“Todd Fries and Todd Miller happily send along notice that OpenBSD 3.2 has been released. It’s available by FTP, CDROMs are shipping, and is CVS if you want to source upgrade. This is a big release for OpenBSD with many substantial changes. Many users will want to reinstall from scratch and not upgrade, as architecture changes on some platforms as well as enhanced security features are best taken advantage of that way. Read on for the release notes.” Read the full release notes at Deadly.org.
OpenBSD 3.2 Released
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– New subsystems included with 3.2
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o The sparc platform now uses ELF binaries.
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I am presently running OpenBSD 3.1 on my SparcStation 20. Does anyone know what the benefit is for having ELF binaries instead of a.out (or whatever it was before)?
between the bsds of the world? open,free,net. they all sound the same to me. what makes each one different?
FreeBSD is just the free evolution of i386BSD from the beginning of the ’90s.
Then, NetBSD was forked, with only goal to get ported to as many platforms as possible.
And in 1995, Theo forked NetBSD to OpenBSD, with sole purpose of creating the most secure BSD known to man.
So, if you want to run seemlessly on many platforms, choose NetBSD, if you want security, choose OpenBSD and if you want a simple server or even a desktop with most application support, get FreeBSD.
The BSDs have a common ancestor…but they have differing focuses…
OpenBSD is security focused…very good for building firewalls and servers with
NetBSD is focused on portability…it runs on more systems than Linux does last I knew…if you have old and obscure hardware that you want UNIX for…NetBSD is the way to go
FreeBSD is a good general purpose system..best for servers and workstations…the “Linux” of the BSDs
hope that clears things up
-bytes256
Actually, I was under the impression that NetBSD, like FreeBSD, was forked from 386BSD, not from FreeBSD.
Actually, not exactly. It got forked from BSD Net/2 or else called 4.3BSD Lite in june 1991.
It later received code from 386BSD in July 1992.
http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html
doesnt sound like one to play around with at home if your an amateur. Do these have a GUI on top?
There is XFree, yes. Installed seperately and requires manual configuration in some cases/versions. I would mostly recommend FreeBSD if you are a home user. More automation exists on FreeBSD than on NetBSD or OpenBSD.
Everytime there is a BSD story we always have the exact same questions being asked. “What’s the dif between Free/Net/Open?”, etc, etc, etc. Then somebody tries to answer but gets it wrong and it sparks a huge debate over the history of the projects.
Just a thought.
A couple things I’d like to say though.
In my opinion the OpenBSD install is the easiest of the three — My first experience with OpenBSD was a few years ago — version 2.5 — I had _never_ touched a BSD before, and had limited experience with linux (very unsucessful experience at that). There was only one part of the installation that was tricky and that was the partitioning (which isn’t that hard if you’ve done a little dos partitioning before). I didn’t have any problems with the install and everything went smoothly. In the end everything worked for me — Just one of the reasons I ended up switching.
Newcomers might want to set aside a dedicated box to tinker with though. It’s not hard to pick up an old p200 system for $50 someplace. This way you can mess around without fear of breaking your main workstation. Printing out a few relevant sections of the OpenBSD FAQ (available on the OpenBSD homepage) would also be a good idea.
with *BSD or the varied Linux distros, no matter how easy or hard, I’ve always found that having separate net access (mostly web and IRC) at least during install and initial setup to be indispensible.
I’ve installed a number of differing systems now, and still find that frequently, it’s necessary to refer to a bug database, HOWTO, or FAQ during install, and I still can’t guarantee that I’ll have printed out *everything* that’s relevant beforehand.
So I agree: either a 2nd PC, or a copy of VMWare to run your new toy is almost always a good bet.
http://www.lemis.com/bsdpaper.html
http://bsdnewsletter.com/bsd/
OpenBSD is arguably the least suitable for a desktop system of the three. Last I’ve checked, they haven’t been able to run Mozilla for quite some time (something to do with a bug in their ld). Does anyone know whether they’ve fixed this? I had always expected it to be a higher priority bug (after all, I rather doubt most of the developers enjoy running Netscape).
I recall reading in the OpenBSD Journal not long ago that someone successfully compiled Mozilla. I don’t know if they have a useable build yet or not but it’s good to hear that someone is working on it.
It’s true that OpenBSD doesn’t have much in the way of desktop software — however it’s getting better slowly. The problem is that most of the OpenBSD developers are only concerned with security and cool crypto-stuff.
I ran OpenBSD exclusively for two years on my desktop machine (haven’t touched it in a year). Your basic needs are met — Opera for internet (via linux emu), Gaim for instant messaging, Gimp for gfx, XMMS for mp3, etc. Mplayer wasn’t available last time I checked. Oh yeah, and I think there was Quake1 and Freeciv as well. It’s enough to get you by but I ended up switching over to FreeBSD, and more recently win2k
There’s actually quite a bit of desktop oriented software for OpenBSD. Most KDE/QT and GTK apps work fine, like KOffice, Abiword, FreeCiv, Sylpheed, Gimp, and so on. Sure, Gnome support isn’t *all* there yet, but it’s a work in progress.
Mozilla still has some bugs in it (not OpenBSD’s fault, certainly) that force it to be staticly compiled for it to work on OBSD; when it’s compiled staticly, it works fine.
What I like about OpenBSD is that it installs and configures much better than any GNU/Linux distro I’ve tried (Debian, Slack, Mandrake, Red Hat, Lycoris, Vector). It’s also the only freenix that works out of the box with my DSL connection (Mandrake is the other one that works without a lot of editing, but still requires manual startup of connections as root). And of course OBSD uses the standard BSD style init, which makes it trivial to set up services. I haven’t got SSH server running properly under Mandrake yet, for example, but it works beautifully out of the box with OBSD. It’s a very nice OS for all purposes, really — lean, *fast*, and quite UNIX-compatible (although a few coders persist in placing Linux-specific code in their “cross-platform” apps).