Double BSD birthday bash beckons – or triple, if you count MidnightBSD 3.0 New point releases of both the general-purpose Linux rival FreeBSD and the security-focused, traditional and rather minimalist OpenBSD have landed. FreeBSD 13.2 has arrived after a slightly longer release process than planned, which included a couple of additional release candidates, RC5 and RC6. Before you get too excited, …
Small correction:
-> the traditional UFS, and this now supports snapshots, so long as you're running with journaled soft updates
UFS on FreeBSD has long supported snapshots using mksnap_ffs, which is very hand for consistent backups. The new feature is snapshots when using journaled soft updates (which is a very common use case). This was not previously possible:
# mksnap_ffs /pies
mksnap_ffs: Cannot create snapshot /pies: /: Snapshots are not yet supported when running with journaled soft updates: Operation not supported
The screenshot is the evidence....56 processes of which 11 are firefox and 1 is xterm. Meaning 44 is all it takes for overhead.
Only 600MB in use.
Try that on a Windows machine....you may get tired counting processes (and gigabytes).
Nothing wrong with a minimalist system that you can bulk up with a selection from thousands of available packages. There is even a graphical utility for this called appmanager.
Try that on a Windows, Linux or FreeBSD machine and its about the same, there's a lot of overhead with OSes that don't have their existence predicated on security. Which isn't very surprising as Theo and Co make it a point to have the smallest attack surface as possible OOB. I'm not a fan of his personally but I do have a lot of respect for OpenBSD though I don't tend to use it unless I need something highly secure without much fucking around with it (there's always going to be some, even with how secure it is by default), FreeBSD has long been my UNIXlike of choice with Fedora and RHEL a close second and third but there's a time and a place for something like OpenBSD.
Thanks for noticing (see icon). But...
"...and booted straight into the xenodm display manager, logging into which took us straight into a very retro TWM session"
I suspect it was a fvwm 2.2.5 session that you booted into. That is what the screen shot is of.
Takes but 20 minutes and a few config files to set up a nice xfce4 4.18 desktop (and that is allowing for my flaky Internet). Google 'OpenBSD on a laptop' (see post title) for a walk-through with links to FAQ and man pages.
The 7.3 installer also now asks if you want to encypt the main disk and prompts you through the steps. Suggest asking for more info (? at the prompt - you get a listing of the size of the devices) to make sure you end up installing into the encrypted softraid device. Works fine.
@Bitsminer: Top tells me 86 processes: 85 idle, 1 on processor with xfce4, firefox, and thunar, terminals and all. Wasn't aware of appmanager - will have a look. Quite like pkg_add/pkg_info -Q though.
[Author here]
It's fvwm? Oops! My bad.
If you follow the link to my previous writeups on OpenBSD, you will read that I did install Xfce on it.
7.1:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/openbsd_71_released_including_apple/
7.2:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/21/openbsd_72_released/
<- I did actually install Xfce on this, but since it looked and worked identically to in 7.1, I didn't include a screenshot or anything.
FreeBSD 13.2 isn't dramatically different from the preceding version
Which is exactly as it should be and will be welcomed by those who keep their BSD systems both up, and up to date with those envious long uptimes. BSD gets so many things right that dramatic changes are very much the exception. Yes, setting it up takes a little practice, but then it's a very stable system. It's fine with a GUI and this is not really hard to set up, just unusual for those who've never seen text-only installers.
I've been impressed by helloSystem, but then I miss the classic Mac desktop and decent implementation of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. Even better, the latest version actually installed on an ancient Sony Vaio and even recognised the wifi!
https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
[Author here]
Yes, I have written about the Hello System as well:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/31/hellosystem_08/
I could not get it to install on bare metal, though, and for some reason, the dock has been dropped from recent releases.
The devs took your comments on v0.8.0 into account for the latest version (v0.8.1) - from https://github.com/helloSystem/ISO/releases/tag/r0.8.1 :
"This maintenance release mainly addresses feedback from the DistroWatch 0.8.0 review by Jesse Smith."
I had problems with v0.8.0 like you, and v0.8.1 is *much* better.
I installed both FreeBSD and OpenBSD in VMs on Tuesday. FreeBSD installed without any problems.
OpenBSD 7.3 however crashes during the installation process. I eventually ended up installing 7.2 and then did an upgrade to 7.3, which went fine.
I just repeated the attempt with a new download a few minutes ago before making this post. It's not clear what the problem is. The VM is VirtualBox 6.1.38 on Ubuntu 22.04.
I install all the major Linux distros and BSDs in VMs for software testing, and this is the only one which is giving me this sort of problem. Aside from that, it worked fine once it was installed and running.
One thing that I did notice is that in OpenBSD the Python version has been upgraded to 3.10 from 3.9, while with FreeBSD it remained unchanged at 3.9. This isn't a problem (I welcome it in fact), but it's worth noting that a change like this has been made in a point release.
OpenBSD doesn't do point releases. 7.0 wasn't special, it just followed 6.9.
> I install all the major Linux distros and BSDs in VMs for software testing
Surely you know this, since you install a new OpenBSD release every 6-ish months? After reading the release notes?
"Only Theo still uses TWM although he threatens to make it the default occasionally."
It has always struck me as a bit strange that an ancient and complex code base like fvwm is kept in the OpenBSD base. TWM is also ancient but a lot less complex and so I'd assume easier to audit?
Icon: Old man end user
13.1 not dramatically different from 13.0, 13.2 not dramatically different from 13.1 …
… true, however (as a doc repo committer) it saddens me, slightly, that we don't make more noise about the leaps ahead in compatibility. Graphics, Wi-Fi, and hardware support were uppermost on the FreeBSD Foundation technology roadmap in 2021; these things are, happily, far better now than when the map was first published.
Graphics: loosely speaking, much of the work on graphics is currently committed to the ports repo, not the src repo. There's no shortage of graphics-related work in the src area, however it sort of flies under the radar when the time comes for (src) FreeBSD release notes and the like.
Wi-Fi, and more general hardware support: from what I can tell, iwlwifi(4) in 13.2 is greatly improved, compared to 13.1. I know less about rtw88(4), but I get the impression that this is another smart move. Throw in the 13.1 improvements to amd64 UEFI boot (quiet, but huge impact) and a few more ingredients: end result, a simpler decision-making process for people who are wondering about using a new or old laptop, or desktop, with FreeBSD.
https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/technology-roadmap/
For clarity: Lumina (pictured, as "FreeBSD's own native desktop") is not FreeBSD's desktop.
There's the TrueOS history – and more – to Lumina, so I do understand why people might think of it as a FreeBSD thing, but really, it's not.
https://www.freshports.org/x11/lumina/
> … the normal freebsd-update command is no longer enough to update your machine, …
This is true for any desktop environment, with any method of installation. (Not only for the DEs that can be installed with desktop-installer.)
> … you'll need to use the menu-driven auto-admin command instead.
auto-admin is smart, however it's not a necessity. It's a runtime requirement of desktop-installer:
https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/auto-admin/#requiredby
Use of desktop-installer can be followed by normal use of 'pkg upgrade' (without auto-admin).
freebsd-update(8) is for updating FreeBSD alone.
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