OpenBSD: lean and mean
When I installed OpenBSD on this system's 14.4 GB drive, I made the root partition a whole lot bigger than recommended. I recall a previous FreeBSD install that crapped out when I didn't have enough space, but I was too ambitious on what I was installing at that point. Still, I gave / a whole gigabyte. I'm not quite sure why I gave /usr so much space, but in the case of /, I wanted to make sure I had room to grow.
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/wd0a 1008M 47.4M 911M 5% /
/dev/wd0h 3.9G 31.8M 3.7G 1% /home
/dev/wd0d 123M 8.0K 117M 0% /tmp
/dev/wd0g 5.9G 784M 4.8G 14% /usr
/dev/wd0e 84.4M 10.1M 70.1M 13% /var
As you can see, with the entire OpenBSD default install, plus my dozen or so added applications, I'm using a whopping 47.4 MB in the root partition.
So yes, OpenBSD installs lean, in case you were asking.
ksh vs. bash: OpenBSD's default shell is the ksh. Being used to Linux stalwart bash, I worried about how much of a learning curve I'd have to overcome. But since I'm no expert in bash, it's probably a wash.
So far, the biggest changes have been using
$ exit
to log out (instead of $ logout in bash)
and
# halt
to shut down the system (although # shutdown -h now works just as well in ksh)
Things like cp, rm, mkdir, rmdir, ls, cd, who ... they pretty much work the same. And since I'm using OpenBSD man pages and FAQs, it's just a matter of doing the commands as written. I'm sure there are reasons why ksh or csh is better than bash ... or not, but for now it works, so I'm happy.
OpenBSD desktop tips: Jem Matzen can help you (as can his O'Reilly PDF -- I will buy this soon).
One thing leads to another: Reading about ksh creator David Korn on Slashdot led me to Korn's effort to port Unix to Windows. Besides his own Uwin, he also calls attention to Cygwin and MKS (not free).
Looks like something interesting to play around with.
Sun (Microsystems) also rises: My fellow blogger Wolfgang Lonien, who writes the excellent blog The Debian User, pointed out that he keeps up with doings at Sun by reading CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog. Mr. Schwartz writes a lot, and with Sun becoming more and more of a force in open source (opening up Solaris, buying MySQL, hiring Debian founder Ian Murdoch) and positioning itself to continue as a big player in computer software and hardware, it's a company worth keeping an eye on. If you want more, Sun's many blogs are all aggregated here. Curiously, Ian Murdock's own blog (not under the Sun rubrick) has been mostly silent of late.
Not being an expert in the OpenSolaris community, or Sun in general, I don't know what that silence means, but it doesn't look good.
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Steve,
first thanks for the nice comments - I can only give them back.
And I wouldn't interpret too much into the "silence" of Ian. Seems he's very busy getting out Project Indiana, like the guys over at Phoronix wrote in http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=986&num=1
Also, a definitely good and solid kernel and a more than promising file system still don't necessarily make a good desktop experience, like Distrowatch wrote in http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080204#feature - so there *is* some work to do perhaps.
As for the BSDs, well yes, I tried FreeBSD long ago, and coming from the RPM-based distros (things like Yum weren't available at that time), I experienced a solid working package management system for the very first time ;-) Also, as you say, the documentation is really really good.
Still I went back to Linux at some point (and ended up with Debian as you know), because that was where all the excitement, the latest & greatest development etc. was. So I more or less gave up something ultra stable (at that point) to something more sexy (also at that point; I don't wanna start flame wars or such).
Debian finally gave me the best of both worlds, so I never looked back...
Thanks again, for everything,
Wolfgang
Is the entire default install not touching /usr?? I mean, even then it's small...
Wolfgang, as far as installing and removing software goes, OpenBSD in particular (because that's what I'm testing now) is extremely solid. Dependencies are handled perfectly, helpful messages appear when needed, and everything works pretty well.
What I can't seem to figure out is why there's nothing like apt in Debian to handle periodic updates semi-automatically.
You probably know about the Debian projects built around FreeBSD and NetBSD. I'd like to see one of those start to pick up in terms of being ready for the average user. Putting Debian together with one of the BSDs sounds like a great thing, indeed.
Any my Debian Etch and Lenny installs are doing great right now.
Funny you mention 'halt' and 'exit'. Having switched from (Open)BSD to Linux, I still always use 'exit' to exit bash, I never used logout.
Also, 'halt' works in Linux too, it's at /sbin/halt. 'shutdown' is just a nice interface to call /sbin/halt, as 'halt' is considered harsh in Linux.
About a Linux-distro wrapper around BSD: There is GentooBSD, but I'm not quite sure what the state of it is. When it's ready, it should feature Gentoo's update mechanism (emerge -DNauv world). Not being able to do a simple update is the complaint most heard about OpenBSD as far as I saw/heard/read on the web.
Hans, I'm at the very beginning of using OpenBSD and the ksh. The fact that things are, at many levels, so different in the BSDs when compared to Linux is part of the attraction. I don't know if the difference will make my experience better or worse. I'm doing this in the interest of a) learning something new and b) promoting diversity in operating systems.
Hans, when you say update, do you mean between versions? The normal packages are covered by a switch in pkg_add, aren't they?