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.]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:41PM (4 children)
You can install an OS with actual software available.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pD-brane on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:03PM (3 children)
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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:04PM
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)
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
Interesting. What are you doing in 2020? I believe you may be qualified to run for president.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:00PM (3 children)
... vulnerable to the "withdrawing copyright" exploit to which the linux kernel seems to be vulnerable?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:27PM (2 children)
How can you "withdraw copyright" when no copyright was ever granted? You make a contribution to Linux, you retain full copyright. What you give is a perpetual, transferable, and I think irrevocable license to your contribution. (haven't read the GPL2 recently, so I could be a bit off)
Exactly what legal foundation is there for canceling such a license for a licensee who has flawlessly adhered to their part of the contract, without opening yourself to a breach-of-contract lawsuit? And perhaps more importantly, what basis is there for simultaneously canceling such a license for *every* licensee on the planet - since unless you do that I could just immediately go get a fresh license from anyone whose still has one, and thus legal authority to grant me a new one.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:06PM (1 child)
We should get with Facefook and Tweeter on that one.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday November 06 2018, @10:42PM
Why? I'm quite certain that buried somewhere around page 37 of their terms of service it says they can do anything they want, you have no rights whatsoever, and by using their service wave any rights the law might otherwise confer upon you, and agree to binding arbitration for any disagreement that might otherwise be settled in court. Oh, and that they own anything you post.
That last bit might be argued in court, if you hadn't waved your right to do so, especially in the case of sharing materials to which you do not own the rights, and thus can't give to them.
Linux has very few such problems - the GPL2 is short, clear, and to the point. it might be argued that someone, somewhere contributed code they had no right to contribute, especially during the early days. However, as I recall in response to the SCO debacle they've gotten much more rigorous about demanding explicit oaths that you have the right to contribute any code submitted, and done a great deal to clean up the ownership trail from early code that's still in the codebase. There's still plenty of "landmines" of unattributed code I'm sure - but they could be easily replaced as soon as anyone tries to make an issue of it.
As I recall the SCO lawsuit also established solid precedent that once you distribute your code under the GPL, you cannot revoke that license. Those wannabe parasites and their high-power lawyers squirmed and twisted for years any way they could, trying to lay some claim on the Linux codebase, and it all came to naught, destroying their own company in the process. And with as much precedent as was established in that case it's unlikely anyone else will ever want to try.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:17PM (2 children)
I tried 6.3 on an old Thinkpad, figuring a) it is OpenBSD so it is lean enough to work and b) the hardware is old enough it should work. A proved correct, B did not, no working power management == no laptop.
But yeah, If I could get OpenBSD to run on either real or virtual hardware I'd be learning it with an aim to switch at least some loads over. But to date the only hardware I ever got fully working was a Tatung UltraSparc clone. It was running headless in a rack so basically all it needed was disk and network.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @07:04PM
from some reading i was doing...
Both crashdumps and suspend to disk use swap space for their storage needs, so if you care about any of these, you will need to allocate at least as much space as the amount of physical RAM installed in the system
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @01:24AM
Really? I ran OpenBSD on my Macbook Air (2013?), and it worked great out of the box. Suspended and resumed flawlessly, although battery life wasn't as good as linux. The only reason I'm not running OpenBSD on my thinkpad is that it has an Nvidia card in it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:56PM (5 children)
It's even stuff that matters.
Is Soylent News Beta next?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Tuesday November 06 2018, @09:17PM (3 children)
I quite agree. Keeping abreast of the state of free software is one of the main reasons that I frequent this site over others.
I installed OpenBSD and NetBSD on laptops earlier this year and was pleasantly surprised how well things worked.
(Score: 1) by soylentnewsinator on Tuesday November 06 2018, @09:20PM (2 children)
Can you call out any older Dell notebooks? I have an older dell that is running FreeBSD but suspend/resume doesn't work, and the general attitude I've picked up is: don't use FreeBSD on non-servers. Maybe most FreeBSD users use Mac for their preferred desktop OS?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07 2018, @02:17PM
You sure you just didn't allocate enough swap?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @01:26AM
FreeBSD sucks on laptops every time I've tried it. OpenBSD is great on laptops though. The one pain area is media keys if you're into those - I think you'll only get audio control without patching your kernel.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday November 08 2018, @03:09AM
This is probably an obscure reference to the other site. But I can think of one thing for Soylent News Beta that might be approved by those here.
A stable API for accessing Soylent News so that we at home, should we so choose, can implement our own application code to run on our own computers to read the news.
I can imagine someone wanting to read Soylent News in a Voynich style. (see https://github.com/lizadaly/nanogenmo2014 [github.com] ) but other might have other tastes. Freedom!
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday November 06 2018, @09:13PM (3 children)
Thing is, this is not a witty phrase meaning "do all things well."
OpenBSD sometimes [ycombinator.com] considers "do it not at all" as a perfectly valid choice.
While OpenBSD's positions on security are laudable, their positions on compatibility can be... less so.
Every choice is a balance. OpenBSD is perhaps a more specialized, not generalized, tool, that can be the right choice in a wide variety of situations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @10:22PM (1 child)
It's not a witty phrase meaning "do all things well."
Rather, it's a phrase meaning "do it well or not at all".
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:25AM
Kind of like "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:41PM
As to your Wine/ycombinator remark: you can run any windows version, and applications, on OpenBSD, using qemu. You will be limited, though, in the amount of RAM you can use in that case.
A better (technical) example of a compromise might be wireshark, the network sniffing tool, which was permanently removed from the available packages somewhere around 2007-8 for software security reasons. Instead you'll have to use [start from] tcpdump if you want to analyze network packet flows -- a lot less convenient, but a price any network engineer should be happy to pay for increased security.
As to the Editor's query in the submission: I've never really had any serious problems*, while I've switched completely to openbsd on a laptop since 2009. Quite a number of OpenBSD developers, however, seem to run it on Thinkpads; and so do I.
*X server problems, sometimes, in the olden days (2006 - 10): but then it did run on some real junk too.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:54PM
Do feel the need to point the innocent reader to Michael W. Lucas' Absolute OpenBSD, as the article mentions some weird things (doas as OpenBSD's version of sudo? bumping up resource limits to run a feckin' web browser?? insulting fvwm ?!!?).
The emotion is nearly starting to get to me.