Parolski.com

I often have epic long dreams with huge amounts of detail in them. Occasionally I have a dream that isn’t very long and the details disappear very quickly. Yesterdays xkcd is so true, it makes me wish I could record my dreams and play it back for other people to enjoy

A year ago Sun announced that it was going to be open sourcing its high availability cluster software. According to this blog, they are now delivering on that promise six months ahead of schedule by releasing two million lines of code. TWO MILLION!!!! thats loads! OHAC isn’t quite the same as Solaris Cluster. Its basically most of the code base, but not all packaged up and is not currently supported by Sun. However, Sun is intending on moving the development work away from the official product and onto the OHAC in the future. This is great news for anyone thinking of developing there own custom agents for their own software, or for anyone who just wants to poke around some enterprise-class cluster software!

First up, its cute. Thats right, the branding is so adorable, you just want a little puffy, like its was a Pokemon or something. No, but really, I do think the branding tells you something about the product; its lean and functional. Of course, you pick whichever product you feel solves the problem, but heres my reasons for liking openbsd:

1. The download is relatively small: about 207MB for the iso image
2. It takes up little resources: 30MB once booted up (and 13 processes). Of course, you’ll be expecting to load the machine up with services, thats the whole point of a good OS, right? Unless you don’t actually intend on using it…
3. Easy to use ports system. You just download the ports.tar.gz file for your version of openbsd, uncompress and then untar in the right directory (/usr/ports), then navigate to the directory of the software you want and type
make && make install
   Of course, this is only really needed for people who like to compile from source! Everyone else can just use the usual packages system
4. Easy network configuration. You can make a bridged connection with two commands:
ifconfig bridge0 up
brconfig bridge0 add xl0 add fxp0 (insert your own network cards here)
5. It ships with apache! Just type:
   apachectl start and your running! (the htdocs directory is /var/www/htdocs )
6. The documentation is fantastic. No really, it really is good, its always a pleasure to RTM on openbsd
7. After installing a window manager like fluxbox, it takes one command to get it working, provided you want to type startx each time you boot. Also bear in mind you’ll need to add /usr/local/bin/fluxbox to your users .xinitrc file , from a fresh install you’ll need to make this file.
8. It recognised my ancient 3COM pccard Ethernet adapter! I can just pull it out and openbsd doesn’t die, it just kills off the dhclient process that was using it!
9. You get stickers if you buy the CD set!!!

The latest version of Opensolaris can be found at opensolaris.com . This was known as project indiana whilst in development and is now yours absolutely free! (support does cost). Its basically Sun’s home rolled distro of opensolaris.org , and now contains IPS (Image Packaging System) . Essentially IPS is like apt for ubuntu and debian:

you want netbeans?

pkg install netbeans

Theres also a graphical installer too! Theres a screencast you might want to watch which explains a little about how to use it, and what its about!

You should also note that its made it onto distrowatch.com, to rank 69!!!!Hopefully enough people will blog about the release to push that figure up!!!Surely it should make it to the top ten, for all the features it has?