OpenBSD or freeBSD?

[N11]

I need a BSD platform to run some side by side comparisons to linux in terms of configuration and administration and need a quick understanding as to which BSD would be recommended.

A quick list of pros and cons of the two would be very helpful.

By the way this is only for x86, nothing else.

 

[drag]

OpenBSD is designed to be as secure as a operating can be. It is a branch off of NetBSD. Every peice of software used in the defualt installation has been audited again and again to make it as bugfree as humanly possitble. It has a nice port system set up to intstall programs from Ftp sites all over the world, of course once you start installing non-standard programs you are lowering the security level of you computer. It is a great OS for the terminally paranoid users, people who depend on their OS and need it to be hacker proof (as much as possible), or a server that is to be set up in a unsecure enviroment (such as no firewall protection). The major downside of this OS is that it tends to be a bit old fasion. Programs need to audited and therefor it is impossible maintain bleeding edge software technology in a distro that has ultimate security and stability is it's goal. I also suspect that scalability and/or performance is not what it could be compared to other OS's if used in something like a mutiple-cpu database server. (although I can't back that up)

I don't have firsthand experiance of the following:

There is also NetBSD. Along with FreeBSD it is the original open source OS for the masses. These BSD's made it possible for Linux to get it's start. It's claim to fame is that is the most ported OS in history. It is able to be used on something like 3 billion different computer platforms. If you have a bunch of different computer platforms you have to deal with this OS is for you. Very usefull and powerfull.

FreeBSD is very much like the other BSDs, the difference is that it's main concern was the i386 platform. So performance and seurity is geared towards the x86 crowd. If you want a UNIX with all the latest bells and whistles to be used on your shiny x86 machine this is it. It is very usefull and is used by many I.T. corporations the world over. It is also very scalable OS and is often used in ultra-high-performance Beowolf clusters. (If I understand things correctly)

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag
OpenBSD is designed to be as secure as a operating can be. It is a branch off of NetBSD. Every peice of software used in the defualt installation has been audited again and again to make it as bugfree as humanly possitble. It has a nice port system set up to intstall programs from Ftp sites all over the world, of course once you start installing non-standard programs you are lowering the security level of you computer. It is a great OS for the terminally paranoid users, people who depend on their OS and need it to be hacker proof (as much as possible), or a server that is to be set up in a unsecure enviroment (such as no firewall protection). The major downside of this OS is that it tends to be a bit old fasion. Programs need to audited and therefor it is impossible maintain bleeding edge software technology in a distro that has ultimate security and stability is it's goal.

Its not as behind as you would think. The only piece that is pretty far "behind" is BIND, but thats because of the ungodly state of 8.x/9.x code. Apache is fairly up to date (patches have been backported atleast in -stable).

I also suspect that scalability and/or performance is not what it could be compared to other OS's if used in something like a mutiple-cpu database server. (although I can't back that up)

It doesnt have SMP support.

FreeBSD is very much like the other BSDs, the difference is that it's main concern was the i386 platform. So performance and seurity is geared towards the x86 crowd. If you want a UNIX with all the latest bells and whistles to be used on your shiny x86 machine this is it. It is very usefull and is used by many I.T. corporations the world over. It is also very scalable OS and is often used in ultra-high-performance Beowolf clusters. (If I understand things correctly)

Its the platform Hotmail, wearethewayout.com, and yahoo! were using (yahoo! still is) and the platform of choice for the Matrix special effects people.

I recommend FreeBSD if you want the most linux-like system. If you have time to learn and tune and RTFM and RTFF, and RTFA (archives), etc test them both. Without any clue as to what you will possibly be using them for, its tough to give you some information thats actually worthwhile.

 

[ProviaFan]

Sorry to interrupt a FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD thread with this question, but...does FreeBSD support a SBLive or not? Their website does not list that soundcard in their supported hardware list, but if their list is anything like the "official" linux supported hardware list, it's probably a bit out of date. So, is anyone using FreeBSD with the Creative Labs SBLive sound card? Does it work well?

 

[drag]

I recommend FreeBSD if you want the most linux-like system.

heh, thats funny. Have we gotten to the point at which we begin to describe Unices in terms of Unix is a Linux-like OS, instead of Linux is a Unix-like OS?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag

I recommend FreeBSD if you want the most linux-like system.

heh, thats funny. Have we gotten to the point at which we begin to describe Unices in terms of Unix is a Linux-like OS, instead of Linux is a Unix-like OS?

If they are comparing OSes to Linux, then yes.

Use linux if you want a FreeBSD-like OS. Use OpenBSD if you want a NetBSD-like OS. Use FreeBSD or NetBSD if you want a senate-like OS (a lot of politics and not enough real work, FreeBSD to a greater extent, NetBSD to much more reasonable level). Use Linux or OpenBSD if you want to live under a totalitarian dictatorship where it doesnt matter what you want unless you happen to be Linus torvalds or Theo DeRaadt respectively.

*those of you that know my preferences will know which method I prefer, whether it happens to be the best or not.

 

[Bremen]

No offense n0c, but shouldn't they use FreeBSD if they want a FreeBSD type OS? Ditto for Linux et al. Also don't forget that Linus only rules the kernel, AFAIK only Slackware ships vanilla kernels (of the major distros). Of course for a truly political OS nothing beats Debian IMHO, no other distro that I know of is actually trying to replace the authors/maintainers for every piece of software (well, Red Hat already employs alot of package maintainers, procps springs to mind).

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Bremen
No offense n0c, but shouldn't they use FreeBSD if they want a FreeBSD type OS? Ditto for Linux et al.

Also don't forget that Linus only rules the kernel, AFAIK only Slackware ships vanilla kernels (of the major distros).

Ok. We will be picky and make that distinction. Ill repost my post with corrections after this.

Of course for a truly political OS nothing beats Debian IMHO, no other distro that I know of is actually trying to replace the authors/maintainers for every piece of software (well, Red Hat already employs alot of package maintainers, procps springs to mind).

Maybe Im wrong about FreeBSD. I can only believe what Ive heard since Im not part of the committee, so when commiters quit because of political BS, I take their words for it.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Use linux if you want to.

Use OpenBSD if you think it might be neat.

Use NetBSD if you want to be 1337.

Use FreeBSD if you like it too!



OpenBSD
is not a democracy
shut the eff up punk


Jordan Hubbard left
FreeBSD core because
Apple is better

Michael Smith left too
because of bad blood with the
political peeps


Linux is just a
kernel because gnu is good
but is not unix

EDIT: If you cant tell, this post is not entirely serious. My opinions have not changed from the previous post .

 

[Nothinman]

Of course for a truly political OS nothing beats Debian IMHO, no other distro that I know of is actually trying to replace the authors/maintainers for every piece of software

They're not trying to replace them, if the original maintainer wants to maintain RPMs and Debs they're more than welcome (once they become an official Debian maintainer). The problem is most don't want to, there's a ton of rules and regulations that must be followed that RPM maintainers don't have to adhere to and in the end it's a good thing because Debian is a much more coherent system than RedHat is IMO.

 

[Bremen]

Well, whoever is brain-dead enough to maintain their package in an rpm format deserves to have a house dropped on them. My main beef with debian is the way many packages don't credit the orginal authors. For instance one obscure package I use alot had the orginal authors listed for versions 1-3, but for the current version 4 nada. Made it out to look like the debian guy did it all. Plus since debian maintains its own bugtraq they effectively cut out the orginal author (now I guess deb maintainers are supposed to pass on all patches/bug reports, but we're kidding ourselves if we think they all do). Anyway, this can very quickly lead to a fork, especially if a maintainer has different ideas on which way a package should go; and I absolutely do not want to have to install the debian version of something just to be compatible with the rest of the world.

 

[N11]

Well, whoever is brain-dead enough to maintain their package in an rpm format deserves to have a house dropped on them.

There's nothing wrong with ease of administration particularly when you are dealing with several dozen services and applications (or even hundreds in some environments) and are responsible for their consistency and inter-dependancies.

Homemade bread tastes really good but I think the general population is getting to a point where it is just easier and more convenient to buy the premade bread from the store.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: N11
Well, whoever is brain-dead enough to maintain their package in an rpm format deserves to have a house dropped on them.

There's nothing wrong with ease of administration particularly when you are dealing with several dozen services and applications (or even hundreds in some environments) and are responsible for their consistency and inter-dependancies.

Homemade bread tastes really good but I think the general population is getting to a point where it is just easier and more convenient to buy the premade bread from the store.

I think he was just talking trash about rpm because deb is better, or something.

 

[Nothinman]

Well, whoever is brain-dead enough to maintain their package in an rpm format deserves to have a house dropped on them

Well you just said that probably 95% of the Linux part of the OSS community needs to die. Like it or not RPM is the defacto standard.

My main beef with debian is the way many packages don't credit the orginal authors. For instance one obscure package I use alot had the orginal authors listed for versions 1-3, but for the current version 4 nada. Made it out to look like the debian guy did it all.

So file a bug, it was probably an oversight. Or a f'd up copy/paste. I also like how you left out the name of the package so noone can follow up on this.

Plus since debian maintains its own bugtraq they effectively cut out the orginal author (now I guess deb maintainers are supposed to pass on all patches/bug reports, but we're kidding ourselves if we think they all do)

Have you ever submitted a bug report? I have, and the Debian maintainer worked with the upstream authoer and myself to get the bug worked out. Why would you believe otherwise?

Anyway, this can very quickly lead to a fork, especially if a maintainer has different ideas on which way a package should go; and I absolutely do not want to have to install the debian version of something just to be compatible with the rest of the world.

Christ, you sound like one of those sheep CNN reporters talking about how Linux has forked and it's going down the same path to doom that unix went.

Noone likes to fork code, it looks bad on the original author and the fork-er. If anything there would be a Debian specific diff applied to each release (infact a large number of packages have Debian-specific or other external patches applied for various reasons), it's far from a fork and if the upstream author ever decides he likes the idea he can incorporate it easily because the work is already done.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I like forks. I think they are good.

 

[Bremen]

Well, it seems I managed to imply something I didn't mean again... lets see if I can't manage to type something that actually conveys what I want it to for once :-\

Well you just said that probably 95% of the Linux part of the OSS community needs to die. Like it or not RPM is the defacto standard.

For distro packages perhaps. But how many people do you know that write a program and decide to distribute it in rpm??? I know of none. All third party apps I find are tarballs, with perhaps a RH/Mandrake RPM contributed by someone else. With LSB perhaps this will change for the better (one can always hope).

Anyway, when I made my orginal statement, I was refering to the fact that an rpm for one distro may not work on the next.

My main beef with debian is the way many packages don't credit the orginal authors. For instance one obscure package I use alot had the orginal authors listed for versions 1-3, but for the current version 4 nada. Made it out to look like the debian guy did it all.

So file a bug, it was probably an oversight. Or a f'd up copy/paste. I also like how you left out the name of the package so noone can follow up on this.

I actually decided not to name the package because I didn't feel it was important, and also because this was a few years ago. I just checked the debian pages, and I couldn't find it again myself :-\ Anyway, my point still stands, while I agree most will work with orginal authors to get stuff resolved etc etc. given the numbers of people involved to say there wouldn't be a few bad sheep would be sheer folly.


Anyway, my apologies, my brain dead ranting seems to have taken this far OT.

 

[Nothinman]

But how many people do you know that write a program and decide to distribute it in rpm???

If the author provides anything it's an RPM unless he's got some affiliation with Debian or Slackware (if you can call those tgzs packages), some just provide source but there are those that provide RPMs too.

All third party apps I find are tarballs, with perhaps a RH/Mandrake RPM contributed by someone else.

VMWare, the nVidia drivers and Opera come to mind right off the bat.

Anyway, when I made my orginal statement, I was refering to the fact that an rpm for one distro may not work on the next.

Maybe I missed that part, but I have no idea where you intended to say that.

Anyway, my point still stands, while I agree most will work with orginal authors to get stuff resolved etc etc. given the numbers of people involved to say there wouldn't be a few bad sheep would be sheer folly.

Like you said Debian is very political and on top of that the process involved in becoming a maintainer is very long, why would any of them risk that and steal someoneelse's work? It doesn't make sense.

 

[N11]

I think everyone here is supposed to be on the same team.... sometimes that gets lost in the politics.

I wanted to compare a BSD to Linux in terms of general administration. Ranging from users/quotas to installing and maintaining services. I wanted to see the viability of a BSD as both a static content serving as well as dynamically database driven solutions.

I've got the current FreeBSD now and am going to get it up and going to take a look.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: N11
I think everyone here is supposed to be on the same team.... sometimes that gets lost in the politics.

I wanted to compare a BSD to Linux in terms of general administration. Ranging from users/quotas to installing and maintaining services. I wanted to see the viability of a BSD as both a static content serving as well as dynamically database driven solutions.

I've got the current FreeBSD now and am going to get it up and going to take a look.

Good luck, let us know how it goes, and if you have any questions, dont hesitate to ask.

 

[Bremen]

VMWare, the nVidia drivers and Opera come to mind right off the bat.

Any that are written by Joe Shmoe? Those are all done by corporations that can afford to pay someone to package for 20 different distros (I actually downloaded the nvidia drivers the other day. I believe they had like 10 different versions just for red hat). Licq comes to mind, not sure if those rpm's are contribtued, but I remember from my experience trying out Red Hat they didn't have an rpm for my version anyway, and I wound up getting the generic tarball :-\

Oh, and on the subject of the orginal poster. I think we've illustrated the major differences in linux/bsd already. They're all philosphical/political <G>