OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD 3.5 reviewed on NewsForge

Contributed by sean on from the yet-another-bit-gobbling-review dept.

Jem Matzan writes:

NewsForge has a review of OpenBSD 3.5 on x86. Overall it's quite favorable and covers a lot of ground.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Casey Roberts (129.118.131.150) casey.roberts@ttu.edu on

    It seems that OpenBSD has recieved quite a bit of coverage since the 3.5 release. This is a good thing! The more people that know of OpenBSD, the better, or is it? I can hear someone in particular saying something about "... those button mashers..."

    Comments

    1. By Michael Knudsen (82.150.71.100) e@mongers.org on

      OpenBSD has received an increased amount of coverage and interest since at least the last three releases and it seems to increase its user base as well. The attention is well-deserved, we all know, since lots of good stuff has made it into the tree over the last few years.

      I'm not sure more users is entirely a good idea. More users inevitably means more noise on the mailing lists etc. which consumes developer attention.

      More _paying_ users, on the other hand, would be good, since it would allow the project to have more developers working full-time and generally improve development conditions.

      Comments

      1. By Juanjo (84.120.176.33) on http://blackshell.usebox.net/

        I really enjoyed using OpenBSD 3.5 for the review, and I'm going to continue to play with it.

        Yeah, It has increased its user base... al least in the reviewers :D

      2. By Anonymous Coward (195.217.242.33) on

        More users will help OpenBSD survive, maybe grow
        I have noticed however that a lot of users from other OSes tend to think that OpenBSD has the same goals as other distros
        This can create a lot of noise

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (67.71.119.19) on

          Survive? I don't think it'll ever die, actually I can't even see why it would.

          Comments

          1. By Nate (209.162.224.62) nate@my-balls.com on

            I think the only way for OpenBSD to die would be if during a hackathon some dire event, like a chili cook-off where the meat had gone bad or the intervention of a powerful gouvernement strike team bent on no goodery, took place and devestated the developer ranks.

            Perhaps even that would not do it, after all, not all developers go to the hackathons.

  2. By Andreas Kahari (193.62.198.94) on

    I'm not sure wheather it's good or bad that many of the reviews of OpenBSD I've read pitch it as more or less exclusively a "secure server OS". Sure, it makes an excellent server OS, but I've used OpenBSD as my main desktop OS at home and at work since release 2.8 and I'd much rather call it a "secure base OS".

    I might not be your average PHB, but I do think that with office applications like the ones in the KDE port, OpenBSD makes an excellent basis for a workplace desktop OS that can be used by a lot of people.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (142.166.105.64) on

      I think it is just that other free'nix distributions cater far more to the desktop. Install something like SUSE 9.1 and you'll see what I mean. When you finally (some slow to boot compared to OBSD, and installation takes forever!) boot up after installation, you are in a seemless desktop environment. There are very pretty and well thought out (and as far I can tell, bug-free) graphical utilities to do all your common desktop and basic administration functions. It even automatically sets up (many) printers, even network printers. And of course all the KDE utilies work properly, because it is Linux (and KDE is programmed primarily for and debugged on Linux -- even artsd doesn't suck quite as much on Linux, although it still sucks). Updates and patches are automated and painless. Things like Firefox render pages almost twice as fast (again, probably because it is written and debugged, and presumably optimized for Linux -- although it is still much slower than it is for Windows). My grandmother could use SUSE.

      The amazing thing is that OBSD comes as close as it does (with much better documentation). It's been my desktop for about 6 years, and I won't be changing. But I still have to acknowledge others systems have clearly put more focus on this area.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (142.166.105.64) on

      BTW -- trying using KOffice for anything serious, and soon you will soon discover, that while they have come far indeed, they clearly have more work to do before it is a truely usable package (esp. if your CPU isn't the latest). I'm sticking with LaTex and waiting it out.

      I'm still kind of curious how OpenOffice is coming along. I've seen it, but never really tried to use it in a serious way.

      Comments

      1. By jtorin (217.215.193.248) on

        I haven't used OO.org recently (or ever for that matter), but some years ago I managed to open a PowerPoint presentation in StarOffice that PowerPoint itself refused to open. Ofcourse I continued to work in StarOffice for the rest of that presentation. Since then I have a keen eye to OO.org, even if I don't use it. Someday a Office killer will come from that project, and the world will rejoice...

        I use LaTeX for any serious document.

      2. By Anonymous Coward (213.119.61.141) on

        Well, OpenOffice does work on my 3.5 box (though I don't know anymore where I got the unofficial port from; should've saved it :()

        But I find it painfully slow, and it crashes quite often (almost like a windows application). Too slow to do real work with (on a p3 850, 256m ram, which should be enough for some word processing imho), and certainly too unstable. I just use it to be able to read MS Office documents some people keep on sending me :(

        For real work, I use LaTeX (vi, latex and gv under X for previewing). That even works perfectly fine on my sparcstation 5 with 64m ram... :-)

        Comments

        1. By Andreas Kahari (62.253.140.188) on

          I just use it to be able to read MS Office documents some people keep on sending me :(

          Take a look at the textproc/antiword port... That solves a lot of problems for me.

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