[TriLUG] lightweight linux distro/pc giveaway

[Magnus]

Magnus wrote:
> I pretty regularly have installed OpenBSD on first generation pentiums 
> and it works great.  Probably far more appropriate than any popular 
> modern linux distro.
>
> Linux has gotten pretty porky since its lean mean days in the 
> underground.


So this thread got me feeling nostalgic for OpenBSD, which I haven't 
been running in any meaningful capacity for awhile.  I used to run it 
all the time, endorse it to my consulting clients, but ultimately for my 
own needs at the time of the "dumping incident" I needed something that 
was a bit more "enterprise friendly".  I was running LDAP & Kerberos at 
home for user metadata and authentication.  OpenBSD doesn't have NSS or 
PAM so this wasn't going to work for me.  Patching OpenBSD is a lot more 
involved than "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade".  So it sort of 
fell by the wayside.

These days I've been trying to slim down my home infrastructure.   I'm 
no longer doing LDAP/Kerberos at home.  I've only got one workstation, a 
couple of servers, and my wife's Wind0ze box.  I suppose I can afford to 
spend the time on OpenBSD again.

So I've got this Athlon XP 3000+ here with 512MB of RAM and 160GB hard 
disk.  Not a lightweight machine.  But for giggles I put OpenBSD 4.0 on 
it yesterday.   I rsync'd down the packages directory off of one of 
their mirror sites last night.  Installed KDE packages, firefox, 
thunderbird, a couple of other things.  This same machine was running 
Ubuntu "feisty" (beta) a couple of days ago.  OpenBSD is quite snappy on 
it.  Quite snappy indeed.

The only real *problem* I'm having with it thus far is the OpenBSD NFS 
client isn't very friendly with my Ubuntu "dapper" NFS server and tends 
to get hung up in a zombie state easily.  I'm messing around with the 
mount options to see if I can work around this.  The BSD guys like to 
point the finger at Linux having a bad NFS server, which may or may not 
be true.  I think I'm on to a good set of mount options now. 

OpenBSD will probably stay on this machine, at least for a little while.  :)