OpenBSD 7.9 released
69 points by utzig
69 points by utzig
I learned today that OpenBSD has an artwork and a song for each release https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#79
I used to go to the bookstore near my office in the early '00s and buy each release on physical media. I had 3 motivations:
I miss that ritual.
Forever curious about BSD but I can’t see myself leaving Linux because of gaming.
2016: curious about Linux, but I can't see myself leaving Windows because of gaming
2026: curious about BSD, but I can't see myself leaving Linux because of gaming
2036: curious about Hurd, but I can't see myself leaving BSD because of gaming
I accidentally started using a separate machine for gaming and it makes so much sense in retrospect. Many online games have a huge attack surface for exploits and they're made up of proprietary code nobody ever audited (and is often abandoned with no updates shortly after release). It's nice that I don't need to have my banking information and government ID related stuff on the same machine.
I'm in the same shoes and the way I resolved this was by setting up a tiny home server on a laptop I had laying around with an utterly minimal 7W TDP CPU. With very little effort you can set up sshd on it and afterwards you can mess around with all the BSD stuff to your heart's content while also providing an opportunity to branch out into self-hosting if you're so inclined.
So far I've got Home Assistant running on bhyve managed by FreeBSD and I'm actively thinking about what else I could throw next to it to further utilize the server.
(Or just go for a VM, but at least for me those never quite provided the same experience as poking around on a real system...)
I don’t recall if there is a hard requirement for home assistant to run on linux but you could actually use jails instead and make running it even lighter on the machine than using a vm. I love throwing jails at w/e I want to host.
I tried 7.9 it out in QEMU. The installer is a bit old-fashioned, and X11+fvwm2+xterm by default feels a bit dated, but it booted and worked fine. doas works great and I could install packages with pkg_add. I was surprised that neither curl nor wget was installed by default, but I like the "bare bones" philosophy from a security point of view.
The installer is a bit old-fashioned
IMO the installer is excellent. It holds your hands through the entire process, but if at any moment you need to manually intervene, you can really easily do so. Enter-enter-enter is just as viable as mostly doing things by hand.
X11+fvwm2+xterm by default feels a bit dated
I reckon the idea is to have a set of packages that you could install on a slightly moldy piece of bread and still work.
That being said Wayland has been ported to OpenBSD (I'm only learning about this myself, nice to see it materialize so fast after it still only being a plan back in 2023).
I was surprised that neither curl nor wget was installed by default
For downloading stuff you're expected to use ftp(1), which counter-intuitively isn't only for FTP, but also for HTTP(S) fetches.
I agree that the installer was straightforward compared to installing manually.
Expecting users to use ftp to download files over HTTP(S) is a bit user hostile, though.
Finally I can try reinstalling on my Yeelong Lemote. Got bit by the pledge changes in the last set of errata when I tried recompiling the 7.8 kernel but not the userland, and of course Loongson doesn't get binary updates.