[PLUG] Practical shell Implementation of the login command.

[Amarendra Godbole]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:29 PM, Kulkarni Shantanu
<linux at shantanukulkarni.org> wrote:
> * Amarendra Godbole <amarendra.godbole at gmail.com> [100729 22:19]:
>> I have moved over to the OpenBSD land, and things are 100% better -
>> maintaining man page accuracy is one of the primary aim of the group.
>
> have you moved your desktop machine (laptop) on obsd? what was the
> primary reason for doing so. i would like to switch to obsd but i find 2
> things holding me back,
>
> is there good hardware support especially in case of laptops and
> desktops?
> is there a decent package mgt. system like apt or yum which provide
> bleeding edge packages (i am not too bothered about security on my
> desktops, i leave that to gateway server)?
[...]

Yes, my laptop IBM Thinkpad X61s runs OpenBSD 4.8-beta as I type on
it. Everything I require is supported - network card, wireless card,
and they do have reasonable package management support via pkg_*
commands.

It mostly supports that h/w for which specifications are available,
except for the intel wireless cards for which drivers had to be
reverse engineered (Intel specs are closed.).

Some interesting features of OpenBSD are:
(1) No binary drivers used -- almost all drivers are either reverse
engineered or written ground up. Another way of saying this, no binary
blobs are accepted from the card vendors. Intel wireless cards are an
exception, and they come with the obvious disclaimer.
(2) All updates are via source code, no prepackaged binary patches
made (except for if you install new packages).
(3) The entire is very lean and mean - install takes 10 minutes flat,
while boot time is under a minute. The entire ISO image of OpenBSD 4.7
is ~250M, including all X.
(4) Kernel build takes ~15 minutes, userland ~2 hrs., and X also ~2
hrs. The entire kernel, userland, and X is written and maintained by
OpenBSD - no borrowed parts.
(5) Most importantly - no licensing baggage, almost everything is BSD
licensed, which I prefer these days (yeah, philosophy).
(6) Releases every six months, on 1 May and 1 Nov (there maybe some
delta of days, but these are usual dates).

But yes, not all h/w is supported, especially if you get the "latest
and greatest", along with many closed video card drivers. I don't feel
a need for these on my laptop, and hence I am perfectly fine. YMMV.

-Amarendra