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OpenBSD 4.4 Released
Linux blog writes "The new version of OpenBSD is available for download. There are lots of nifty new features to try out including OpenSSH 5.1 with chroot(2) support, Xenocara, Gnome 2.20.3, KDE 3.5.8, etc. Machines using the UltraSPARC IV/T1/T2 and Fujitsu SPARC64-V/VI/VII are now supported. It seems amazing to me that they keep delivering these new results on a six-month release cycle."
Congratulations to the OpenBSD team. BSD is far from dead!
Something like FreeBSD is very similar to Linux although they lack a good pre-built distro like Ubuntu. Hardware support in Linux is better.
OpenBSD on the other hand performs poorly and is several years behind in certain OS features. In the case of hardware, it's many many years behind Linux (they only relatively recently even got multiple CPU support). Then there is the issue of the many arrogant asses that think they are somehow better than everyone else even though they're basically just off working in some corner in the dark working on already outdated ideas. Of course you find people like that all over but when they run the whole project it can really be a turn-off.
Congrats to the OpenBSD team.
In related news, NetBSD 5.0 should be released soon, too.
BSD proves Netcraft wrong again.
This is not flamebait. I encourage moderators to read the guidelines at http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
The parent did use "a name" but it was not an insult so much as voicing the consensus judgment of the behavior of the leader of OpenBSD, Theo de Raadt. de Raadt is, in fact, an "arrogant ass[]"; if a moderator thinks this is calling names rather than an accurate description, I encourage that moderator to peruse the history of Slashdot articles about de Raadt, perhaps starting with http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/17/127206
Thank you and let's all try to make Slashdot a better and more interesting place.
No, the UltraSPARC T2 was released in October 2007.
T1s aren't quite three years old yet, and T2s have only been out for just over a year.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I have been regularly running OpenBSD for the last 8 years, and I have never been disappointed. 4.4 keeps up the string of solid releases.
I have a thinkpad that runs it as well.
Yes, I buy the CDs, and a few shirts, and donate $ when I can. Hopefully it keeps them working on the next release. I don't know what I would do without it running my DNS and other servers.
KDE 3.5.8? Why so old... even if KDE 3.5.10 released in late August was too late to make it, KDE 3.5.9 came out in February, that's over 8 months.
although they lack a good pre-built distro like Ubuntu.
They do have a good pre-built distro. It's called PC-BSD. It's very good in my experience, very nice. And it's a breeze to install, just like Ubuntu.
I like Ubuntu even better. But PC-BSD is very fine, really, it deserves recognition. It's well worth trying.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
This site is geared towards Linux users that want to learn OpenBSD: http://www.openbsd101.com/
It was flamebait on several counts, the first being FreeBSD is not anything like Linux. Kernel, filesystem, hier, SMP, licensing, and general philosophy are greatly different.
I personally think Theo de Raadt is a great project leader, even if he leaves a bit to be desired in tactfully dealing with situations. He's a bit abrasive in way House, MD is abrasive. I think Linus Torvalds is an ass but if I were to use that a basis of running down his work, then I too would be guilty a flamebait.
The rest of the OpenBSD criticisms are simply there to troll, nothing substantive at all. SMP has been there for quite awhile.
Please let people spend their mod points how they see fit even if they don't agree with your viewpoint.
Thank you and let's all try to make Slashdot a better and more interesting place.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Yes, OpenBSD's performance is behind that of Linux and FreeBSD (which are neck-and-neck.) However, performance is still quite adequate. OpenBSD has a kind of austere simplicity, however, that makes it a pleasure to administer. It certainly has a niche.
the problem i have with openbsd is it's 12 month EOL cycle. in a production environment upgrading the entire OS ever 12 months so you can continue to get security patches just doesn't cut it. perhaps the openbsd team could put up a paid for extended patch team or something to help fund their efforts? that would certainly be attractive to companies using it for firewalls and as security devices.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
[Death walking away muttering]
Death "SO DISAPPOINTING"
They're significantly behind Linux in many areas, but don't mistake optimization for specific workloads as obsolescence. Performance sucks once you hit userspace, but most OpenBSD machines spend almost all their time in the kernel, routing and firewalling, tasks for which they are quite competitive with Linux.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Did you just copy/paste this entire post from Wikipedia's article about Slashdot??? Protip: Next time, actually type your redundant flames, rather than stealing them.
Linux doesn't take anything from BSD. Everything in Linux is free for BSD to use as long as the code stays free, ie under the GPL. While if apple takes code from BSD, you will never see that code again.
Every bit of BSD code that Apple uses is still available from them (either under the original license, or the OSI approved APSL).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Congrats to open/safe bsd guys. Just a bit momentarily confused because of version number 4.4 - as if we were back in the '90s.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
OpenBSD puts a lot of money in consultant's pockets. It's hands down the most secure OS on the market. Got a client that needs a secure redundant firewall but can't afford big, over-priced Cisco gear? OpenBSD to the resuce. OpenBGP, CARP, etc. You can do things with OpenBSD and 15K worth of hardware that would cost six or seven times as much money with dedicated networking hardware. And, you can do it better. So, if you need some easy extra cash get into OpenBSD and start making a killing in the firewall business in your hometown. When you get a reputation for solid, secure systems (they'll wonder how you do it :)) donate some cash to the OpenBSD Foundation and buy some CDs.
Read the guidelines.
Wrong comments are not flamebait. Wrong comments should be left unmoderated.
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
Actually, wrong comments should be modded "overrated" you fucking dipshit. See? Now THAT was flamebait you asshole!
It's Lupus, go die already, *hugs and kisses.* - Greg
I normally consider it otiose to comment on moderation, but given that most of this thread has been moderated flamebait, it seems that the guidelines can't be clear enough for somebody. Someone with an agenda is clearly modding down anyone with whom he doesn't agree.
You should have been running OpenBSD, daddy.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Let me just point out that PC-BSD's kernel is the very same FreeBSD, nothing related to OpenBSD; let me also just point out that the standard FreeBSD distribution combines the advantages of Gentoo's (customizing the building of packages to your needs or desires) and of Debian (superb dependency tracking, very fast on searches, always up-to-date (if you consider Debian Unstable)).
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
He's interested in humans. Disconnected, yes, but not really an asshole. He is also freakin' brilliant at what he does, so that would be a huge compliment. He's basically suppose to be Sherlock Holmes. And who wouldn't want to be the Holmes of Software? :)
PC-BSD, like DesktopBSD, is FreeBSD based. Don't confuse FreeBSD and OpenBSD - they share many userspace utilities and their kernels have some common history, but they are not the same OS.
Basically, OpenBSD is the one that is rabid about security - makes great server software.
NetBSD is the ultra-portable one - good for unusual hardware.
FreeBSD has excellent support for commodity hardware. It is the one used to make the user-friendly distros.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
How is it that these comments are raised again and again with rarely a genuflect towards the possibility that our social norms and our technical norms exist at cross purposes?
It is often pointed out that humans are hierarchical animals. What's pointed out far less often is that we are also polarizing animals. For the most part, it's pretty darn hard to get a community of people to rest comfortably within a dual hierarchy: the polarizers will either succeed in driving the culture toward a political hierarchy, or they will succeed in driving the culture toward a technical meritocracy, politics be damned.
What evidence do we have that people can be effective and polite at the same time? NASA? I think not. When it became a political culture, shuttles exploded.
Is Linus an ass, or does he choose to occupy the niche that has proven viable? Larry Wall has taken a gentler stance toward his position as benevolent dictator for life, and he's not getting much good press lately. Nice guys finish last or at best, five years late.
Every time this subject comes up, there is a lot of chattering from the "How to win friends and influence people" crowd that despite the technical merits of X, it doesn't suit that person's social worldview, as if technical merit belongs in a marriage with popularity and approval.
As far as I can tell from my experience, the majority of PC marriages of that ilk are functionally destitute, yet the chattering never ceases that the world *ought* to operate that way. On what basis? What annoys me most is that this chattering rarely includes even the slightest nod toward justification.
This is another fact about human nature: we seem to have an inbuilt algorithm for determining that certain kinds of opinions can be safely put forward with little or no justification (e.g. "that's just how things are"), and which kinds of opinion can automatically be called to account. In my experience, the hierarchy of what must be fully justified and what needn't be has been pretty much decided on the grade 3 playground.
There seems to be a lot of people out there who are offended to the core that Theo's objectionable personality has been associated with so much durable accomplishment. In my opinion, that's just a bad case of shooting the messenger. Given broad human instincts toward hierarchy and polarization, it was as inevitable as the rise of the spam king having created a zero-cost anonymous distribution channel.
The underlying problem is that there is no reliable chalk line between civility and brown-nosing, and it's hell to police in a project that could otherwise rely on more objective measures. It's kind of like Sudoku. A complete waste of time, but I enjoy it anyway. We've made almost no progress (as a social organism) at efficiently policing the line between civility and brown-nosing, but so many among our ranks seem to prefer sliding down this slippery moss bank over the firm traction of dystopian merit.
I suspect you'd agree that there's nothing wrong with using a stable OS. There's everything wrong with trying to "re-invent the OS" every few years using some wet-behind-the-ears college grads, and still -- after 25 years -- not being able to ship a dispatcher that can handle a spinning process without roaching the whole box. Yes, I'm looking at you, Windows. OS/MFT could handle a spinning process. Even CTSS could handle a spinning process, and that was written in 1960.
As far as the old saw that Unix/Linux/BSD/whatever "can't support a real graphical shell," have a peek at OS X. The academics who pronounced that a microkernel was the way to go (where are you now, QNX? Hurd? CMU?) found out that idea wasn't all-she-wrote either. OK, I enjoyed watching the file system crash on QNX without crashing the kernel, but there isn't much you can do without a file system (unless you're running a nuculer power plant, which was QNX's favorite example), so who cares?
Age is good. Stability is good. These are good things.
> What does Linux take from BSD? All those vendor supplied drivers? The userland? The vast array of high quality filesystems?
The overwhelmingly dominant SSH implementation?
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
woo! Only three posts into the topic and we're already into the age of freedom debate, way to go for starting the forest fire of a flamewar.
Don't worry about me though, you just keep beating that rotting dead horse corpse.
As a Debian admin and user, I have to point out that Debian also makes this process trivial. Gentoo is overrated; Debian is the best OS to admin I've come across, whether Linux or BSD.
Although GPL is not free in the BSD sense, there are people like myself who would be happy to dual license my code under both GPL and BSD.
Don't ask, don't get.
Where's the boot-on-all-hardware fork of MacOS then?
I hate printers.
I didn't realise people still use lunix. Perhaps the problem is your hardware being to old instead of a driver problem?
Unlike Linux, the BSDs don't come preinstalled with tons of third-party software you didn't ask for, because there's a clear separation between the base UNIX operating system and the ports/pkgsrc collection. If you're too damn dumb to go into /usr/pkgsrc and take the 2 minutes to install Bash, I think BSD is probably above you. Stick with Ubuntu.
The Mach/BSD parts are darwin. The GUI parts aren't derived from BSD code.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
That sounds more like a description of Mycroft Holmes than Sherlock.
Yes and don't forget the other three since you're trying to be complete:
DragonFly BSD - clustering (freebsd 4 fork) good for servers.
MirBSD - OpenBSD fork (3.x i think)
MidnightBSD - FreeBSD 6.x fork (although bringing in 7.x features now) Focused on desktop use. Not at PC-BSD usability levels yet.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
As far as I know, OpenBSD tries to be fully POSIX compliant. Not just to document the points where they are not compliant. And OpenBSD is the last project I would critisize with respect to documentation.
Even Linux man pages (more or less all of them) have by now info how does/doesn't particular tool/call conform to POSIX.
As long as Linux insists on shipping tedious GNU info pages instead of normal man pages, I'm NOT interested.
As much as I wanted to try BSDs, unfortunately, most of them (OpenBSD included) remain kind of toy for basement kids who do not know anything better.
Son, I think you need to read more and talk less.
Advice: on VPS providers
For a distro that prides itself on proactive security, OpenBSD seems to lack one security feature most mainline Linux distributions have: some form of package signing. I know package signing doesn't make a system 100% percent secure from Trojan'ed applications. I'm not a security expert, but I think having signed packages helps reduce the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks, say, from malicious DNS redirection that points the user to a bogus mirror even if the "real" mirror (which presumably is running a secure BSD system) isn't compromised. It seems to me the most secure OpenBSD system is one without anything besides the base system installed, good enough for a server, but unfortunately not for everyday Desktop use in Facebook era.
Spend $20 on a new ethernet card? I used a cheap off-the-shelf realtek on openbsd for years. On a Sun SPARC, no less.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Of all the ways to moderate this, for once "offtopic" isn't the right one ;)
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
As long as bash is not default shell, less is not default pager and VIM is not default text editor - I'm NOT interested.
Lucky for you, less is more and pdksh isn't a bad shell (not everyone loves bash..). In the BSD realm it's extremely easy to add a package or even compile it from scratch via ports, so even vim is within your reach! If you don't like messing with defaults, might I suggest that neither openbsd nor linux are for you?
And find doesn't search by default in current directory.
Hmm.. OSX, Solaris, Free/OpenBSD all seem to require directory specification in find. I thought I remembered it being required in linux as well--when did linux distros change?
And grep isn't recursive.
hint: "-R"
And, for **** sake, where is POSIX conformance statement??? Even Linux man pages (more or less all of them) have by now info how does/doesn't particular tool/call conform to POSIX.
Exactly where you would expect to find it--in the man page. Where exactly did you look, and why are you getting so worked up? Linux, BSDs, etc can be complicated if you're new to them--that's one of the strongest things about the BSDs--consistent system design and excellent documentation.
If you're not familiar with how to look in manpages, here you go:
As much as I wanted to try BSDs, unfortunately, most of them (OpenBSD included) remain kind of toy for basement kids who do not know anything better.
You wouldn't be attempting a poorly researched troll, would you? I think I just wasted my time :-/
*BSD might be true Unix, but this is not something to be particularly proud of, as Unix has history of being worst platform for both users and developers.
If you don't like unix, you don't like linux. (note that that DOESN'T affirm the opposite--if you do like unix, that doesn't mean you have to like linux!)
In other late breaking news, 100% of Coke drinkers prefer Coke to Pepsi.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
... the standard FreeBSD distribution combines the advantages of Gentoo's (customizing the building of packages to your needs or desires) ...
You have that backwards.
Wasn't that one of the bad guys in "Under Siege: 2"?
Here's the song with lyrics for this release: 4.4: "Trial of the BSD Knights" http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#44
Thanks. I've admined clusters and individual machines at plenty of places I've worked. I know what RHEL is like, because I still admin a RHEL cluster of 12 machines to serve a high-traffic website. Let me tell you it sucks. Just because there's a GUI to do some intricate change doesn't make it in any way good. Come on, instead of resorting to insults, give me a good reason why RHEL is better to administer than Debian.
You are full of shit.
Q: we seem to have an inbuilt algorithm for determining that certain kinds of opinions can be safely put forward with little or no justification
A: I believe it's called ego.
You are where you are at the time you are there.
Lucky for you, less is more and pdksh isn't a bad shell (not everyone loves bash..). In the BSD realm it's extremely easy to add a package or even compile it from scratch via ports, so even vim is within your reach! If you don't like messing with defaults, might I suggest that neither openbsd nor linux are for you?
Reminds of the saying: "Linux is for those who hate Windows, BSD's are those who love UNIX".
Solaris is also heavily criticized by the Linux crowd for not mindlessly following the GNU "standards" - OTOH Sun has done a much better job with backwards compatibility than Linux.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Apple releases the free code if and when it chooses to, sometimes only after repeated prodding. Apple is very likely going to be on the bad end of a lawsuit regarding GPL violations because there are still versions of XCode that they have never released the GCC source for (XCode 2.5 I think? I don't recall which.)
Apple regards the open source community as a convenience, not as partners.
Until House's brother comes on the show and solves the one case House can't while being somehow an even bigger, more arrogant ass, I entirely agree.
I look forward to them finding a character that can be even more humorous, more unapologetic than Hugh Laurie for that role.
The new metamod isn't very meta.
That's like saying that water isn't very dry. The new metamod system is totally NOT meta at all -- in fact, it's completely braindead.
The old one was tolerable, but what I'd really like to see is a 'This comment should have been moderated xxxxxx' style system.
I would also like to see a -1, Wrong moderation.
I would also love it if people would actually think about what 'Redundant' actually means and would understand that 'I don't agree' != 'Troll'.
*/me prepares to be moderated -1, Wrong*
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
SMP may have been there for awhile, but is SMP and software RAID supported yet? When I last checked (which was admittedly a long time ago), the only way to get both SMP and software RAID was to compile a custom kernel.
This might not sound like a big deal, but OpenBSD developers aren't very friendly towards people who compile their own kernels. They're certainly not supported, and you're lucky if you get any replies past the standard "custom kernels are not supported, so stop using one" message.
Hmmmmm, and what if I want said third-party software... Last time I checked, this is what Desktop Linux is about... I get it, though. BSD is not a desktop OS. Period.
Even Linux man pages (more or less all of them) have by now info how does/doesn't particular tool/call conform to POSIX.
As long as Linux insists on shipping tedious GNU info pages instead of normal man pages, I'm NOT interested.
Show me single Linux distro which removed man.
The "info" weirdo is for GNU tool only. All normal software is pretty happy to live in man pages.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
That's sad. I was planning to run it on my T800.
I'm not that dumb. It is just starts eating into my production time quickly.
I can make out of fresh install of Debian something useful within half of an hour. And I can easily maintain it that way (weekly "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" rarely takes longer than one minute).
With BSD it never was the case: one or two days are spent on making out of the system something more useful than M$DOS. Later on, patching is also relatively time consuming.
P.S. And broken ports are also not rarity.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
As much as I wanted to try BSDs, unfortunately, most of them (OpenBSD included) remain kind of toy for basement kids who do not know anything better.
You wouldn't be attempting a poorly researched troll, would you? I think I just wasted my time :-/
You didn't. It is nice to know that BSD though slowly is also moving somewhere.
I tried *BSD last time about 2.5 years ago (thanks to free VM software it is quite easy) and situation wasn't much improved compared to when I tried FreeBSD about 8 years ago: you still had to do too much hand waving to have a working system. By "working system" of course I mean system which I can use to do my work. Out of box, BSD is sort of M$DOS: bare command prompt, where you need to install and configure everything before you can do something with it.
I do not might wasted gigs of Debian/Sidux/Ubuntu installs: I lost few gigs (which are penny per kilos this days) but I save much more time since I do not need to configure everything. Most of the things come with decent default configs - but some require attention.
*BSD might be true Unix, but this is not something to be particularly proud of, as Unix has history of being worst platform for both users and developers.
If you don't like unix, you don't like linux. (note that that DOESN'T affirm the opposite--if you do like unix, that doesn't mean you have to like linux!)
I do not like BSD. I do not like Unix. But I like Linux.
Linux - Thanks God - is not Unix.
Unix now is more or less corporate tool (e.g. Solaris, HP-UX, AIX) which you might end up using since your business runs on it. But as to plain user, they have nothing to offer out of box. And of course, since business runs on Unix, you would refrain from installing all the end-user stuff on the business critical systems. Best experience with Unix is achieved - as it was many times confirmed in practice - by using Linux as a client.
BSD is good as development community. It is good as technology preview. But that's about it. Using it do some work in business is quite complicated due to very steep learning curve. And even after that you would find that Linux is much much more interoperable that BSD or commercial Unix and much easier to use in practically any environment. "Easier to use" of course means "can do much more work on it without distractions."
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Solaris is also heavily criticized by the Linux crowd for not mindlessly following the GNU "standards"
I would be last to push "GNU standards" as GNU tools are also by now quite old. If you would check Savannah where most GNU tools are maintained, you can easily find for any tool bug report with flamewar where maintainers try to fend off people proposing new features.
Problem is that GNU now is also stuck in some past.
If you would look closer to Linux installations, you would notice that only few pieces of GNU software are left in. And the list of the GNU software is pretty constant, while Linux universe is now more and more densely populated by tools developed elsewhere.
And frankly, as much as I do not like GNU, their text-tools and file-tools are far more superior to anything out there. If it makes users more productive - why not to use it??
As to Solaris... My critic of Solaris would be that they do not preinstall decent shell, normal text editor and pager. I actually addressed to one Solaris engineer the question: when Solaris would ship with sh/vi/more which support keyboard? He laughed and answered that actually Sun is revisiting preinstalled software on Solaris 10, because I'm not alone who find default setup useless and counterproductive.
P.S. GCC and glibc are kind of exceptions and due to heavy Linux bias (and fast development cycle) they are more or less all the time on verge of being forked and made independent from GNU/FSF. FSF tried few times intervene with projects but they got immediate response from developers and maintainer "try that again and we all leave." So they do not try anything. GNU/FSF are politicians and religious leadership - they can't without engineers. GCC and glibc are de facto independent from GNU/FSF now.
P.P.S.
Sun has done a much better job with backwards compatibility than Linux.
I'd be careful with that. "Backward compatible" is not too far from "retarded."
I do not think that following steps of M$DOS and M$Wind0ze (which still carry 25yo(!) errors and mistakes for sake of backward compatibility) would get you anywhere.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Note that this depends a lot on the system. OpenBSD still doesn't have fine-grained locking in the kernel. This means only one process can be in a system call at a time, irrespective of how many processors you have. This means that, for normal workloads, it doesn't scale beyond a small number of processors / cores. I believe someone is working on this, but it is a huge amount of effort. It took the FreeBSD guys several years to go from the big giant lock to fine-grained locking.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It is incredibly trivial to change these things. I'm the most lazy admin ever, and it took me five minutes from install to changing the default shell to bash.
Changing the default editor doesn't take much longer, nor does changing the pager.
Don't like how the userland tools work, you can find the gnu tools fairly easily.
No posix compliance statement is necessary, it's redundant in *BSD.
Having used both Linux (Gentoo, [k]Ubuntu, Red hat/Fedora Core, etc) and *BSDs extensively, I have the same oppinion of Linux as you do of *BSD.
My only complaint of BSD is that the driver support is somewhat less advanced than Linux, beyond that, configuration is easy, documentation is INCREDIBLE, and (at least in the FreeBSD crowd), the user base is extremely helpful and friendly.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
1
Even Linux man pages (more or less all of them) have by now info how does/doesn't particular tool/call conform to POSIX.
As long as Linux insists on shipping tedious GNU info pages instead of normal man pages, I'm NOT interested.
Show me single Linux distro which removed man.
Show me a single Linux distro which has a man page for either bash or grep, two tools you mention. For that matter, show me a single Linux distro that has documentation that is even remotely as good as OpenBSD's. OpenBSD's man pages are truly beautiful.
The "info" weirdo is for GNU tool only. All normal software is pretty happy to live in man pages.
Well, not bash, grep, tr, cut, join, paste, make, cc, bc, awk, gdb, the C library, less/more, m4, ncurses, sed, tar, which, who...yeah, all the "normal" software has man pages.
Advice: on VPS providers
YMMV
:-P
First time I installed FreeBSD (without any previous *nix knowledge) I had a server running in 5 minutes.
Adding the packages was a no-brainer through sysinstall. Updating I do through compiling (portupgrade) but can be done just as easily by specifying to use packages only which is just as fast as using aptitude.
I've seen no difference in ease on installing and maintaining Linux and BSD systems.
Windows systems on the other hand...
home
It is nice to know that BSD though slowly is also moving somewhere
Everything in my email has been true of BSDs for a LONG time. POSIX conformance statements, recursive grep, less is more, etc.
I do not like BSD. I do not like Unix. But I like Linux.
I think we have differing conceptions of what unix is.
BSD is good as development community. It is good as technology preview. But that's about it. Using it do some work in business is quite complicated due to very steep learning curve.
I stridently disagree with this. As I and others have been attempting to say, if you actually look at the man page, look at documentation, etc, the BSDs have a huge advantage over pretty much all linux distros. When I first started playing with linux/bsds, I think the first one i used was an ancient slackware, then some redhat, debian, etc. When I first used BSD I used FreeBSD and have never regretted it. From the FreeBSD handbook to the manpages to the standardized and logical system layout, the learning curve was far easier for me.
And even after that you would find that Linux is much much more interoperable that BSD or commercial Unix and much easier to use in practically any environment
What does that even mean? How is linux "mouch much more interoperable than BSD" ? I run netatalk, nfs, samba and apache on my FreeBSD server. I run OpenSSH on all of them. Almost all software for linux will run on the BSDs. Some do require some modfication. (Actually, most of the BSDs have a linux compatibility layer that let you run linux binaries as if native).
If you're talking a barebones FreeBSD install versus a ready-to-go Ubuntu--I won't disagree about off the bat enduser usability. If you compare PC-BSD or a preconfigured FreeBSD+gnome/kde/whatever to Ubuntu, on the other hand...
The new metamod system is totally NOT meta at all -- in fact, it's completely braindead.
Agreed. I used to metamod all the time, but I refuse to touch the mess that is the new metamod system.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Spoiler Alert.
House may have a step-brother, as he isn't biologically related to his mother's only husband.
What universe do you come from? Bash has a huge man page. GNU grep has a good man page. A Linux installation which doesn't have both of them is broken.
Yes, I have seen Linux distributions (RedHat) with a sloppy attitude to man pages, and yes, it's laughable that the GNU yes(1) manpage first lists the two trivial command-line options and then goes on to say: "the full documentation for yes is maintained as a Texinfo manual" but it's never as bad as you believe. And Debian is very acceptable, possibly as good as OpenBSD (which I've never used).
Then you install it? Or if you're using FreeBSD, browse the binary package list during the installer and choose what you want preinstalled?
Please, go back to Ubuntu and stay there.
Oh, come on. It takes a couple of minutes to install bash from ports, and then you're done.
I can do the same with FreeBSD, and I can easily keep it up to date with one of the many available utilities in /usr/ports/ports-mgmt. Portsnap, portmanager, portupgrade...all of these are easy commands to use.
I'm sitting next to a 64-bit dual-core FreeBSD box that took me half an hour to set up. You're flat-out lying.
Show me a single Linux distro which has a man page for either bash or grep, two tools you mention.
$ cat /etc/slackware-version /usr/man/man?/{grep,bash}.?.gz
/usr/man/man1/bash.1.gz /usr/man/man1/grep.1.gz
Slackware 12.1.0
$ ls
Show me a single Linux distro which has a man page for either bash or grep, two tools you mention. For that matter, show me a single Linux distro that has documentation that is even remotely as good as OpenBSD's. OpenBSD's man pages are truly beautiful.
My Gentoo box has both grep(1) and bash(1). They appear complete and do not refer the reader to the info pages (which may or may not be installed...I didn't check).
Now, that said, I do agree that the OpenBSD documentation is second to none, but the state of Linux documentation, at least on Gentoo, is not as bad as you seemed to imply.
*sigh* back to work...
softraid is enabled by default, no need to recompile anything. So is SMP, just use the default GENERIC.MP kernel.
{{.sig}}
Point taken.
When ideas fail, words become very handy.