OpenBSD 4.0 Released

Undeadly Halloween writes, "On October 18th, OpenBSD celebrated its 11th birthday and ten years of punctual biannual releases. Now it's time for OpenBSD 4.0, which includes tons of new drivers for wireless, network, and storage chips. Consider helping the project by buying the new goodies (CD set, t-shirt, poster, Audio CD). And discover what's new and what battles developers must face daily to support new hardware in the traditional interview featuring nearly 20 developers."

Nice.

[JoshJ (1009085)]

Good stuff. Hopefully some of those free drivers will get spread around to Linux as well.

Now supporting the Amish

[dsginter (104154)]

Whew... On the press release, under "New/extended platforms", it says:

"OpenBSD/armish"

I read that as OpenBSD/amish. You can imagine the visions that swirled through my head at that point.

Re:

[Hognoxious (631665)]

that would be like naming a car after a turtle

Like Toyota did?

The best feature of OpenBSD...

[cucucu (953756)]

is that it can run Linux executables!

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Even better is you can run them in a sysjail. This way, when your Linux executable is exploited, the whole box isn't compromised.

This is a dream for those of us forced to have to run linux executables

No... the best feature is the research

[HighOrbit (631451)]

By research, I mean the novel approaches they take to acheive new functionality in firewalling, routing, hardware drivers, and cryptography. They also have a reputation for coding "correctness" in improving the basic BSD/Unix utilities that are then used by other projects. I tend to think of the OpenBSD project as an extremely productive research institution run on the cheap. My opinion is that they are probably on a level close to Sun and its multi-million dollar R&D in pumping out Unix inovations.

N

Audio CD?

[hcdejong (561314)]

presumably this contains the installer, encoded into audio Commodore 64-style?

Why wont hardware vendors give out documentation?

[jonwil (467024)]

Has anyone actually gotten a straight answer from hardware vendors as to why they wont give out documentation? Can you build a modern x86 PC using only hardware that is fully supported by free software with no binary bits, blobs, non-redistributable firmware or missing functionality? Are there any hardware companies that DO give out documentation?

It'll have to be another donation

[DrSkwid (118965)]

T-Shirts - Hideous
CD Set - More toxic landfill
Posters - see t-shirts above
Audio - got to be kidding

Re:

[dylan_- (1661)]

T-Shirts - Hideous

Actually, I kind of like the 4.0 t-shirt, but given the Mobilix affair, I wouldn't expect them to last long. Get 'em while they're hot!

Re:

[smithberry (714364)]

Are you sure about that?

See for instance http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?sourceid =Mozilla-search&va=Biannual+ [webster.com] which says biannual means "occurring twice a year" compare with biennial http://www.webster.com/dictionary/biennial+ [webster.com] "occurring every two years"

Re:

[eraserewind (446891)]

whereas biweekly means both "occurring every two weeks" and "occurring twice a week".
Gotta love that precision.

Re:

[remembertomorrow (959064)]

You seem to be confusing OpenBSD with NetBSD.

If you were attempting to troll, *looks at userid* that was pretty pathetic.

Re:

[DieNadel (550271)]

Hmmm, no... this would be NetBSD [embeddedarm.com].

Check this [laughingsquid.com] cool picture as well.

I could use a security-enhanced toaster at my office though...

Re:

[evilviper (135110)]

I can't run any of the stuff I need to run under OpenBSD,

Name it, and stop trolling.

OpenBSD is a normal Unix system (most software compiles), supports FreeBSD and Linux binary emulation. Has Wine in ports, etc.

Re:

[evilviper (135110)]

Fair enough... No Wine, then.

I doubt the great majority of Unix users make use of Wine, anyhow.

Re:

[IdleTime (561841)]

Oracle RDBMS
Cisco IP Communicator
Any brand of SQL based tools. Take your pick!

Re:

[DieNadel (550271)]

I'm quite sure you're trolling, but anyway...

Could you please name what applications you need to run, and at which point they stop?

If it's not too much hardware dependant, maybe there is a way to run it on OpeBSD. It even has linux/freebsd/solaris/others binary compatibility (to some extent).

Post your problem and I'll try to help you (if you want, of course).

heh

[ArbitraryConstant (763964)]

Turns out a specialized OS for a small number of users often ends up being something that can't be easily replaced. PF has availability features no one outside of Cisco can match, and they can't match them for what it costs us to use OpenBSD for the job.

For example, our Internet connection at work is managed by OpenBSD. If I rebooted our firewall, no one would notice, because the backup would kick in and it would preserve state for everything, even pre-existing TCP connections. You could be streaming music and it wouldn't even skip. How can I do that with Linux again?

"I can't run any of the stuff I need to run under OpenBSD, so why the heck should I even care about it?"

Hm. Whenever I have that problem, I just download the Linux version and run it under binary emulation.

Re:

[fnj (64210)]

Not only that, but has anyone actually used CD-RWs (or even DVD+-RWs) since they were a novelty when the priginally came out?

Re:

[Nimrangul (599578)]

If you had read the articles linked you'd know that OpenRCS is an almost completely compatible replacement for the GNU RCS, it is a clean reimplementation. The idea being security and reliability improvements. OpenCVS will more of the same once completed, and perhaps after it's features are all complete will add additional things, but until then it is seeking only to be a complete replacement for the GNU CVS.

Re:

[ari_j (90255)]

Theo being childishly abrasive and arrogant? You're kidding! Check out this masterpiece of social graces [freebsd.org].

Re:

[Dan Ost (415913)]

Even if they're of one mind now, putting pressure on Dell, HP, and the rest might
make them change their minds later. The key is to make this as visible an issue
as possible.

Talk to the chip manufacturers.
Talk to the OEMs.
Talk to the people who do the purchasing for your company. If you're lucky,
they might start asking the right questions when they place an order. That's
the kind of thing that makes Dell/HP/etc take notice.

Re:

[raddan (519638)]

I have a Soekris vpn1401 [soekris.com] and it works well, although I don't believe all the features are supported. IIRC, this is because hifn has not been forthcoming with their documentation. The vpn1201 [soekris.com] is known to work as well. I'm not sure if later revisions (like the lan1461) work-- OpenBSD does not have a good relationship with hifn at the moment. BTW, I haven't done any benchmarking with my 1401, but the machine handles crypto much faster with than without it. That's all I can say.

Re:

[Nimrangul (599578)]

You obviously don't know OpenBSD, it's the one that gets new drivers for wireless cards and removes ipf because of it's developer's interpretation of his licence. It's the one that will never move to a newer version of Apache, since it's licence is too restrictive. It's the one that rewrites compress to include all the functionality of gzip, just so it can remove gzip, and it's done the same for size, and diff, and grep...

The gcc is one of the last remaining non-BSD licensed bits in OpenBSD, OpenBSD has