OpenBSD — I'm back (and I'd like to think you care ... but I know you don't)

Maybe addressing OpenBSD in the second person singular isn't the right way to announce my return to what I think is one of the best operating-system projects available.

If you're read it once in this blog, you've read it a few dozen times: When I first acquired a couple of trash-destined Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptops, I hadn't yet figured out that the machines' CD/DVD-ROM drives don't like CD-R discs, barely tolerate CD-ROMs but seem to like DVD+/-R discs. Without that critical piece of the old-hardware puzzle, just about the only thing I could install was OpenBSD via floppy. (That you can still install OpenBSD via a single floppy disk is a wonderful, beautiful thing — especially when it works for you.)

I ran OpenBSD 4.4 for six months, actually ordered the 4.5 CD set and was more than a bit crushed when my in-place upgrade blew up. I suspected Xorg problems. (Intel video of a certain age equals pain in all but the most recent versions of Xorg. Not so with OpenBSD 4.7, which runs Xorg as smoothly on this platform as did 4.4.)

When the upgrade failed, I did have all of my data backed up. At the time I transitioned to Debian Lenny, which I ran happily for quite some time ... until I blew up that install while trying an in-place upgrade. It seems that transitioning from the 2.6.26 Lenny kernel to whatever is in Debian Squeeze isn't so easy; advice I got since then instructed me to grab an up-to-date kernel and install that before attempting the Lenny-to-Squeeze dist-upgrade.

Anyway, after I killed Lenny (which I should have reinstalled — if hindsight means anything) I moved on to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, eventually upgrading to 8.10 and 9.10 (both in a single weekend), finally installing 10.04.

I could go on about my experiences with Ubuntu 10.04 and its social-from-the-start desktop integration and Ubuntu One capability. Let me just say that I added the Xubuntu desktop and turned off a boatload of services just to make things usable on my aging laptop (2002 era).

Since then I acquired a new (yet cheap) Lenovo G555 laptop. I've been running Fedora 13 with Xfce on it. Aside from a few issues with Linux in general, I'm happy with the distribution.

Just about everything I think is "wrong" with Fedora turns out to be something affecting the kernel or Xorg and isn't Fedora-caused or -specific. Functionality, design and the underlying systems (which which I'm somewhat unfamiliar due to my Debian-based background) seem very solid. Did I mention the design elements? Best-looking Xfce implementation I've ever seen (and better than my previous favorite, which was Xubuntu 7.04 ... or was it 7.10?). The Fedora design team is doing everything right.

That's on the new Lenovo. The Fedora live CD won't even boot on the old Toshiba. That's OK. I've been testing Debian Squeeze on it. I'm not deliriously happy with the Debian installer (which refuses to pull files from a mirror), nor with the way the Xfce and GNOME desktops look in Squeeze (not much progress from Lenny or even Etch). I know I can configure anything to look "better" in my eyes, but for now I'm still looking around.

One thing I can say is it's nice to have a test machine again.

With the Lenovo I'm going to stick with Fedora for now.

But on the Toshiba, I just popped in the OpenBSD 4.7 network-install image. You've got to love OpenBSD's install process. OK, you don't have to love it, but it has its advantages. Whether it's painless or painful (and that depends on your perspective and familiarity with it), it is over quickly. Very quickly. You can probably go from boot to Fvwm2 desktop in less than 10 minutes. Take that (fill in the blank)!

Things I've noticed immediately about OpenBSD 4.7 vs. 4.4/4.5 are that the installer is actually easier to use. I really appreciated the installer's suggestion of a disk layout. It makes probably the quickest installation in FOSS operating systems even quicker. Looking back, I probably should have made /usr/local bigger than the 2.1 GB allotted (or just done /usr in one big partition), but I hopefully won't be packing this particular installation with too much software. (Must ... resist ... GNOME ...)

At this point I've got an OpenBSD 4.7 installation running the default Fvwm2 desktop with Firefox. Once I get my saved OpenBSD files off of the backup (I've tried to document everything I did so I won't have to totally re-learn it), I can get my custom Fvwm setup running with all my menu entries and really get things working.

Thus far in OpenBSD 4.7, X looks way better out of the box than it did in Debian. The desktop seems adequately snappy.

True today as it was when I first began experimenting with OpenBSD in the 4.2 days are that it seems to run on just about any machine you throw it at, and from the packages to the documentation to the code itself, it's a very solid and useful operating environment.

To a certain extent it's actually fun to do the manual configuration needed to make things work in OpenBSD, and much of what I learned not just about Unix-like systems but also about the applications we use day to day (Web browsers, CUPS, PDF readers, mail clients) I learned getting them to work in an environment that doesn't do all the setup for you.

I haven't set it up yet, but I did leave an ext3 partition on the end of the drive so I could use a live CD distro like TinyCore or Puppy for those times when I absolutely, positively need Flash 10. That partition will also serve as an area in which I can share files between OpenBSD and Linux. I'm sure there's a way for a Linux machine to read an OpenBSD FFS partition, but I have no idea how to make it happen. I probably should look into it.

Maybe I'm self-punishing, but as before, I do find it fun to tinker around in OpenBSD and try to make it work as a desktop. Try it (or any other BSD ... or maybe every other BSD) to see both how a BSD project differs from your average Linux distribution and how it's the same. For the most part, Firefox is Firefox. Hell, OpenOffice is here if you want it. I did have it on my "old" OpenBSD installation, but these days I avoid having an office suite on the hard drive, preferring not just to use Google Docs but to have the files in Google's cloud so I can access them from any number of machines. It's just too convenient.

And as far as Flash goes, you can still run Flash 7 in the Opera Web browser, but the near future for the Web should mean that HTML 5 will make video a much easier proposition in non-Windows/Mac environments.

If you do have a spare machine in your stable — and who doesn't, do a little distro-hopping. And a few BSD experiments couldn't hurt. You'll learn something. That I guarantee.