Opera in OpenBSD -- I shoehorn it in

Remember the eight-part "Finding an OS for the $15 Laptop"? After considering everything from Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux, through Wolvix, OpenBSD and Debian, I elected to keep OpenBSD on the hard drive and use Puppy as a live CD, with the eventual migration of the system from OpenBSD 4.2 to 4.3 and Puppy 2.13 to 3.01.

If I thought that a hard-drive install of Debian on this 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt would give me a huge speed advantage over OpenBSD, I'd go in that direction right away. With 233 MHz of CPU and 144 MB of RAM, performance really counts.

But I really like running OpenBSD, and until (or "unless") I can get ACPI management of the CPU fan on the newer $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), I'd like to keep this most-secure of Unix-like operating systems on the Compaq, which from a hardware-configuration standpoint has responded better to OpenBSD than to any version of Linux.

The realities of using OpenBSD on this old machine have had me booting Puppy more and more. The reason is that Firefox in OpenBSD can't handle posting to Movable Type. Scripts are constantly timing out, and the experience is more than a little frustrating.

The Dillo browser runs great in OpenBSD. It doesn't have tabs, like some versions of Dillo do. And it was compiled without support for cookies. (Dillo does support cookies in OpenBSD, and you can modify your ~/.dillo/cookiesrc file to implement them on an overall or site-by-site basis, another way that OpenBSD locks things down from a security and privacy standpoint). So But even with cookies turned on, as an interface to something as complicated as Movable Type, Dillo won't work.

Since then, I've discovered the free (but not open-source) browser Opera, which is a good deal faster than Firefox (or anything else based on Mozilla) and in Windows a great deal faster than Internet Explorer.

Could Opera help me in OpenBSD?

First I had to clear some space. This 3 GB hard drive has 1 GB set aside for the /usr partition in OpenBSD.

When I initially set up the system, I added two huge educational packages — Childsplay and GCompris — for my daughter. That pretty much maxed out the /usr partition.

To reclaim some space I started removing packages with pkg_delete. It took me quite a bit of time before I even had enough space to download the OpenBSD ports tree and unpack it.

The first couple of times I tried, I ran out of space in /usr. But eventually I was able to untar the ports tree and install the Opera browser, which, being non-FOSS, is not available as a precompiled binary package for OpenBSD but only as a port. (Actually, the "port" grabs the Linux binary package and installs that in OpenBSD; you need OpenBSD's fedora_base package to make Linux binary compatibility work, and you then need to modify /etc/sysctl.conf to have Linux binary compatibility automatically started at boot time. I will do a tutorial on this at some point soon, but is there really an OpenBSD user out there who knows less than I do? I'll believe it when I see it.).

Ethical aside: The way OpenBSD works is that the user is given the ultimate freedom. Rather than limiting the system to only free, open-source packages under amenable licenses, the developers of OpenBSD allow the user to decide, on an app-by-app basis, what they are comfortable installing and using on their machine.

The precompiled packages on OpenBSD's servers and mirrors are composed of, as far as I know, all free, open-source software. There are many things less than FOSS (but still free) available via ports, which are a different animal entirely.

A "port" in the world of OpenBSD is just a script (or "recipe") that fetches the appropriate code from the application's source (and NOT from any OpenBSD-controlled server) and compiles it, creating a binary package that is then installed on your system.

Back to Opera: Once I cleared out enough space for the ports tree, I installed Opera (OK, I had to clear out more and more from /usr before I had enough space for Opera to build).

And now I'm running Opera and writing an entry in Movable Type. The screen doesn't exactly keep up with my typing, but I don't have any scripts stalling, and I can produce an entry with little trouble.

Opera's sheer usability on this system has me using it more and more. For a nearly 10-year-old system with this little CPU and RAM, it's pretty much the killer app.