Slashdot Mirror
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."
Good stuff. Hopefully some of those free drivers will get spread around to Linux as well.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Whew... On the press release, under "New/extended platforms", it says:
"OpenBSD/armish"
I read that as OpenBSD/amish. You can imagine the visions that swirled through my head at that point.
More
Are you sure about that?
d =Mozilla-search&va=Biannual+
which says biannual means "occurring twice a year"
compare with biennial
http://www.webster.com/dictionary/biennial+
"occurring every two years"
See for instance http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?sourcei
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
is that it can run Linux executables!
Turns out a specialized OS for a small number of users often ends up being something that can't be easily replaced. PF has availability features no one outside of Cisco can match, and they can't match them for what it costs us to use OpenBSD for the job.
For example, our Internet connection at work is managed by OpenBSD. If I rebooted our firewall, no one would notice, because the backup would kick in and it would preserve state for everything, even pre-existing TCP connections. You could be streaming music and it wouldn't even skip. How can I do that with Linux again?
"I can't run any of the stuff I need to run under OpenBSD, so why the heck should I even care about it?"
Hm. Whenever I have that problem, I just download the Linux version and run it under binary emulation.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
T-Shirts - Hideous
CD Set - More toxic landfill
Posters - see t-shirts above
Audio - got to be kidding
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
If you had read the articles linked you'd know that OpenRCS is an almost completely compatible replacement for the GNU RCS, it is a clean reimplementation. The idea being security and reliability improvements. OpenCVS will more of the same once completed, and perhaps after it's features are all complete will add additional things, but until then it is seeking only to be a complete replacement for the GNU CVS.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
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.
*sigh* back to work...
I have a Soekris vpn1401 and it works well, although I don't believe all the features are supported. IIRC, this is because hifn has not been forthcoming with their documentation. The vpn1201 is known to work as well. I'm not sure if later revisions (like the lan1461) work-- OpenBSD does not have a good relationship with hifn at the moment. BTW, I haven't done any benchmarking with my 1401, but the machine handles crypto much faster with than without it. That's all I can say.
You obviously don't know OpenBSD, it's the one that gets new drivers for wireless cards and removes ipf because of it's developer's interpretation of his licence. It's the one that will never move to a newer version of Apache, since it's licence is too restrictive. It's the one that rewrites compress to include all the functionality of gzip, just so it can remove gzip, and it's done the same for size, and diff, and grep...
The gcc is one of the last remaining non-BSD licensed bits in OpenBSD, OpenBSD has actively removed GPL and other licences from their codebase. No new GPLed software will ever be added to OpenBSD. If there was anything close to as portable as GCC and was BSD licensed, it would quickly get adopted and replace the GCC in OpenBSD. Tendra is nowhere near good enough and it is a long way away from being there, the kencc of plan9 is desirable, but under too restrictive of terms. OpenBSD developers have sought Bell Lab's release of the compiler under BSD-like terms, but without sucess.
While both NetBSD and FreeBSD lack in the constitution to be a BSD, instead seeking to compete and perhaps be a Linux distribution, by including binary blobs, Project Evil and various CDDL and APSL bits. OpenBSD is the fighter, it's the FSF of the BSDs and hates the viral and restrictive nature of the GPL. It also hates the increasingly bad support for non-i386-based hardware, thus it having to ship two gcc versions.
Really, if the developers cared about BitTorrent, it would be reimplemented and in the base - obviously that is not the case. So if someone wants it integrated, they would have to make the implementation, having it be in C and licensed BSD, and submit both a patch set to integrate it and an explaination of why they think OpenBSD developers ought to give a damn.
Even then, if the developers didn't want it, it wouldn't be integrated.
But as I said, you obviously don't know OpenBSD, or you'd have known that is how things work there.
Also worth noting, OpenBSD is not a, "distro," it's a fully functional, self-contained operating system. It's ps is the OpenBSD ps, not the GNU one, or the FreeBSD one, or the OpenSolaris one, or the Darwin one, but the OpenBSD one. The same goes for pf, cat, arp, ifconfig and the other bits and bobbles inside, true, there are programmes from external sources, such as bind, apache and gcc, but those are the exception rather than the rule.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.