why use openbsd?

Anton Parol — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:48:35 +0000

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 (insert your own network cards here)
It ships with apache! Just type:
apachectl start and 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 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.
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!
You get stickers if you buy the CD set!!!

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why use openbsd?