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OpenBSD 5.0 Unleashed On the World
First time accepted submitter tearmeapart writes "A new version of the operating system that most of us would love to love, but probably hardly ever directly use, has been released. As scheduled, release 5.0 brings support for more hardware, network improvements, and OpenSSH 5.9. The links: changelog; download; main 5.0 page; and how to order your OpenBSD products!"
...no but srsly, OpenBSD is not actually a giant blowfish out to destroy our cities.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
link to the 5.0 song, art and lyrics.
http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#50
it is recommended best practice to play the correct release song while upgrading your openbsd.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Mac OS X is based upon BSD, you fucktard.
I use OpenBSD on many devices. I wouldn't run anything else for a firewall. I have already got a copy of 5.0 and setting it up on my work desktop now.
I remember trying to install this back in the 3.0 days, being thwarted by the fact that one of the authors of the software owned the copyright on the OS in ISO disc format, effectively making it impossible to get a version to install without paying him. After a few failed days of missing this or that file, and corrupt BitTorrent copies, I gave up, went back to FreeBSD (at the time).
It's Linux, direct from 2005!
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Ubuntu? I though eveyone has already switched to LMDE. Windows 8 my homework.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
So it's not corrupted by the utter crap that is Gnome 3 and Unity? SIGN ME UP.
Is 5.0 meant to be a major release? Looks like it is only the next version in the regular schedule. Why don't use 4.10 then?
It is crazy to think that shipping gnome 2.32, OpenBSD 5.0 has become much more desktop-friendly than Ubuntu.
Some people don't even like Gnome 3.
I can't decide whether to mod you "funny", "insightful", "flamebait", or "sad".
Maybe we need an "all of the above" category.
I get to rebuild my firewall from source yet again.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why is this news on the main page?
Because OpenBSD matters?
Ubuntu 11.10 is out too and Windows 8 will be out soon!
... as compared to them.
In other news, Kim Kardashian got divorced after 72 days!
Who?
Seriously, I didn't know they'd released a new version, and I was just wondering what I should do with a presently mothballed system I have. Now, I can build an OpenBSD sandbox to play with. Woohoo! :-)
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
If it makes you feel any better I'm using Lubuntu, Xubuntu, CentOS and various Windows installs in VMs between work and home. Just calling a spade, a spade.
The jury is still out as to whether KDE and Gnome from 2011 is an improvement over KDE and Gnome from 2005. Last I heard, Linus Torvalds was urging people to drop KDE and Gnome in favor of Xfce. As is typical in these GUI-centric times, you are confusing the GUI with the OS itself. If your first priority is the latest candy-coated GUI goop, then by all means stick with Ubuntu. If you're more concerned with stability, security and code correctness, then any of the BSD flavors may be for you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have been using it for 3 days! I ordered the CDs and they arrived early! I installed it to test out, plus I upgraded my works subversion server to this.
My server runs OpenBSD. It has a really good firewall, and it's absurdly secure. I'm not enough of a masochist to run it on a desktop but if you configure it properly it makes an excellent server OS.
OpenBSD is only perceptually secure. There is no unbiased audit process. There is no verification by a third party. There's just narcissism. The only reasons we think OpenBSD is secure are:
1) OpenBSD supporters said so.
2) Few people who say they use OpenBSD actually use OpenBSD. As a result, few security holes are found and published.
Please prove this wrong. All I'm seeing are various forms of cognitive distortion and fallacies when people try to prove to me that OpenBSD is truly more secure.
Kriston
Oh, I wasn't disagreeing.
I don't think I've ever seen OpenBSD with a GUI installed in the real world. I usually see it in DNS/DHCP and firewall roles... deep infrastructure for highly secure nets.
And not everyone thinks that change for the sake of change is good. Secondly foisting tablet UIs on desktop users is fucking stupid.
From the Distrowatch site, looks like the list of destops supported by BSD include AfterStep, Blackbox, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, GNOME, IceWM, KDE, Openbox, WMaker, Xfce. And as CarsonChittom pointed out below, it's offering 2 choices of KDE - 3.5.10 and 4.4.5. Chances are that when their Gnome 3.2 is ready, it'll be offered alongside 2.32. My favorite aspect - it offers both AfterStep & WindowMaker - two GNUSTEP based DEs.
As an aside, even Firefox 3.5.19 and 3.6.18 are included. As well as version 5 - thay ain't up to 7.x as yet.
Linux distros would do well to do what the BSDs do - offer a wide choice of desktops, so that everyone can pick their own w/ minimum heartburn. All 3 BSDs - Open, Free & Net offer the wide choice of desktops. Wonder how widespread is the driver support for OBSD, particularly for Wi-Fi?
Larry hasn't yet gotten around to buying them out.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Furries make the internet go.
I dunno what crack these ppl are smoking, but not only is OBSD more secure than most other OSes and makes an excellent server/netapp, but is an awesome desktop and/or HTPC. Been using OpenBSD as my primary desktop for years.
Im proud to celebrate another major BSD release and props to Theo for being a stubborn prick and stickin to his purist ways.
-HasH
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Does anybody know if there are pre-built VMware appliances with the new OpenBSD and VMware tools on them? Or will I need to do that from scratch?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't like Unity, but I do like Gnome 3. For me, it is just as desk-top friendly as its predecessors. I haven't had any trouble with it, and I'm surprised that people do. There may be an aesthetic dislike of it, but in terms of usability and friendliness for the desktop it is on par with what came before.
Only a git uses Mac OS X. A real OS is Darwin BSD! (To those modding parent down, it's a sarcastic joke. A lot of OS X (user space and kernel space (and nested parenthesis space!)) is derived from BSD).
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I remember trying to install this back in the 3.0 days, being thwarted by the fact that one of the authors of the software owned the copyright on the OS in ISO disc format, effectively making it impossible to get a version to install without paying him. After a few failed days of missing this or that file, and corrupt BitTorrent copies, I gave up, went back to FreeBSD (at the time).
OpenBSD always had a simple free install if you had a network connection. There were free bootable images available for download. You boot from one of these and it downloads components as needed during the install. The only thing you had to pay for was a CD that contained all components and could do an install *without* a network connection. At least for the current release, the full CD images for previous releases were available for download.
I keep wanting to try one of the BSDs out on a preliminary basis to see how it compares to Linux, but honestly every one of them has irked me from the point of installation. I've tried FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and PC-BSD.
The former two were somewhat cryptic to me, despite 10 years of Linux experience. I've done everything from manage servers to develop for embedded systems, and I always managed to figure things out. But FreeBSD, for example, gives me this somewhat counter-intuitive menu to go through, most of which I figured out, despite my lack of understanding of BSD partition types and all that. The problem though came from the packages. If you don't do anything, it just defaults to a console installation. And that's fine for some situations, sure. But actually trying to install the GUI was another story. I felt like a complete idiot trying to figure out their menus. It wasn't smart enough to just realize that the packages it might need aren't on the basic install CD, so initially I couldn't even find Gnome to install it. Immediately I was turned off by this seemingly primitive package system. But even when you get into the menu to select an internet source, it's a huge mess. I tried to pick Gnome, but it seemed that no matter what I did, I ended up with a plain CLI installation without even basic X. I had no idea where I was going wrong. I tried sysinstall afterward, read some stuff online, but I could not make the damn thing work. So I ended up trying to do it from the command line instead, which in fact was a million times more straightforward than their interface. But without knowing what all packages I actually needed for a full install without digging around, and upon realizing I still would have to manually edit my config files to make X launch with Gnome and all, I just threw my hands up and said forget that mess. If I wanted to go to that much trouble just to try something out, I'd install Arch or Gentoo or something. It's also worth pointing out that pkg_add is a very ugly tool, and not nearly as informative of progress as, say, APT. Perhaps I'm spoiled from all of my Linux use, though.
PC-BSD is supposed to be the most friendly, yet not only did it contradict itself in how much space it would require between two different install attempts, but the first time it failed after the install began, and the second time it said it needed more space than I had allocated in the partitions (and that was both with auto-allocate as well as me doing it manually). Considering there's absolutely nothing different you can choose at that stage of the installation to affect disk space or anything (selecting basic stuff like keyboard type), I have honestly no idea why it was different on each attempt. The third time, when I gave up and just created a bigger virtual partition than I wanted to originally allow it, it then appeared to start downloading a single huge image rather than separate packages. I canceled it after realizing it would take a million years to get from their slow server.
I heard that the release candidate for FreeBSD 9 had a friendlier installer, but a) it seemed pretty much the same text-based one to me, and b) none of the download mirrors in the installer would acknowledge the version I had and wouldn't let me download any packages.
I'm sure many BSD veterans will simply think I'm a moron, am too impatient, or maybe I just had a string of bad luck. And maybe you're right on all counts! And sure, I could go read tutorials on how to do it "properly." But honestly, after using so many variations of Linux over the years, all the way back to the much more cryptic Red Hat installations of yesteryear, you'd think I would be able to figure out BSD no problem. Instead, I just gave it a big sigh, threw my hands up, and said forget it. I haven't needed it so far, so I probably won't need it anytime soon either.
And yet the (stubborn) geek in me still wants to know if it's any better once it's actually up and running, because I know the kernel is supposed to be much cleaner and more optimized than Linux, so I doubt this will be my last attempt.
You missed his point; he knows that BSD is not Linux, he was saying that this is just like Linux from 2005.
I run OpenBSD/amd64 on a small Intel Atom box as a firewall.
It is lightweight, fast and reliable - so it's served me well.
I like gnome 3 too, I just found it too different and not really mature for the time being.
As every human, I need time to adapt, and gnome 3 do not provide for a good backwards-compatible interface (there is one but is a hack and it sucks) .
Even windows 8 has a fallback interface that looks exactly like windows 7.
This is how you install Openbsd. You can download a small iso for your usb/cd, and that will download anything needed thru the net.
Back in the version 3 days, you needed only a floppy or two to start such an install, nowdays is the same, but ppl mostly use usb sticks now (the floppy image still exists).
Going for randomly made iso images on bittorrent was a very stupid idea. The only reason i could see someone needing a whole iso is if they lack connectivity.
You can compare this install method to Debian netinstall, or Ubuntu minimal iso images.
TIP: The installation and configuration guide is called "FAQ" for some reason.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
The code is great. It's clean, understandable, and auditable.
Best I've seen.
Anyone who actually reads a decent portion of OpenBSD's cleaned up and perfected code, and its associated documentation, should fall in love with it.
Unfortunately their weird 'security at the expense of anything' will steer a lot of people away from ever digging that far into it. Their loss.
1. Somehow, Richard Stallman hasn't claimed that OpenBSD is also "the Gnu System".
2. The installer reminds me of Slackware from 1993.
3. The xdm desktop is totally Slackware from 1993.
4. The fvwm desktop menu. Ah, the memories.
openbsd 5.0.
It's like 1993 all over again.
W
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They're working the obsolescence angle. Nobody remembers how to compromise security on any OSS that old.
Any benchmarks with ZFS yet?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
As far as the GUI is concerned maybe but usability is a whole other story. You think a regular person would enjoy compiling updates from source? That's not too big an issue for power users though. However...
Besides that the biggest problems with OpenBSD on the desktop are poor performance and complete lack of any decent desktop virtualization for running things like Windows when needed. Hell, VirtualBox may be a poorly written piece of crap but it is open-source and even it isn't available for BSD.
Virtualization is the future and BSD lags way behind in that area.
.. in hindsight, was a bad move
I like how they never fuck around with their version number. Just keep incrementing it as they should do.
This news is clear evidence that OpenBSD's greatest years are coming to an end. With the advent of new and better operating systems such as Haiku and Puppy linux the old stalwart's days are numbered. If you want to install 5.0 and find out what the end really looks like, go right ahead. Nobody is stopping you.
I use OpenBSD for everything from online banking and web surfing with Chrome to playing games, to watching youtube and viewing PDFs and my photo collection. About the only desktop activity I can't do on OpenBSD is use Wine for windows emulation which isn't supported and probably never will be. But in a pinch they have qemu which I keep meaning to try out because unfortunately I still need to use MS Office for work. And I use gnome which very closely follows the latest releases. KDE is another story and is quite far behind but there's been a recent effort to finally get it updated and maybe the next release will have some of that work included.
They're actually far ahead in some areas. WiFi is a breeze to setup compared to some Linux distros. And they really do aim for extreely high standards (i.e. POSIX) compliance. The other area that's outstanding is the documentation. Most *commercial* products don't have the level of quality the openbsd documentation has.
Then why does the OpenBSD team have recognized leadership in the security industry, their wares are part of major OS such as HP/UX, Sun Solaris, sgi IRIX, and in products such as certain models of Cisco and Juniper routers and HP Procurve switches?
It's the "downgrade to upgrade" meme all over again. We saw it all the time with /. posters talking about "upgrading to XP" from Vista.
Now it's playing out with Linux.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I think later versions of Gnome are basically Linux-only, with a lot of desktop functionality being tied to low-level parts of Linux.
The -CURRENT Party line is that virtualization sucks. At least they've gotten around implementing multi-byte support, which used to be teh sucks. Maybe in 20 years, when the future is past.
It's the tweeter syndrome. People only see the first phrase you typed.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
I was referring to the OpenSSH and OpenSSL implementations that the OpenBSD team developed from scratch.
When will the next versions of NetBSD (5.2?) and FreeBSD (8.3?) be out?