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Status Update for Gnome3 on OpenBSD

posted by LaminatorX on Friday February 21 2014, @07:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the Gnomes-for-Theo dept.

joekiser writes:

"Antoine Jacoutot has given a status update for GNOME users of OpenBSD, including a short video. The GNOME release has been updated to 3.10.2, and auto-mounting of devices is now supported through a new helper program, toad. Now is a great time for desktop users to test the upcoming OpenBSD release. The ports tree was recently locked for stability testing ahead of the 5.5 release, meaning that recent -CURRENT builds are very close to what will be released in May. Antoine also addresses the upcoming issues non-Linux systems face with GNOME, such as the upcoming hard dependency on systemd."

[ED Note: I ran an OpenBSD router box years ago when tinkering about with an old PII with four NICs seemed worthwhile. The OS lived up to it's rep, but it never occurred to me to use it for a desktop system. Are any Soylentils using OpenBSD for a GNOME-based workstation?]

 
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  • (Score: 1) by ld a, b on Friday February 21 2014, @11:05PM

    by ld a, b (2414) on Friday February 21 2014, @11:05PM (#4592)

    Leaving aside the points raised by other people, I think you are forgetting why someone would consider OpenBSD for anything in the first place.

    I don't know enough about network security or RNGs to criticize, but FreeBSD exploit mitigation is abysmal. They are just now starting to consider implementing ASLR. Stack smashing protection is only available for the base system(ie. not your desktop). This means that about just any stack corruption bug can be trivially exploited by a stack smashing aficionado in a few minutes real time.

    Even if we assume that their jailing system is able to and actually set up correctly to prevent the exploit from taking over more processes, I can tell you I wouldn't like to run a Desktop with say an pwned web browser running arbitrary code.

    In TFA case, he has to provide desktops for clueless users who, for all we know, will attempt to download porn and angry birds at any chance they get, from their nuclear plant controlling terminals. I can see why they would go with OpenBSD.

    --
    10 little-endian boys went out to dine, a big-endian carp ate one, and then there were -246.