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.