Celebrating 20 Years of OpenBSD With Release 5.8 (openbsd.org)

badger.foo writes: 20 years to the day after the OpenBSD source tree was created for the new project, the project has released OpenBSD 5.8, the 38th release on CD-ROM (and 39th via FTP/HTTP). This release comes with four release songs instead of the usual one, and a long list of improvements over the last releases. (Probably a good time to donate to the project, too, even if you don't use it directly, because of all the security improvements that OpenBSD programmers contribute to the world.)

Comments

Re:I'll download and spin it up...

[spauldo]

I've been using OpenBSD and FreeBSD for years.

They're different, but not horribly so. Most basic configuration is similar, and they both have excellent documentation. FreeBSD does have a lot of features that OpenBSD lacks, but I think that's a good thing; I use OpenBSD for network services (firewall, DHCP, DNS, etc.) and it's dead simple to deal with. That simplicity can make unusual things easy - getting my firewall to run diskless and boot off the DHCP server, for instance.

My basic rule of thumb: if I need ZFS or jails, I use FreeBSD - otherwise, I use OpenBSD.

I tried to set up NetBSD as a backup server (since it can act as a ISCSI target), but the monitor I use in the server room freaks out every time I boot it. It does it with OpenBSD too, but if I boot it with the KVM somewhere else and switch after boot, it works with OpenBSD. Oh well, maybe next upgrade cycle, I'll get a better monitor for in there.

I've never tried GhostBSD, nor heard much about it.