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joekiser writes:
"Antoine Jacoutot has given a status update for GNOME users of OpenBSD, including a short video. The GNOME release has been updated to 3.10.2, and auto-mounting of devices is now supported through a new helper program, toad. Now is a great time for desktop users to test the upcoming OpenBSD release. The ports tree was recently locked for stability testing ahead of the 5.5 release, meaning that recent -CURRENT builds are very close to what will be released in May. Antoine also addresses the upcoming issues non-Linux systems face with GNOME, such as the upcoming hard dependency on systemd."
[ED Note: I ran an OpenBSD router box years ago when tinkering about with an old PII with four NICs seemed worthwhile. The OS lived up to it's rep, but it never occurred to me to use it for a desktop system. Are any Soylentils using OpenBSD for a GNOME-based workstation?]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @08:28AM
That beautiful piece of Unix simplicity has been in FreeBSD for decades and is still there to this day. Without it, FreeBSD is worth a lot less. All default configs in /etc/rc.conf makes life so simple.
I have never understood this need to improve the speed of the boot process by a few milliseconds. How often do people boot their systems? In my case, once every few years.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @10:46AM
FreeBSD has /etc/rc.d and /usr/local/etc/rc.d, where packages can install scripts to start, stop, and control daemons. You use rc.conf to define which ones should be started (and what other arguments they're given). On OpenBSD you just have /etc/rc.local, which is a shell script. This means that there's no way for a package uninstall to remove an rc entry, so you end up having to bracket everything in tests to see if the daemon that you're trying to start exists, which means that turning on a service in OpenBSD involves copying a few lines of shell script into rc.local. In FreeBSD, you just set the {package name}_enable variable to YES and it runs. When it's uninstalled, that line is dead code, but it's just setting a variable, so it's safe (it just slows things down slightly).
While speeding up the boot is nice, the most important reason for replacing init systems is that you want something that can be managed at scale. Adding and removing files is easy, as is running a command that (atomically) updates some structured format. Modifying a text file, especially one that contains code written in a Turing-complete language (e.g. POSIX shell), is not something that scales well when you're trying to manage thousands of machines.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @07:20PM
Running services from packages is not something you do on a regular OpenBSD system. Anything I care about can be set as a variable in rc.conf.local. Of course the article is about Gnome, so you are going to get everything and its grandmother running as an insidious service. Good luck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @09:15PM
Your information is out of date. OpenBSD also has scripts in /etc/rc.d, and enabling, say, saned is just a matter of setting "pkg_scripts=saned" in /etc/rc.conf.local. rc.d scripts first appeared in OpenBSD about three years ago.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday February 22 2014, @06:30AM
sudo mod me up