OpenBSD 4.0 Released

Undeadly Halloween writes, "On October 18th, OpenBSD celebrated its 11th birthday and ten years of punctual biannual releases. Now it's time for OpenBSD 4.0, which includes tons of new drivers for wireless, network, and storage chips. Consider helping the project by buying the new goodies (CD set, t-shirt, poster, Audio CD). And discover what's new and what battles developers must face daily to support new hardware in the traditional interview featuring nearly 20 developers."

Comments

Laptop Vendors need to step up

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole documentation firestorm recently didn't seem to stop their progress. The issue remains, how to get the chip vendors to provide documentation that allows writing drivers for OpenBSD in this case, and all the other OSs. Maybe the pressure needs to come from a different side.

What would Broadcom or Intel do if Dell or Hewlett Packard told them to provide documentation for each of the chips in the laptops or desktops. If it became a business decision, no Dell laptops with a non-documented Broadcom chip, would it make Broadcom wake up? Or does this argument hit a brick wall, a) they are in bed together already and of one mind. or b) Dell/HP couldn't care less about what some minor segment of the market wants?

Still, I like the looks of OpenBSD 4.0 and my order is on its way.

Re:Laptop Vendors need to step up

[Dan Ost]

Even if they're of one mind now, putting pressure on Dell, HP, and the rest might
make them change their minds later. The key is to make this as visible an issue
as possible.

Talk to the chip manufacturers.
Talk to the OEMs.
Talk to the people who do the purchasing for your company. If you're lucky,
they might start asking the right questions when they place an order. That's
the kind of thing that makes Dell/HP/etc take notice.

Re:Why support it?

[evilviper]

I can't run any of the stuff I need to run under OpenBSD,

Name it, and stop trolling.

OpenBSD is a normal Unix system (most software compiles), supports FreeBSD and Linux binary emulation. Has Wine in ports, etc.

No... the best feature is the research

[HighOrbit]

By research, I mean the novel approaches they take to acheive new functionality in firewalling, routing, hardware drivers, and cryptography. They also have a reputation for coding "correctness" in improving the basic BSD/Unix utilities that are then used by other projects. I tend to think of the OpenBSD project as an extremely productive research institution run on the cheap. My opinion is that they are probably on a level close to Sun and its multi-million dollar R&D in pumping out Unix inovations.

No, I don't run OpenBSD myself right now (I have in the past), because I currently have no compelling need of its unique features that would justify me moving away from the comfort of apt-get for binary updates. The source-only updates are my only real complaint about OpenBSD, and even that is because I'm basically too lazy to deal with it myself.