why use openbsd?
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:
- The download is relatively small: about 207MB for the iso image
- 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…
- 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 - Easy network configuration. You can make a bridged connection with two commands:
ifconfig bridge0 up
brconfig bridge0 add xl0 add fxp0 - It ships with apache! Just type:
apachectl startand your running! (the htdocs directory is/var/www/htdocs) - The documentation is fantastic. No really, it really is good, its always a pleasure to RTM on openbsd
- After installing a window manager like fluxbox, it takes one command to get it working, provided you want to type
startxeach time you boot. Also bear in mind you’ll need to add/usr/local/bin/fluxboxto your users.xinitrcfile , from a fresh install you’ll need to make this file. - It recognised my ancient 3COM pccard Ethernet adapter! I can just pull it out and openbsd doesn’t die, it just kills off the
dhclientprocess that was using it! - You get stickers if you buy the CD set!!!
Tags: internet, networking, openbsd