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I work on the same thing. I'd make love to it if I could.
*BSD runs much of the internet, including even Microsoft's own Hotmail service, so uncovering a bug in it can do more damage than finding one in MS's code. The motivation to try to crack it is definitely there. Linux runs a pretty large share of the internet too. Apache is definitely the most used server on the net, not Windows Server.
I really want to use OpenBSD, but I was turned off by how slow it was out of the box. The do entation says rebuilding it for modern CPUs will do nothing (since it's built for i386), but it's an absolute dinosaur compared to the linux I built. Maybe the ports should be optimized, as in my experience KDE is terrible when installed from the pre-built packages hosted on OpenBSD's FTP servers.
OpenBSD seems like the most well-organized OS I've ever seen. I like their version of ports so much better than FreeBSD's, since most packages have one version and one supported build (if I want to highly customize every package I wouldn't use any official distribution). FreeBSD and Gentoo's ports and portage collection seem so chaotic. OpenBSD's man pages are far better than GNU's also.
OpenBSD's wireless networking absolutely destroys anything I've used on Windows or Linux. I leech a really weak signal, and OpenBSD's ath driver (for my wireless adapter) is much more reliable than Linux's madwifi or the official Netgear Windows 2000 driver.
You have any tips for making OpenBSD reasonably fast as a desktop OS? My system is pretty old (384MB 266MHzDDR, 1.5GHz Athlon-Xp Palomino), but runs very fast in linux even with all the eye-candy turned on in KDE.
I still like linux, but I can't stand bloated distros like FedoraCore and SuSE, or trainwrecks like Gentoo. Slackware is prob the only mainstream linux distro I ever liked.
Last edited by baseline bum; 05-28-2006 at 03:08 AM.
I work on the same thing. I'd make love to it if I could.
Ever since Apple killed off the Power-PC architechure, I've had no reason to ever consider buying one of their systems. OSX is the only thing keeping that company alive. If they're going to go cheap with Intel i686 CPUs (as opposed to the old Motorolas), they should seriously reduce the prices of their systems, because Intel is a pretty large downgrade. Intel hasn't done anything interesting in the x86 market since the Pentium III.
When did you last looked at it? There was a ton of work done on cpus, dual proc and similar stuff in version 3.8 (the current version is 3.9).
I can't really tell you much about graphical desktops, since most of our work is related to network infrastucture. And this is really where OBSD excels. It comes to a point that it doesn't reall matter what your client OS is, if your infrastructure is run by OBSD things just work better.
One thing about OBSD is that there's still a lot of work to be done - but I really like their approach of security first. Also they have some of the most passionate and talented developers out there, so whatever aspect/function of the OS they tackle next I'm convinced it's going to outperform anything out there.
We recently went head to head with a Cisco based solution for a vpn system for a network of banks (the project included vpn security, routing and redundant communication channels). We blew them out of the water! At the end it wasn't even funny anymore because all of the flaws of Cisco had been exposed. The only problem is to come up with clients who will go through the process of a real side by side test. The old addage "Nobody has ever been fired for buying Cisco" is still very true.
Just a hint for you, we often build firewalls, WL Aps,routers and similar appliances using Soekris hardware, it's not really for the large systems but for home/small business it is absolutely perfect (small, affordable and good performance/choice of options). It's something you might want to look into.
Edit: And my main gripe with Linux is the enormous amount of bad Linux servers around. As a desktop system, Linux has a big advantage just because of the large amount of work that gets done in that direction. BTW I believe that MS has now moved their hotmail system onto MS servers, because running BSD servers was bad marketing (I kinda remember an article about it). Well good luck to them, I'm sure they electrical bill has taken a big hit because of that
Last edited by Slomo; 05-28-2006 at 04:10 AM.
my girlfriend's dad works for IBM as a consultant. he says the power pc chip is actually an IBM chip that motorola bought from them. are the new intel dual core processors not good? from everything have seen at work the performance on them is pretty good, as long as it doesn't use rosetta, which kills processor cycles.
Geek Alert!
ummmm yeah
I just wanted to get that 21inch Imac or the 17 inch Powerbook
I like the one with the piano keyboard hooked up to it, its pretty badass too!
better hurry up for the powerbook, they are no longer being produced!
the new Mac notebook replacement will do just fine by me!
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