Thursday, July 03, 2008

New OpenBSD LiveCD

Looks like there is a new OpenBSD LiveCD distro called BSDanywhere. Having built both Linux and OpenBSD LiveCD's the latter is a definitely a pain in the ass, although it is possible.

Although I'm not sure *why* you would want to do it, because with the exception of PF there is no reason to actually use a BSD. But it would be cool if someone wrote a nice GNOME based installer for OpenBSD (like Ubuntu) just to piss off the zealots. Oh and throw in a 20th century package management system while you are at it.

(I did actually get dpkg working on OpenBSD 3.9 once, but never got to apt)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The package management system used on OpenBSD is more advanced than that of nearly any other system out there. It's not got the extra fancy bit of an official GTK2 GUI, though there is a GUI for it in the ports tree, it uses a database of the ports tree (which is also in the ports tree). Yaifo is a different installer for OpenBSD, maintained by an OpenBSD developer. It's not GNOME (but then, no installer is, those installers just GTK, GTK2 or QT).

Yaifo and the random GUI installer give you what it is that you want. Play with them if you really think they're needed, hell, you may be able to make them better.

Matt Franz said...

Thanks for playing, but have you tried to support large (100s) numbers of production FreeBSD/OpenBSD systems? With ports you can fsck yourself far worse with port dependencies and realistically who has the time.

Basically the solution you are left with is create packages from ports and push them out to servers.

Then there is the whole fact that the packages/ports for common apps (Ruby, Squid, whatever) don't get security updates as fast as the OS core.

It is easier to build all your critical apps from scratch and ditch ports/packages.

Forget about the GUI (that was a troll) and I like the fact that the OpenBSD installer hasn't changed since I first used it in 1998.

But there is no way you can seriously compare the pkg_* tools compared to rpm/yum dpkg/apt?

Ports are fine for dev systems (just like Gentoo is fine) but get real for large numbers of prod systems that you actually have to maintain and patch.