openBSD

[Xwally192]

I'm thinking of giving openBSD a try (the "secure by default" clame has caught my eye) and I have a couple questions.

1) What is the difference between openBSD and FreeBSD? Are these just different distros or is it something else?

2) Does openBSD have a graphical interface? I like a command prompt, but a graphical interface is nice when learning something new.

3) Is openBSD easy to patch/update?

4) Any recomendations on some good openBSD newbie sites?

5) Is there anything, good or bad I (as a linux user) should keep in before/while trying out openBSD?

Xwally192

[Gnu/Vince]

Originally posted by Xwally192:
I'm thinking of giving openBSD a try (the "secure by default" clame has caught my eye) and I have a couple questions.

1) What is the difference between openBSD and FreeBSD? Are these just different distros or is it something else?

2) Does openBSD have a graphical interface? I like a command prompt, but a graphical interface is nice when learning something new.

3) Is openBSD easy to patch/update?

4) Any recomendations on some good openBSD newbie sites?

5) Is there anything, good or bad I (as a linux user) should keep in before/while trying out openBSD?

Xwally192

1. OpenBSD is more oriented towards security and integrated-cryptography whereas FreeBSD is more for high performances.

2. Yes, you can have the X Window System. But I think you should learn to do things from the command line

3. Yup.

4. deadly.org, bsdvault.net, openbsd.org, openbsdpost.net, man

5. Your brain, your knowledge of vi and your desire to learn. You may want to back up your home directory, put it on another partition (say the windows one, or any that WON'T be affected by OpenBSD's installation). just do: tar -cvf home.tar ~/* ~/.[a-z,A-Z]* ; gzip -9 home.tar
and then mv it to /mnt/something.

You may also want to try NetBSD, which is really nice too (though it is not as popular as Free and Open)