Official CD sets: April 2009 Archives

For the first time, I decided to purchase the OpenBSD CD set to both support the project and make it easier for me to upgrade my two OpenBSD laptops and install the OS on some new boxes.

I've had been using OpenBSD off and on since version 4.2, but only in the past five or so months has OpenBSD 4.4 been my main operating system on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop. And it has performed admirably, doing everything I need to do, with the exception being able to view Flash video that requires anything newer than the Flash Player 7 that runs in the Opera Web browser. And since I'm not doing all that much work with video at present, I haven't missed Flash 9 or 10 that much. Moreover, I recently discovered http://keepvid.com and the ability to turn many Flash videos into MP4s (including everything on YouTube, which is viewable in Flash 7 anyway) and watch them with Mplayer, even that issue is more of a ... nonissue than ever.

All the apps I want/need, from Firefox to Thunderbird, OpenOffice to the GIMP, gFTP and Pidgin, the Opera browser, Geany text editor, and the thus-far little-explored Inkscape and Blender (the latter of which I hope to use not as a 3D animation app but as a video editor) — they all installed easily and run well. I've also recently added the Xfce 4.4 desktop, but I still see much value in the default Fvwm2 window manager, with which I divide my time in the OS.

Never mind that the sound chip in this particular laptop is dead. I do have an identical Toshiba laptop that does have working sound (and I'd like to move the install from this Toshiba to the other).

Things in OpenBSD aren't always as easy to get working the way I want as they are in Linux. Everything is more "locked down." I needed to do more to get CUPS working, but adding the proper script in the proper place, and then configuring my printers was much more valuable learning experience and less drudgery than you'd think.

And networking — a specialty of sorts for the OS — is excellent, made all the more so by the detailed man pages and FAQ. And when those don't go far enough, I use marc.info to search the OpenBSD mailing lists (especially misc) for tips on how to get my system running properly. There's also the newish Daemon Forums, plus the valuable news from Undeadly, the OpenBSD Journal.

The OpenBSD community may have a somewhat prickly reputation, but I've found dozens of helpful people out there who are happy to help you (especially if you've done your homework, and by that I mean man pages ... FAQ ... mailing lists ...).

Amid all of this, I'm not saying I'm 100 percent going to stick with OpenBSD as my main OS. But with wireless networking working so well, an easy installation (yes, it's easy once you've done it a few times; quick, too) that can be done with a CD, a floppy (that's how I did it on this laptop) or via PXE boot over the network, some 5,000 packages in i386 (and with a package quality that is of an extremely high level — meaning the packages work well and are rarely broken — along with excellent package management in the base system) and the choice of either a six-month upgrade cycle (like a certain Linux OS you might have heard of ... or maybe not so much like it due to the incremental and conservative nature of OpenBSD development) or following the -current tree, which actually aims to be more stable than the twice-yearly releases ... (sentence WILL wind to a close ... I promise), there's a lot to like in OpenBSD on the desktop when it comes to what I need in an OS, and that is the ability to get work done in a solid and stable environment.

I've had to wrap my head around -release / -stable / -current instead of Debian's apt-get update/upgrade, but in turn I start with a minimal system (just like Debian's non-desktop "standard" install but unlike Ubuntu), add exactly what I want, and thus far have excellent X performance (something that Debian hasn't given me in the Lenny era) and a rock-solid environment in which to run the apps I need.

My CDs haven't arrived yet, but when they do, I'll let you all know.