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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe-you-CAN-take-it-with-you? dept.

Software developer Cullum Smith has written a detailed blog post as a guide to a secure and streamlined installation of OpenBSD 6.4 on a laptop. He goes through installation, networking, initial configuration and advanced customization, getting started with the graphical interface, and adding packages including the Chromium web browser. He also touches on multimedia and battery questions as well as updates. As usual, OpenBSD lives up to the do it well or not at all philosophy.

It's been almost a year since I've posted any articles, and I'm afraid I have a confession to make...I've joined the dark side! Most people know my site from the How to Run a Mail Server post, which targeted FreeBSD. A few months ago, I converted all that infrastructure to an automated OpenBSD platform. Turns out OpenBSD was so much easier, I decided to run it as a desktop too.

You won't find nearly as many online resources about setting up OpenBSD, because honestly, you really don't need any. Unlike much of Linux and FreeBSD, the included manuals are high quality, coherent, and filled with practical examples. You also need very little third party software to do basic tasks—almost everything you need is well-integrated into the base system.

[Years back, I'd read of issues with laptops and entering/exiting hibernate/suspend modes, driving internal/external displays, and limited run-time on battery power; how well have these been straightened out? What laptops are BSD/Linux-friendly and what distribution do you run on yours? --Ed.]


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by pD-brane on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:03PM (3 children)

    by pD-brane (6728) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:03PM (#758580)

    Misinformation.

    To compare with, maybe Debian GNU/Linux is the system distribution with the highest number of packages available. OpenBSD has fewer packages (and ports), but from my experience there is less redundancy and packages tend to be current.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:04PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:04PM (#758607) Journal

    I'm not really a BSD guy, but I'll agree with your post. With Debian, pretty much every file manager ever built for *nix is available. BSD and Arch, a few others, don't offer _every_single_file_manager_ever_created. But, if you need a feature, you can find it, all the same.

    Maybe it's alright to reinvent the wheel every now and then. But, there is really little need to keep a stockpile of every wheel ever invented!

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:54PM (1 child)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:54PM (#758633) Journal

    Look, picking on BSD is a time honored tech tradition and I'm not about to stop now because of things like "truth" or "facts"

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07 2018, @05:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07 2018, @05:26AM (#758843)

      I'm not about to stop now because of things like "truth" or "facts"

      Interesting. What are you doing in 2020? I believe you may be qualified to run for president.