“OpenBSD 3.9 has been released today. This new version of OpenBSD has better buffer-overflow protection, and can ease the burden of systems monitoring through a new sensor interface framework.”
This one I’ve been looking forward! 😀
I’m getting to be a big fan of OpenBSD, because I like the way it embeds strong security so tightly into the system and yet is so simple. The first time I tried it, about a year ago now, the installer was a little bit daunting, but thanks to a great guide called OpenBSD 101, I quickly got comfortable with it, and got the system up and running, I redid the installation a few times just to really get to know it, and once I had done it three times in total, I found it so simple yet very elegant.
I have an old, piece-of-shit AMD K6 box sitting under my desk, which, when it ran Windows 98 SE, was dog slow and always causing problems on my network, so I yanked the Windows off of the harddrive and put OpenBSD on there and it ran like a bat outta hell, boots in like 16 seconds now, which is cool, and is a great web server with Apache.
I’ve been playing around with 3.9 for a little while now, and it seems very nice, I had some hickup issues with my networking card with 3.8, but 3.9 seems to have those issues solved, which is nice.
So props to the OpenBSD guys, great release guys, I’m gonna buy a CD when I get the cash for it! 😉
Those of you not familiar with Free Software may wonder “Why pay for free stuff?”, I can shock you even further by saying that I’d much much rather pay for Free Software (Some of you may know it as Open Source Software) than commercial proprietary software. Some of you may think I’m crazy, but step back and think about this for a moment. You are not forced to pay for Free Software, and you get the freedom to modify it to fit your own needs or make derivative works, which is wonderful, and at the same time show my appreciation and help the project stay around.
My point is, to me, the price of Free (Read: Free as in Freedom) Software is just a bonus. Call me crazy if you want to, and if you think I’m completely nuts, go try GNU/Linux, OpenBSD or FreeBSD out yourself and see what you think.