784 words, 4 minutes
Last week-end, I was invited to the UNIX Social Camp in Dijon, France to talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look at OpenBSD .
This post is an English transcription of the original French slides that are available here .
OpenBSD is a free UNIX©-like operating system.
It has been forked from NetBSD in 1995.
The development process concentrates on portability and security.
There are about 10+ supported hardware architecture.
Some of the software (OpenSSH, LibreSSL, pf…) developed for OpenBSD are widely used in other free and proprietary software.
The official OpenBSD website is https://www.openbsd.org .
The code is open and the sources freely available: OpenBSD CVSweb .
The installation media can be freely downloaded from OpenBSD CDN .
The system works on various hardware platforms: OpenBSD supported platform list .
The system is compatible with most virtualisation platforms: Qemu, KVM, Virtualbox, VMware, bhyve, vmd…
It is developed and maintained with security in mind
.
It ships with loads of security innovations
:
privilege separation and revocation, stack protector, randomization,
pledge(2)
, unveil(2)
,
etc…
Here are a few server-based options:
It can also be used as a workstation thanks to integrated software like:
And many more…
A whole set of Free and OpenSource Software is available as binary packages for every supported architecture.
- amd64: ~12000
- arm64: ~12000
- powerpc: ~8000
- risc64: ~10000
- sparc64: ~9000
- etc …
Server-oriented highlighted software for OpenBSD 7.7 include Apache, Asterisk, Go, OpenJDK, MariaDB, Node.js, OpenLDAP, PHP, Postfix, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Rust, …
Workstation-oriented highlighted software for OpenBSD 7.7 include Chromium, ffmpeg, Gnome, KDE, Krita, LibreOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, (Neo)Mutt, Python, Shotcut, TeX, (neo)vim, Xfce, …
The text-mode installation wizard works the same way on the various
architecture and connection type (COM0, VGA, HDMI, KVM-IP…).
The documentation man(1)
is complete
and a welcome message pointing to
afterboot(8)
helps you start with
using OpenBSD. The overall filesystem organisation is described in
hier(7)
.
Service management configuration is locate in /etc/rc.conf.local.
Service management is available using a single
rcctl(8)
command.
The OS material is installed throughout /.
Third-party material is installed under /usr/local.
The system configuration examples are located inside /etc/examples/.
All software configuration defaults to /etc/.
The dedicated fw_update(8)
command manages non-free firmwares.
Binary packages management includes dealing with dependencies and
options
.
Three main commands deal with package management:
pkg_info(1)
,
pkg_add(1)
,
pkg_delete(1)
.
Security patches are managed using the
syspatch(8)
command.
System upgrades are driven by the
sysupgrade(8)
commands.
Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.
– Stephen Covey
RTFM! As in “do your homework before asking”.
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Note that those content may not have been updated recently. That said, the content is probably still pretty accurate.
Thanks again to the UCS for inviting me.
And if you wonder how the slideware was produced, I used the remark slideshow generator, the Atkinson Hyperlegible Next Medium and the Comic Code Ligatures Medium fonts. Because not everything is Google Docs and Arial! 😈