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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!
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/
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.
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
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.
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.