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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!
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
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.
[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.
Linux is only at 2.6.27.4, as if we're back in the 1980s. Though unix-like systems in general are relics from the 1970s.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
In other late breaking news, 100% of Coke drinkers prefer Coke to Pepsi.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
Anonymous cvs access is done over ssh, and the public keys are listed on the OpenBSD website. The ports tree includes checksums, and these are all verified automatically. So if you check the ssh key of the cvs server, all your ports are safe.
As for pre-built packages from FTP, I don't think there's anything in place for verification.
that's not a solution when you have applications processing information, and you switch over while your in the middle of processing requests. In my situation there isn't a single second the system isn't fielding 100's of requests. basicly it involves a hand shake where the client makes a requests and expects an answer, if you switch over the new system won't know the client is expecting an answer so you'd have to re engineer a black box system to do it somehow.
Ever heard of connection draining? You build systems with the expectation that they will fail. Any component at any given point in time should be expected to be broken, because it will be at some point. If your system can't handle bringing down a server for maintenance, then you have far bigger problems than picking a good OS. Good luck to you.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman