OpenBSD 3.9 The first impressions
As I have detailed elsewhere on SlashBoot dot org, I'm not much of a C programmer or kernel hacker, so I approach this as an enthusiastic user of OpenBSD. After backing up my home folder and various config files from within /etc, I decided on doing a fresh installation on my laptop, a 2GHz Dell Latitude c840 with 512MB RAM and a 60GB hard disk. No major changes in the installer to report, it was as straight forward as ever. A quick sweep around of some the config files to make the system resemble how I like to have things and I was set.
Hmm, lovely packages
The first thing that struck me was the vast improvements in the selection of pre-built packages available for this release. Well actually, I had discovered this a day or two before the CD set arrived, whilst having a quick shufty through the FTP repositories, where you'll find up to date versions of the major programs and applications, far more so than when 3.8 came out. The packages are also put together much better, with a lot less of the dependancy hell that can arise at times. So, first to go on is the xfce4, fluxbox and also Gnome. I've opted for three separate desktop environments as I like to switch between them as needs dictate. I generally use xfce4 on the desktop, but when I'm going to be really taxing the machine, I'll often swith to fluxbox, which is very lightweight. I also like to have a full Gnome installation in place, as it helps to improve functionality in xfce4 and I don't know exactly which components to have onboard, so I throw it all on.
The window managers went on without incident by simply pkg_add'ing the chosen packages. I then tidied everything up, got my bookmarks in place and dropped my mail folders back into Thunderbird to get my desktop environment back on track. Next I needed to build various programs from ports a big job of a build it turned out to be, in building the Sun Java JDK 1.5, which means building two previous versions and the mozilla-devel package. I was pleasantly surprised to see it go through flawlessly, once I had gathered the source and binary packages from Sun and the patches from another site, all as per instructions in the build process. For whatever reason I had never previously managed a successful build of Java, so this is indeed good news for me and an indication that the ports collection has received the same kind of attention as the package collection.
The best yet
From my point of view, OpenBSD 3.9 is the best that I have used and installed so far, at least as far as building a working environment is concerned. The improved package collection is the highlight for me, although many would prefer to cite the under the bonnet improvements in the base packages as the best points. I am merely a user of this excellent operating system and have so far contributed only hardware and funds, in the form of CD and t-shirt purchases, not being a proficient C/C++ programmer. OpenBSD is primarily written by developers for developers, but although I am not a software developer in that sense, I feel right at home with it and am very much impressed with this latest release. Although not a goal of the project, that I know about, it seems to have become that much more user friendly in this latest guise. Either that or I have edged towards becoming a Unix developer, which I seriously doubt at this point in time. Either way, it is a great product and much credit should go to Theo De Raadt and the rest of the developers, contributors and committers, for the sterling work that they continue to do.
Post a comment:
| 
| 
