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Depends what you mean by "king". If it's the king of security or elitism, yes, it's the king. If it's king of popularity or usage share, no it's not.

It's not the most popular OS because it's focused on a small niche of users (it's a choice from Theo), and there are other reasons that have made a number of users disgruntled, but this is another story...

Same here, and I love it. Go OpenBSD! Whenever I need a server of any kind or a lightweight Desktop, OpenBSD is where I turn.

I do think that you answered your own question.
"even how simple it is get the source for X and build it"

That may be one of the bigger resons why it is not king.

Having it simpel means that you should not need to build all your common applications

You don't *have* to build it. It's just very simple if you wish to do so either to apply your own patches or enable different build options. Keep in mind that simplicity is a relative term--I, for example, don't find Windows Vista simple at all, but rather needlessly layered and complicated. I find OpenBSD, and all of the BSDs for that matter, to be very consistent and concise without a lot of hand-holding or cruft. They let me do what *I* need to do and stay the heck out of my way the rest of the time, something that OS X thankfully inherited from its BSD roots as well. Wish I could say the same for most of the so-called "simple" Linux distros out there today, so far Slackware and Arch are the only ones I've found that stay out of the way.

Actually you don't have to build X (xenocara is on the install CD) and most packages are available pre-built, too.

But setting up everything needs more user intervention and knowledge (both the partition and the disklabel editor are *not* user friendly) and it's just not an out-of-the-box experience as many got to expect from their OS.

That being said, I've just finished the installation, went back to Linux to transfer the wireless firmware and will now test WPA support.

I've tried to switch since 4.1, but there was always a problem (wireless, printer drivers, screen resolution,...) holding me back to my Arch install...

It is not an OS designed for the clueless unwashed masses. We're not trying to please everyone, unlike Linux based OS's that are a pile of garbage.

Doesn't change the fact that Windows is a complete and utter pile of garbage.

Me? More then you've ever made using Windows but that's really none of your damn business and is of no relevance to wether it's a good OS or not.

Thank you for your reply. I haven't heard your name yet, but I assume you are a part of the OpenBSD team.

Do you know if there are any plans to use a tool similar to cfdisk in the future?

It's really a pitty, because I love OpenBSD for its fast and simple installation. Only partitioning takes a lot of time due to the need for a pen and paper.

P.S. This time a meaningless "WARN not buffer" error was spamming my console in regular intervals (coming in groups of 4) and made working uncomfortable. I lacked the time to search for the reason, but will try it later again.
This is what I meant with out-of-the-box: Give me something I can work with (i.e. usable internet (Intel's fault) and a command line), to set up the system to my liking.

Yes. 10 years now.



I can pretty much say there is zero chance of that happening. There have been some very minor changes to the tools over the last release or two and interest in maybe some SMALL changes that could improve things but there will definitely be no major changes in how things are done.



That "WARN .. not buffer" message appears to be coming from the ACPI stack. An area that has had a lot of development over the last 3 releases. Could you tell me which release this was you were trying out? I would encourage you to try at least booting up a -current snap if it is easy to reproduce. There were some changes somewhat recently (after 4.4) to fix an issue with memory handling with the ACPI stack. Did these messages scroll by upon simply booting up the system?

Regarding the situation with the Intel Wifi adapter firmware.. yes it is annoying. This is an issue Intel needs to deal with. It is bad enough that they're not allowing distribution, but even worse is that the firmware is buggy as hell.

Edited 2008-11-02 11:47 UTC

Yeah well, Commodore RULES, Apple DROOLS!

My heavily modded C-Net 11.1a with sP1NN1nG kuRs0rZ beats your lame AE!

>> how is OpenBSD not the absolute king of open
>> source operating systems??

Because it's slow?

Edited 2008-11-01 21:36 UTC

It might help if they had an ISO image you can download.

They do. Did you bother to look?

ftp://openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.4/i386/install44.iso

Why would he do that? He would rather look like a complete retard.

OK, so they do have an ISO now. I'm glad to hear it. But apparently this started around a year ago with 4.2. So, from 1996 to 2007, there was no ISO to download.

Not 100% true. There was a boot ISO provided as an alternate to the boot floppies for systems that did not have a floppy drive or people that wanted to use an optical drive instead, there are also more device drivers that can fit into the boot ISO kernels.

Although I agree that OpenBSD is great, there are many reasons why one would rather have some Linux running.

NVidia and ATI. If you need extreme performance, you need the binary drivers that are only for Linux (and perhaps FreeBSD).

Another reason is package management. I don't know if this has changed for OpenBSD recently, but seems to me that they don't have a simple way to upgrade the whole system fast. You even said in your comment something about getting the sources of X and building them. Almost nobody wants to do that.

Then there's SMP. Almost all new machines have more than one core. How does OpenBSD handle that currently?

Indeed, OpenBSD does not allow blobs for drivers. We are very firm about that, and for good reasons.

It's strange how people judge a system without actual experience. Since a couple of releases, upgrading packages is as simple as can be. The package system checks which packages are out of date and offers to upgrade them. This includes dependency checks and all that. Also, a lot of ports are available as pre-built packages.

Upgrading the base system always has been easy: boot install media an choose "upgrade".

Both i386 and amd64 (and sparc64 and macppc) have MP support. But multi threading is done in-process.

Sure, but reality being what it is... hopefully this won't be such an issue in the future.



Good that they have finally fixed this. I will have to check this out.



That word, 'easy', I don't think it means what you think it means.

Seriously though, perhaps that is much more robust than what you get in most Linuxes, but I wouldn't call it easy. In here, we usually upgrade the whole system in a single command without needing to reboot.

But I'll see for myself.

Edited 2008-11-02 13:31 UTC

It won't change, period. The only people who make a big deal about this are the idiot NVIDIA fanbois who were dumb enough to buy systems with such GPUs. They
deserve to be screwed and with the way things have been going with NVIDIA lately they surely are.



Yes, it does. It is that easy.



He is talking about upgrading between major releases of the OS. You have to reboot to load the new kernel with major releases of Linux-based OS's as well.

It won't change, period. The only people who make a big deal about this are the idiot NVIDIA fanbois who were dumb enough to buy systems with such GPUs. They
deserve to be screwed and with the way things have been going with NVIDIA lately they surely are.
"

Oh, I meant that I wish in the future we don't have to resort to closed source to get high quality drivers.

But thanks for demonstrating a point about the OpenBSD community for us :-)

I assume you are talking about TrueType Font, do you have the port installed(/x11/msttcorefonts)?

Yes.

The song has been out for some time, actually. Some of the songs are really good. Almost as good as the OS they ship with.

No way ZFS will even be taken into consideration until it is under an acceptable license which is not the case at the moment. Besides ZFS in FreeBSD is still pretty flakey. Maybe HAMMER will happen.

The installer will not change.

Things that don't change, usually die. You obviously have the "Theo mentality" I see. Another reason why I avoid OpenBSD like the plague - elitist people like you.

Dave

The OS is not designed for the unwashed masses! If you don't like it then too bad! Good riddens!

Here on planet Earth everything dies, sooner or later.
Changing for the sake of change itself usually speed up that process though.

Good for you. Did you ever wonder if you staying away is best for you or the rest of us?

hahaha. Good one. Let's compare the number of OpenBSD users versus other operating systems. Eccentric geeks might try and use OpenBSD, real people will use alternatives that don't involve smartass, up themselves, elitists.

There, I stated it for you in plain good 'ole English.

Dave

hahaha. Good one. Let's compare the number of OpenBSD users versus other operating systems. Eccentric geeks might try and use OpenBSD, real people will use alternatives that don't involve smartass, up themselves, elitists.

There, I stated it for you in plain good 'ole English.

Dave "

s/real people/the unwashed masses/ ok now it is correct.

hahaha. Good one. Let's compare the number of OpenBSD users versus other operating systems. Eccentric geeks might try and use OpenBSD, real people will use alternatives that don't involve smartass, up themselves, elitists.

There, I stated it for you in plain good 'ole English.

Dave "

Could it be that there might not be all that many people that knows about openbsd..? Perhaps even because you don't see to many openbsd users hyping the shit of out it unlike certain linux users?

The most elitisk people i see on a daily basis would be linux people claiming that they use the only good os ever made...

I'm a Linux and BSD user, so I'm being offended by your comments on both ends.
As Linux user, please be so kind as to bring solid evidence how you know that the trolls above are new (?) Linux (??) users (???).
As a BSD user, I fail to understand what you are trying to achieve by starting a spam war: Turn users away from alternative OS? Spread bad publicity? Release hidden anger?

There's an old Hebrew saying that, translated to English, goes something like this:
"The burning hat is on the head of the thief"
... or in this case:
"People who are quick to blame others for trolling tends to be trolls themselves."

- Gilboa

Edited 2008-11-02 17:49 UTC