OpenBSD 5.6 is released today. Another stellar release! Many thanks to Theo and developers world-wide.

http://www.openbsd.org/orders.html

Arrrrgh!.. They've taken lynx out of the base install! How the hell am I supposed to refer to the FAQ, errata, mirror list and other information on the website post-install without a textmode browser! Telnet to port 80?

If you're about to (re)install, make sure you write down the address of your local mirror before you start so you've got something to put in your PKG_PATH, otherwise you'll end up like I did with no way to look it up!

I noticed that a few days ago when I looked at the website. I must admit that I do not understand why it was removed. Having a text-based browser included in the base system is very useful. Perhaps there is a good reason I am ignorant of, but I cannot imagine what it might be.

A quick google search led to some discussion on openbsd-tech back in July. Seems Theo and Co didn't think the code was of sufficiently high quality. Which is a bit odd, considering its been in base for years and base is supposedly already 'audited'. But then, openssl was in base for years too and that turned out to be a right pile of ____. I'm starting to think that "audited" doesn't actually mean a great deal.

Anyway, whatever the reasons, its not hard to workaround so long as you're expecting it, so no big deal.

Loving 5.6 so far. Up and running and fully patched.

Yep, me too. 5.6+Errata all applied.

Do you use M:Tier, or just follow the official errata?

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I tried out M:Tier and it was pretty good, but, I've been following the official errata for the last two releases.

I do my own patches for things in base, but I use M:Tier for the backported package updates, particularly firefox, which I like to keep updated for obvious reasons.

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No time to upgrade as yet - got as far as downloading the install kernel and that was it...

Regarding patches - I just use anon CVS to sync my sources with the patch branch and then just rebuild whatever needs to be rebuilt according to errata.

GazL,

I decided to try out M:Tier again and I am impressed. I'm mostly a DIY user and don't like automation a lot, but, openup makes patching a breeze.
I'm sold.

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I finally felt brave enough to try an upgrade. Since it was my first upgrade, I assumed a 9/10th or greater chance of screwing up and having to re-install. Much to my pleasant surprise, the upgrade was successful. I am now using 5.6.

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This is not my first time using OpenBSD: I have been using OpenBSD and FreeBSD for years. However, I switched from Slackware to OpenBSD 5.6, on a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop, and OpenBSD runs better on it. For instance on Slackware I used wicd and it kept disconnecting from the wireless network I use at my apartment but OpenBSD does not randomly disconnect from this network (I'm not sure if it was wicd or some underlying system code flaw ). Also the man pages are superior to Linux and the code quality higher etc.. I've looked at some source code from each system and Linux is full of cheap little hacks that just happen to run while OpenBSD code is well constructed and engineered. I don't what I was thinking when I put Slackware on my laptop but I'll never use linux again if I can help it especially since Systemd has gained mindshare in the Linux community.

Anyway, about systemd obviously systemd won't ever become a part of OpenBSD (or any other BSD), so that is part of the reason why I switched back to OpenBSD.

On the whole, the systemd software appears complex and full of magic, moreover it doesn't seem to be in keeping with the traditional Unix philosophy of keeping stuff small, simple and independent of each other. Rather this is more something you would expect to see in Windows not *nix.

I downloaded the systemd tarball, some weeks ago, and looked at the source. Some things jumped out at me:

- 37.5 MB in uncompressed stuff
- 12.8 MB of c source (This is huge!?)
- Dependencies: dbus, udev, cap, attr, selinux, pam, libaudit, others?
- Dependencies of dependencies: Rabbit hole, but there are some here, like X11.
- Presumably these are all statically linked into the binary so that emergency booting is possible (like if I cannot mount /usr or /var or something else important).

All that to turn some software on and off.

My opinion is that this is way too complex for an init system; for me to use something like this I'd want to see less than, say 6 (arbitrary!) c source files each with less than 2k lines of code and probably a dependency to libevent and imsg for a small privsep state machine. Then you'd at least know what you're getting into.

Even then, the small collection of sh (not bash) scripts, on OpenBSD, that starts my handful of daemons is just immensely preferable for me.

I'm glad you like OpenBSD; I also like it a lot. I'm not sure why you hijacked my announcement thread with a tirade about systemd.