What I'm running right now
As of today, here are all the machines I use and what they run:
At the office:
Work box:
Dell Optiplex GX520
Pentium 4 (3 GHz)
512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2
The Debian Mac:
Power Macintosh G4
466MHz single PowerPC processor
384 MB RAM
Debian Etch
The Self-Reliant Thin Client:
Maxspeed Maxterm 5300(??) thin client
VIA C3 Samuel (1 GHz, running at 500 MHz for some reason)
256 MB RAM
8 GB Transcend Compact Flash module as boot drive
1 GB USB flash drive for backup
Debian Etch
At home:
iBook G4
1 GHz CPU
384 MB RAM
120 GB Fujitsu hard drive (replaced by me in a 3-hour odyssey)
OS X 10.3
This Old PC:
Pentium II MMX (333 MHz)
256 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive
Windows 2000 (I haven't booted this or connected it to the Internet in over a year)
The $0 Laptop:
Gateway Solo 1450
Mobile Celeron (1.3 GHz)
1 GB RAM
30 GB Toshiba hard drive
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Debian Lenny, Puppy 3.01
The $15 Laptop:
Compaq Armada 7770dmt
Pentium II MMX (233 MHz)
144 MB RAM
3 GB IBM hard drive
OpenBSD 4.2
I have quite a few machines in various states of repair that I might resurrect over the next year if and when I get the time, but this is what I have right now. With the exception of the white-box This Old PC, all of these get fairly regular use.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
I would have expected OpenBSD 4.4 to be on the way in?
I never upgraded to OpenBSD 4.3, let alone 4.4, on this laptop because I'm working with severe disk-space limitations.
It's a 3 GB drive, and besides the OpenBSD installation, I wanted to have Linux swap and a smallish ext2 filesystem on which to store the save files for Puppy, Damn Small Linux and Wolvix.
So I ended up with a /usr partition on the OpenBSD 4.2 installation of only 1 GB in size. I quickly filled it up.
When removing OpenBSD apps, you never seem to get anywhere near the space you had before. When you use pkg_add, you get all the dependencies, too. But when you use pkg_delete (is that it???), the dependencies remain and you have to try to pkg_delete each individual package just to see if it is needed by any other package. All of this depends on whether or not I'm doing it "right."
For all I know, there is some utility like deborphan to clean up an OpenBSD install.
Anyway ... I have such a small /usr partition — it should be 5 GB instead of 1 GB — that I barely have any apps on the box, and it might not "make it" through an upgrade from 4.2 to 4.3 and 4.3 to 4.4.
I could do a reinstall and keep the same /home partition, but I really think I'm going to either a) use a different PC with a bigger drive for OpenBSD or b) use a bigger drive in the same laptop.
Keeping all of that in mind, that's why I haven't upgraded.
Just to be comfortable in OpenBSD with X, I think 144 MB of RAM and 233 MHz of CPU is not quite enough. I might be able to get something closer to 1 GHz of CPU and 256 or 512 MB of RAM. As long as I didn't have trouble with noisy CPU fans, that would make a much better OpenBSD machine.
One thing about OpenBSD, I haven't done any "benchmarkish" testing comparing it to FreeBSD (which prides itself on speed), but it definitely is slower to do most tasks than, say, Debian or Slackware GNU/Linux, so for a really underpowered box, Linux might be a better choice for desktop use.
But if you want to run OpenBSD on the desktop, even with more marginal hardware, it can be done, and there are THOUSANDS of packages and ports. And of those packages/ports, all the ones I've used have been of very high quality (i.e. things work great and look great, too).
My experiences were rather good with older hardware, but perhaps this is because it boots rather fast - and as I am mostly using lightweight applications in general, they don't feel sluggish to me.
Also, did you try Arch? I would assume that the combination of good dependency management, quick boot, advanced installer and very good documentation would appeal to you.