers.
Aside from the joy of it for those that are so inclined, the main reason for working on other architectures is because it often brings to light subtle errors in code--particularly in the compiler--because of the differences in the hardware's instructions and such.
In the case of the VAX and Alphas, both out-dated platforms to many people, they've both been quite good at making coding errors surface, so they're very useful for that if nothing else.
If memory serves in fact, one of the OpenBSD devs, Miod, fixed such an error in the compiler that was picked up because the VAX puked in building X on the same compiler instructions that other platforms were perfectly willing to tolerate.
In the end it produces a better product for all of us since it can often help developers find and fix bugs--especially the hard-to-find and hard-to-duplicate varities. That's pretty cool.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
java 1.5 is native on openbsd/i386. it works as fine as you can expect java to run.