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OpenBSD 5.4 Released

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Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#71

Post by okasaki »

earlz wrote: post #17
csmuk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest I've been using it for about 7 years and I didn't know that. I'm not sure that matters either. It's not really a priority and I respect that.

No, and being able to download all the FAQs easily is cool but there are things where it actually impacts me. For instance, I have a netbook without a cdrom drive or floppy disk. So, to install OpenBSD on it, I had to first install OpenBSD onto another PC computer, and then run makeboot and such on my USB drive and copy over the ramdisk. Apparently the cited excuse for why they don't support USB bootable media is bec…

That can't be true. I used to run OpenBSD on a netbook and I'm pretty you can just dd the cdrom image onto a usb stick and boot that.

Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#72

Post by cmccabe »

teddyh wrote: post #60
cmccabe wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want an introduction to complex topic, I usually won't use man pages. I will open up a web browser and search. That will give me web pages that have pictures, diagrams, and possibly even introductory essays about the topic. There are many more people who know how to write web pages or forum posts than who know how to write "info" pages. There are also great tools for searching the web, but poor tools for search…

An internet search will give me many different choices of documentation of unknown provenance, authorship, official status, datedness, accuracy, and comprehensibility. This, to me, is not helpful, since I have no way of knowing which are any good, even after reading them. On the other hand, Info documentation will give me the official, up-to-date, correct, and mostly well-written documentation. Internet searches cert…

An internet search will give me many different choices of documentation of unknown provenance, authorship, official status, datedness, accuracy, and comprehensibility.

True. But the documentation for GNU programs, both man and info, is often also "of unknown provenance, authorship, datedness, accuracy, and comprehensibility." You even said yourself that the man pages for many of these GNU programs are years out of date on some systems. Official status is not guaranteed either, since anyone can fork an open source program and produce a clone.

Somehow, despite all that, we manage to muddle on. Probably, it's because we're humans, with the ability to filter out bad information and incomprehensible explanations, and find the real information. And in my experience, this is much easier to do with a man page, which usually simply gets to the point, than with a long, meandering info page which treats me like an idiot and yet often fails to mention vital information.

Thank you for the clarification that info pages can support images. Since I have only ever used info in a terminal, I was not aware of this.

In a lot of ways, info reminds me of Microsoft's CHM format, another HTML workalike with limited abilities. CHM can also support images.

Web usage may be monitored, but I suspect that searching for information about open source programs won't reveal anything about me that downloading Linux did not.

Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#73

Post by digitalzombie »

pimeys wrote: post #34

I'm a big OS geek, I love to install and test all new operating systems. Does anybody use OpenBSD as their main development OS? At least there's ports, and looks like you can compile all the necessary tools (xmonad, vim, firefox, zsh) from the ports system. But is this the ideal use of OpenBSD? Do I gain something if changing from Gentoo?

i'd use it for firewall.

I hear pf firewall is awesome.

Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#74

Post by clarry »

aortega wrote: post #36
pimeys wrote: post #34

I'm a big OS geek, I love to install and test all new operating systems. Does anybody use OpenBSD as their main development OS? At least there's ports, and looks like you can compile all the necessary tools (xmonad, vim, firefox, zsh) from the ports system. But is this the ideal use of OpenBSD? Do I gain something if changing from Gentoo?

I used it for a while as a desktop. Maybe it's because I have an old Thinkpad, and I know OpenBSD is being developed mainly in old Thinkpads, but everything works just a little better in OpenBSD. The video, sleep/resume, power, wifi, etc. Everything just works a bit faster, a bit cleaner. It's like FreeBSD but without feeling that a script kiddie will remotely crash or pwn your box. If you limit yourself to the packa…

It can run qemu.

Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#75

Post by clarry »

Mordak wrote: post #51
pimeys wrote: post #34

I'm a big OS geek, I love to install and test all new operating systems. Does anybody use OpenBSD as their main development OS? At least there's ports, and looks like you can compile all the necessary tools (xmonad, vim, firefox, zsh) from the ports system. But is this the ideal use of OpenBSD? Do I gain something if changing from Gentoo?

I use OpenBSD in a development environment. The environment happens to be offline, so the win for OpenBSD here is that it is very easy to work with in places where you don't have internet access. The entire system comes on CDs that you can carry around, and you can easily work offline with a local copy of the package repository when you need to install something. The included man pages are excellent, and are all you…

"A breath of fresh air" is exactly the expression I've used to describe my experience with OpenBSD. It feels so simple, clean, consistent, and well documented. After using it for a while everything else starts to look like a clusterfk.

Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#76

Post by clarry »

teddyh wrote: post #46
nodata wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The official GNU system documentation is in Info There is nobody in the world outside of the GNU foundation who prefers using info pages to man pages.

(You are demonstrably wrong, but I will address your implied point instead of your hyperbole.) I think that the hostility to Info comes from exposure to the standalone Info reader. It is non-intuitive, non-Unix-like, and does, as far as I know, not even support text attributes, so it looks bad even for a text-based UI. It is not very newbie friendly (like GNU nano with its very explicit menus to guide you). Nor is it…

My problem with info is the document structure. The manual for each application seems to be structured so differently with topics under specific titles and subtitles, I always get lost and it takes me a while to find the thing I'm looking for. And it really is frustrating to stumble in the dark looking for that one command line flag or input format that you've found and used many times before.

For me the consistent reference-like structure and terse language of man pages is ideal. The whole document is shorter than a bunch of info pages will be, and because of the structure, I always know where to expect specific things to be. Some man pages do not quite fit the traditional model so there is a bit of compromise, but I still find it easier to scan through such pages and remember the location of things than I do with info pages.

The difference between (Open)BSD and GNU/Linux world man pages is that the former group spend plenty of effort on polishing the language & structure to make the text clean, short and to-the-point, as well as consistent. So exactly the qualities I prefer man for are taken as far as possible. And because we love well written man pages, there's a man page for damn well near anything in the base system; whereas on other systems you're sometimes looking at info pages, sometimes html documentation installed where-ever or nowhere, READMEs, comments in config files, howtos and tutorials via Google, or at the source because nobody bothered write real documentation. If the source isn't at hand or you don't have the time for it, you try imitate what you see in use already, and pray..

Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#77

Post by sarnowski »

cmccabe wrote: post #58
teddyh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the document I cited conceded that there are some very good Unix man pages — BSD Awk may very well be one of many, I have not read it. It follows, logically, that there could be some very bad Info documentation manuals, and the GNU Awk manual may very well be one of many; I have not read it. This does not disprove the point the citation made; namely, that the Unix man page structure is unsuitable for many things…

If I want an introduction to complex topic, I usually won't use man pages. I will open up a web browser and search. That will give me web pages that have pictures, diagrams, and possibly even introductory essays about the topic. There are many more people who know how to write web pages or forum posts than who know how to write "info" pages. There are also great tools for searching the web, but poor tools for search…

This is true for me too as long as I don't use OpenBSD. The cause is that GNU/Linux manpages are horrible. They are mostly outdated and not in sync with the versions that are actually installed.

As soon as you log in to your newly installed OpenBSD system, your root account has a mail in her mailbox stating to read the "afterboot" manpage. When I first time entered "man afterboot" in my shell, I was blown away.

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=afterboot

  The idea is to create a list of items that can be checked
  off so that you have a warm fuzzy feeling that something
  obvious has not been missed.
It gives you a fast introduction with all informations you need and then references all locations where you find every other topic. At that point, you don't need google anymore where you again find outdated and incorrect informations.

The documentation is so high quality that this is the biggest advantage I appreciate the most.

Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#78

Post by sramov »

pimeys wrote: post #49
ams6110 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use OpenBSD as my main desktop and dev machine, with Awesome as the window manager (it's a tiling window manager). http://awesome.naquadah.org/ I use Xombrero (formerly called xxxterm) for browsing, or Chromium from packages if I'm working with anything on Google. https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero I use Emacs as my editor and email client, and do pretty much everything else in a terminal.

Are you using any specific font setup? Infinality patches etc? At least default install leaves the fonts in a pretty bad state.

The fonts are looking nice and sharp for me:

http://s24.postimg.org/n94n4dred/fonts.png

I fetch freetype via CVS from xenocara tree:

    cvs co xenocara/lib/freetype
Apply the subpixel patch (the Adobe CFF stuff is already default in -current):

http://dpaste.com/hold/1438578/

And use the following `~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf`:

http://dpaste.com/hold/1438579/

You might also want to delete `/etc/fonts/conf.d/30-lucida-aliases.conf`.

Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#79

Post by sramov »

brunoqc wrote: post #57

What is the best hardware for a home router? Soekris was very popular in the past but I'm wondering that maybe there's cool hardware out there. I also wonder if carpd is usable with a DHCP connection.

Soekris now has new models with Intel Atoms, top quality stuff as always (old ones are rock solid too, if a bit dated). I went with ALIX instead as I had a local distributor so it was quite a bit cheaper. Plenty fast for now, too.

Re: OpenBSD 5.4 Released

#80

Post by justincormack »

microcolonel wrote: post #61
csmuk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signed up to agree. Canned 6 Ubuntu machines (servers) and replaced with OpenBSD 5.3 recently. So much goodness ships with openbsd it's unreal. Bar Theo's sharp tongue (which is usually spot on), you get pf, opensmtpd (so much cleaner than postfix), nginx in base, miles better manual pages than Linux, no horrid gnu info, small and simple base system, absolutely no surprises, no bloated crap like dbus/upstart, tmux in…

D-Bus is just a low-level socket protocol(which is, by the way, really quite light); there is nothing "bloated" about it.

Well, its going into the kernel as kdbus, which you could argue is bloated. Linux is much bigger than the BSDs, although it is modular and you can remove it, but the big distros use much of it so you can't if you use them...
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