[TriLUG] Slightly OT: Which *BSD? OpenBSD!

[Patrick Boyer]

I have only tried OpenBSD but I love it so far. The ports system is
very familiar to me since I use Gentoo on the laptop (FreeBSD
developed the ports system, which was copied by OpenBSD, and which was
used as the basis for portage on Gentoo). I like OpenBSD for its
emphasis on security and its outstanding firewall, PF. I'm currently
in the process of setting up OpenBSD 3.5 on an old Pentium I as a
bridging firewall.

One word of caution: if you thought that some of the Linux community
can be unfriendly towards newbies (RTFM, etc.), the OpenBSD community
is much, much worse. They have no interest in taking people by the
hand and walking them through an installation. They expect users to
read the man pages (the best man pages in the universe, by the way!),
read the online FAQ, and figure most things out for themselves. It
might not be the best attitude in the world, but it is the way that
they are. They do have some reason to gripe, since their documentation
is excellent (did I mention that OpenBSD has excellent man pages?).

If you're really serious about OpenBSD, I highly recommend "Absolute
OpenBSD" by Michael W. Lucas, as well as the online man pages and FAQ.


On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 13:41:33 -0400 (EDT), Shawn Page
<bspage at webassign.net> wrote:
> What kind of performance benefits specifically did you see with FreeBSD?
> I haven't used it in a few years but really liked it.
> 
> Gentoo _is_ quite nice by the way and emerge almost seems easier than *BSD
> ports though I can't explain exactly why.
> 
> I'm currently trying out OpenBSD 3.5 at home and have found the install to
> be very quick and painless.  It is entirely text based though so be
> prepared.
> 
> -Shawn
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > The one cool feature of the xBSD is the ports collection.  Personally I
> > love the way it works.  It compiles the software the way you want,
> > instead of taking the defaults that someone else compiled for you.  The
> > closest distro to xBSD is Gentoo; however I have never used it.  I
> > typically use OpenBSD for firewalls, FreeBSD for servers and Linux for
> > desktops.  I have seen better performance on servers with sustained high
> > load on FreeBSD over Linux which is why I prefer it.  I have not played
> > with NetBSD in forever...I understand they are doing some sysV type
> > things with the boot process.  If you are wanting to learn, I would
> > suggest OpenBSD or FreeBSD.  Look at both and see which meets you needs
> > for software to install after the OS, you may be limited in OpenBSD
> > compared to FreeBSD.
> >
> > Good luck with your adventure...
> >
> > -brandon
> >
> >
> > On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 10:42, Jon Carnes wrote:
> >> On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 10:17, Roy Vestal wrote:
> >> > I'm wanting to learn BSD. I've been reading up on the 3 I understand
> >> to be
> >> > the "Big 3": OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD.
> >>
> >> If functionality is your primary criteria (unless you need some nice QoS
> >> based routing capabilities), then stay with Linux. Nothing is being
> >> developed faster - and it can do just about anything a computing system
> >> (or phone system) needs to do.
> >>
> >> But if security (and High Availability) is your primary criteria, then
> >> OpenBSD is the flavor you want to try. I run Mandrake and OpenBSD on my
> >> networks: Mandrake for it functionality (and I like MSEC), and OpenBSD
> >> for Firewalling and Failover (CARP is really cool).
> >>
> >> I've played with the three main variants and long ago chose OpenBSD as
> >> my favorite. It's track record is the best in the industry for security
> >> and for it's response to any security issues.
> >>
> >> It's also not as big a leap from Linux as you might think. Here is an
> >> article that will take about 2 hours to read (if you follow the primary
> >> links) that covers most of the differences between Linux and BSD:
> >> Migrating to OpenBSD
> >>   http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq9.html
> >>
> >> ... And here is a primer on PF (the firewall application in OpenBSD):
> >>   http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html
> >>
> >> Have fun Roy!
> >>
> >> Jon Carnes
> >
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> 
> 
> 
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