Thanks for taking the time to document your experience. There are so many misnomers on the internet that keep people from trying or doing new things. Glad you’re enjoying openbsd for your dev environment. I’ve been building and deploying web applications on openbsd for a long number of years and it’s much more painful to go to another platform than it is to teach someone how to do things in openbsd. The startup scripts are so simple and allow you to easily run your apps as a non-priv user. There are great healthcheck features and HA tools that don’t require a phd to setup and use. Cheers.
Indeed, so far it’s been a very rewarding experience. I dunno if I’ll be setting up a web server on OpenBSD any time soon, but I expect it to be less painful than with Linux.
I am having a bit of trouble with the lid though. Closing it suspends, which is fine but then when I open it it’s all black.
I’ve seen this issue on a few laptops - usually one of the following three fixes it:
1. switching between consoles `[CTRL]+[ALT]+[Fn]` where Fn is between 1 and 6 (F5 ttyC5 is reserved for use by X)
2. using `[FN]` and the internal / external monitor key,
3. `[FN]` and the brightness keys
Nice writeup, I’m becoming increasingly tempted to install OpenBSD. My old Thinkpad T61 has a nvidia card though, which OpenBSD doesn’t like. Interestingly nvidia provides drivers for FreeBSD; I haven’t really had X trouble since I installed them.
Kinda sad CVS is still used over Git for the ports
I like that FreeBSD uses svn for everything. If I had to git clone base or ports, I would not appreciate the additional gigabytes of history. I like my disk space.
> du -sh freebsd-base/ freebsd-ports/
1.9G freebsd-base/
1.3G freebsd-ports/
No it’s not relevant, but misconceptions about git being the one size fits all solution to version control bother me. And you can do that, but it breaks pretty much everything last I checked. You might as well download a tarball of the source.
I believe recent versions fixed the “it breaks pretty much everything”. I in no way implied that git was one size fits all either. Don’t project.
For example, git is pretty awful at tracking large binaries. I know lots of game studios still use svn because tracking large art assets in svn subtrees is very straightforward.
I’m not projecting, I was merely specifying why I chose to bring up git in my original comment. Don’t assume people on the internet are attacking you personally. =)
I’ll have to check out (heh) those changes, I love git to death and if there is a way to reasonably use it with very large repositories, that’s exciting news!
For reference, the whole history (since 1994) of freebsd-ports is 1G, so a Git checkout will be 1.7G (since SVN stores everything twice… i.e. a shallow clone will actually use less disk space.)
The actual size of my tree (minus .svn) is 0.93G, so 1.93G for git. I see your point though. How do you know the size of the history?
Edit:
I’m mirroring the full history of ports/head with svnsync to verify your claim of 1G. I’m on revision 66,086 out of 384,601, about 17% of revisions.
du -sh freebsd-ports-mirror/
1.5G freebsd-ports-mirror/
I’m dubious of your 1G claim, as my crappy napkin math suggests the history should be at least 8G when this finishes. I’m going to finish the mirror and see the actual size, and then import the repo into git to see that size. I expect the git full size will be smaller than svn, but the clone size will be larger than the svn checkout size. That’ll be a good time to play with shallow clones too! =)
Interesting, I did not think to do that. It’s surprising (to me) that the svn mirror is so much bigger. I wonder if anything has been stripped out, or if the git repository format is really just that much more efficient. All the commits appear to be there though.
I really want to use a bsd (ideally dragonfly, which i have on a server), but working with Haskell and Rust on them is really painful / not really possible at the moment.
edit: I had some pain getting a snap service to compile on dragonfly, but was able to eventually get it to compile by setting up symlinks to some shared libraries, but now I have runtime errors related to sockets, I’m going to look into fixing it soon. It’s just annoying that so many things are linux specific. I never realized how unportable most things seem to be until I started playing with various BSDs. I wouldn’t have expected to have to change anything to use Haskell or Rust on a different *nix system.
Have you attempted the insanity that is Dragonfly with a desktop environment? Last time I went through the process it was pretty crazy, and then the mouse drivers died. But I have an old proliant sever that’s been running pretty stable with dfly.
I haven’t yet, I’m probably going to try it on my old thinkpad soon, I don’t expect it to really be useable, but I’d like to see if I can contribute or at least file bug reports.
I’ve learned so much more about real OS things getting dfly working. I have an x220 laying around maybe it’s time to put its insane battery life to the test.
Fun fact, the hardware trickery that Lenovo did to get the x220 to 12 hr light use battery life actually made the battery life drop to only like 7 hr on linux. Essentially without the Lenovo drivers the power saving features were almost useless. I think it took a year or two before the issue was solved. I wonder what battery life I’ll see with dragonfly.
The c720 is pretty cheap, but it shows. It has a weak keyboard, a very glossy, cheap looking screen bezel, and a low quality screen. The c740 just came out and reviews have said it has a slightly better keyboard, but the screen is still the same. It’s being targeted at the education market so it’s been sort of ruggedized over the c720. A c740p (with touch screen) should be forthcoming with a better screen (even if you don’t want the touch part) and reportedly a better case.
Author of that post. A friend let me know this was linked here.
Any questions anybody wants to ask I’m here. :)
Thanks for taking the time to document your experience. There are so many misnomers on the internet that keep people from trying or doing new things. Glad you’re enjoying openbsd for your dev environment. I’ve been building and deploying web applications on openbsd for a long number of years and it’s much more painful to go to another platform than it is to teach someone how to do things in openbsd. The startup scripts are so simple and allow you to easily run your apps as a non-priv user. There are great healthcheck features and HA tools that don’t require a phd to setup and use. Cheers.
Indeed, so far it’s been a very rewarding experience. I dunno if I’ll be setting up a web server on OpenBSD any time soon, but I expect it to be less painful than with Linux.
I’ve seen this issue on a few laptops - usually one of the following three fixes it:
I just tried them all and none of them worked. :/ I’m fine with not being able to suspend, it’s just an inconvenience.
I’ll try it tomorrow when I wake up. Thanks! :)
Maintainer of the node.js port here. If you are interested in testing (and you are running -current), here is a diff for 0.12.2 :D
I hadn’t realised that Node.js doesn’t provide pre-compiled binaries for OpenBSD.
I now really appreciate your work on this. Thank you very much. :)
Cool! I’m not going to run -current until after I upgrade to 5.7, just to be able to write about the upgrade experience.
But yeah, once I’m running -current I’ll probably use
nvm, because I need an environment with several versions of Node.Thank you for your hard work, and for the Node.js bin that is keeping me alive right now. ;)
I installed OpenBSD this week because of your post. So far, I love it! ^_^
Nice writeup, I’m becoming increasingly tempted to install OpenBSD. My old Thinkpad T61 has a nvidia card though, which OpenBSD doesn’t like. Interestingly nvidia provides drivers for FreeBSD; I haven’t really had X trouble since I installed them.
I like that FreeBSD uses svn for everything. If I had to git clone base or ports, I would not appreciate the additional gigabytes of history. I like my disk space.
Not really relevant to the parent article, but git does support shallow clones with truncated history.
No it’s not relevant, but misconceptions about git being the one size fits all solution to version control bother me. And you can do that, but it breaks pretty much everything last I checked. You might as well download a tarball of the source.
I believe recent versions fixed the “it breaks pretty much everything”. I in no way implied that git was one size fits all either. Don’t project.
For example, git is pretty awful at tracking large binaries. I know lots of game studios still use svn because tracking large art assets in svn subtrees is very straightforward.
I’m not projecting, I was merely specifying why I chose to bring up git in my original comment. Don’t assume people on the internet are attacking you personally. =)
I’ll have to check out (heh) those changes, I love git to death and if there is a way to reasonably use it with very large repositories, that’s exciting news!
git fetch --deepenor--unshallow?I didn’t mean to imply Git was a one size fits all when I was writing this.
I guess I didn’t make it clear but I wanted to show how much of a Git user I am, since Linux uses Git. :)
For reference, the whole history (since 1994) of freebsd-ports is 1G, so a Git checkout will be 1.7G (since SVN stores everything twice… i.e. a shallow clone will actually use less disk space.)
The actual size of my tree (minus .svn) is 0.93G, so 1.93G for git. I see your point though. How do you know the size of the history?
Edit:
I’m mirroring the full history of ports/head with svnsync to verify your claim of 1G. I’m on revision 66,086 out of 384,601, about 17% of revisions.
I’m dubious of your 1G claim, as my crappy napkin math suggests the history should be at least 8G when this finishes. I’m going to finish the mirror and see the actual size, and then import the repo into git to see that size. I expect the git full size will be smaller than svn, but the clone size will be larger than the svn checkout size. That’ll be a good time to play with shallow clones too! =)
I just cloned
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports…Interesting, I did not think to do that. It’s surprising (to me) that the svn mirror is so much bigger. I wonder if anything has been stripped out, or if the git repository format is really just that much more efficient. All the commits appear to be there though.
This post has convinced me to finally get into OpenBSD. There just seems to be so much to like. Let’s see how it goes.
Awesome! :D
I’m really happy that my post convinced someone to try it out. :)
I really want to use a bsd (ideally dragonfly, which i have on a server), but working with Haskell and Rust on them is really painful / not really possible at the moment.
edit: I had some pain getting a snap service to compile on dragonfly, but was able to eventually get it to compile by setting up symlinks to some shared libraries, but now I have runtime errors related to sockets, I’m going to look into fixing it soon. It’s just annoying that so many things are linux specific. I never realized how unportable most things seem to be until I started playing with various BSDs. I wouldn’t have expected to have to change anything to use Haskell or Rust on a different *nix system.
http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/lang/rust/
I have had some issues with haskell stuff - but nothing major! :D
Have you attempted the insanity that is Dragonfly with a desktop environment? Last time I went through the process it was pretty crazy, and then the mouse drivers died. But I have an old proliant sever that’s been running pretty stable with dfly.
I haven’t yet, I’m probably going to try it on my old thinkpad soon, I don’t expect it to really be useable, but I’d like to see if I can contribute or at least file bug reports.
I’ve learned so much more about real OS things getting dfly working. I have an x220 laying around maybe it’s time to put its insane battery life to the test.
Fun fact, the hardware trickery that Lenovo did to get the x220 to 12 hr light use battery life actually made the battery life drop to only like 7 hr on linux. Essentially without the Lenovo drivers the power saving features were almost useless. I think it took a year or two before the issue was solved. I wonder what battery life I’ll see with dragonfly.
Strangely, Matt Dillon took a liking to the c720 chromebook and wrote a mouse driver for it.
Thats really strange. If I find myself wanting a small laptop I might turn that way.
The c720 is pretty cheap, but it shows. It has a weak keyboard, a very glossy, cheap looking screen bezel, and a low quality screen. The c740 just came out and reviews have said it has a slightly better keyboard, but the screen is still the same. It’s being targeted at the education market so it’s been sort of ruggedized over the c720. A c740p (with touch screen) should be forthcoming with a better screen (even if you don’t want the touch part) and reportedly a better case.