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OpenBSD 5.6 Released
An anonymous reader writes Just as per the schedule, OpenBSD 5.6 was released today, November 1, 2014. The theme of the 5.6 release is "Ride of the Valkyries". OpenBSD 5.6 will be the first version with LibreSSL. This version also removed sendmail from the base system, smtpd is the default mail transport agent (MTA). The installer no longer supports FTP, network installs via HTTP only. The BIND name server will be removed from the OpenBSD base system. Its replacement comes in the form of the two daemons nsd(8) for authoritative DNS service and unbound(8) for recursive resolver service. OpenSSH 6.7 is included along with GNOME 3.12.2, KDE 4.13.3, Xfce 4.10, Mozilla Firefox 31.0, Vim 7.4.135, LLVM/Clang 3.5 and more. See a detailed log of changes between the 5.5 and 5.6 releases for more information. If you already have an OpenBSD 5.5 system, and do not want to reinstall, upgrade instructions and advice can be found in the Upgrade Guide (a quick video upgrade demo is here). You can order the 5.6 CD set from the new OpenBSD Store and support the project.
>The installer no longer supports FTP
With FTP acting as fragile as glass in the world of NAT and firewalls, I don't see this as a bad thing any longer. HTTP is reliable when serving large files these days.
OpenBSD is fantastic. Thanks to the developers who spend so much time to make it work well!
1. OpenBSD supports laptops, specifically Thinkpads, better than any other operating system not called Windows. Suspend/resume works, instantly.
2. Does not require PulseAudio, but can still output multiple channels from multiple apps at the same time. This was always a problem with ALSA.
3. PF is a lot easier to configure than ipfw. It is the firewall of OSX.
4. Man pages for EVERYTHING.
5. A simple init system. Whether or not it is better than systemd is debatable.
6. Not tied to any one desktop environment. Gnome 3.x is well-supported, but not requisite for anything.
7. The first place you will find updates for new wireless cards, OpenSSH, LibreSSL, libc (Android actually uses this instead of glibc).
8. Full disk encryption without requiring an unencrypted boot partition, unlike Linux.
9. Simple, text-based config files.
10. No need for HAL or *Kit or whatever flavour of the week abstraction layer is needed for interfacing with your hardware.
OpenBSD is not for everybody; there is a steep learning curve and a lot of software is not supported. But if you need a simple operating system that doesn't change much from release to release, it's worth checking out. If you are looking for an alternative to systemd (which I honestly have no problem with), check out OpenBSD before checking out FreeBSD, and I cannot stress this enough. FreeBSD developers don't use their own operating system; they run it in a Virtual machine on their Macs, and it shows. Suspend/resume has been broken there since 2008, and drivers for any recent Intel graphics adapter will not run (you cannot switch from Xorg to a console and back) properly. FreeBSD devs do not care about their OS; OpenBSD devs actually use their system.