More on OpenBSD 3.7 Release 149
putko writes "As previously reported, OpenBSD 3.7 is released. Here's some interviews with the people behind the release about the new features, including information about which companies are complying with requests for documentation and permission to freely distribute required firmware, and which are not. Ralink Tech and Realtek 'GOOD,'Intel 'BAD.'
The next time I build/buy a wireless product, I'll want Realtek or Ralink Tech inside -- because getting software to work with it will be easier. Ralink Tech and Realtek are Taiwanese, by the way."
Re:RealTek? (Score:5, Informative)
http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/pci/if_rl.c?v=RE
Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2)
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, the problem is that Broadcom makes the most common 11g chipset, and they don't provide squat.
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2)
Also, a glance at madwifi's CVS suggests that the coders for that are almost (but not quite) as bad as I am about maintaining code.
Having said that, madwifi is bloody good software and SHOULD be in the mainstream kernel. It has been out long enough and would have no impact on existing code
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:1)
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2)
Now if I could only find somewhere to buy a (PCI) card using the rt2500, then I could finally ditch this SMC 2802W V2 piece of shit.
[0] and Debian makes a release containing the subsequent kernel...
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2)
There are multiple versions of this card - the one I got is the newer one.
Should be easy to find almost anywhere.
- BBK
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:3, Insightful)
I recently bought an A-link WL54H PCI card (about 30 EUR), which has the rt2500 chip. See http://ralink.rapla.net/ [rapla.net] for a big list of devices with the rt2500 chip.
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2)
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2)
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2)
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:2)
Watch out if you enabled 4K stacks for the kernel, or SMP, or a few other mystery things. The current drivers are basically straight ports of the NDIS drivers with a few add-ons.
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
The only catch is that firmware is still closed-source. It can be downloaded, but I am not certain about redistribution conditions.
Re:Free 802.11g drivers? (Score:4, Informative)
and, straight from iwi(4)
The official person to state your views to about this issue is peter.engelbrecht@intel.com at (858) 391 1857.
Re:Beware Taiwanese Companies (Score:2)
Oh, no, wait. That was AT&T, in their bid to have BSD declared AT&T proprietary, on the grounds that BSD coders may, potentially, have seen AT&T Intellectual Property and therefore be encumbered for life, along with everything they wrote.
Re:Beware Taiwanese Companies (Score:2, Informative)
To be 100% precise, the original port by William Jolitz and his wife to the i386 architecture (probably one of the smallest BSD development teams of all time, and probably the least-credited for the work they did) had potentially encumbered code.
Most of the "potential" encumberances were header files and a few relatively minor bits of code that AT&T could
Re:Beware Taiwanese Companies (Score:1)
Maybe we should just nuke the entire country to be safe?
Re:Beware Taiwanese Companies (Score:1)
Re:Prism54 (Score:2)
prism54 chipset cards suck anyway, because you need to use non-Free firmware.
Firmwares and drivers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Firmwares and drivers (Score:1)
Re:Firmwares and drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Firmwares and drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Put it this way. If the hardware gives OpenBSD troubles, how much do you want to risk that the troubles affect ONLY OpenBSD? Conversely, if OpenBSD has no troubles supporting the hardware, any troubles elsewhere are at least fixable. OpenBSD may be a small niche, but it is a niche that carries a lot more weight than its numbers would suggest.
Re:Firmwares and drivers (Score:2)
are lots of us who don't consider a machine to be completely trustworthy
unless it's supported by OpenBSD, even if we don't intend on running OpenBSD
on that machine.
Re:Firmwares and drivers (Score:2, Interesting)
drivers for the video card's, LAN card's, TV Tuners, digital camera's
Why does your plural form of the words 'driver' and 'Tuners' just add an 's', while your plural form of the words 'card', 'videocard' and 'camera' require the apostrophe?
You got 'news' and 'firmwares' right. What's (that is a contraction, one of the times when you _do_ use apostrophe-s) the thinking there? If you're not going to make the effort
Re:Firmwares and drivers (Score:3, Informative)
Please don't give up. We must discover what compels people to ignore the very simple rule that the only time you should ever use apostrophes to pluralize is with single letters (ie, I got four A's).
Re:Firmwares and drivers (Score:2)
Re:Firmwares and drivers (Score:1)
I mean, you cant even install Windows onto a PA-RISC, UltraSPARC or MIPS box for Linus' sake! How on earth do windows users cope?! Its like they are second class IT citizens, struggling to get by with a sluggish, unstable legacy OS that no one wants to help them with
Re:Firmwares and drivers (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends who you buy from and if they want to increase sales. In many cases, if they don't have drivers on the CD-ROM, they're sometimes downloadable from the manufacturer's web site. If
Rapid Reply Form (Score:2)
The "BSD-is-dying troll" is:
[ ] an idiot, [ ] green, [ ] bored, [ ] Pixar animated
And therefore should be:
[ ] shot at dawn, [ ] sent to work at SCO, [ ] enlisted
Besides which, the troll is so ancient that:
[ ] Archimedes discredited it, [ ] It underwent heat-death pri
Re:Ugh (Score:2)
Re:Ugh (Score:1)
Intel (Score:2)
I guess it's safer for them to donate developers than to give away what i guess they think they have ("trade secrets")
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Intel (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know how true this is, but there is another reason that vendors may not release hardware info.
I have heard that a lot of hardware is pretty bad and is mostly fixed with software hacks in the driver. Companies may be not want people to know how broken some of their products are.
Re:Intel (Score:5, Informative)
So, yes, faulty designs do exist, and one of the best-known for it is also one of the best-known for not releasing hardware specs, which does tend to make for some interesting implications.
Of course, even when documents ARE released, there is often a lot that is UNdocumented. The 486 had an interesting "load/save all registers" instruction, which basically allowed you to preserve or restore a complete CPU state. The hardware industry is littered with all sorts of other obscure undocumented syscalls, which is one reason why Open Source drivers for 3D graphics cards generally underperform - not because they are no good, but because the proprietary drivers include undocumented calls which improve performance.
This goes along with why manufacturers are dead-set against reverse-engineering. Not because they fear someone learning some "industrial secret" that really IS something the manufacturer shouldn't divulge, but because they fear people discovering device commands that they currently sell to the highest bidder.
Re:Intel (Score:2)
I have heard that a lot of hardware is pretty bad and is mostly fixed with software hacks in the driver. Companies may be not want people to know how broken some of their products are.
I suspect something more cynical. The best explanation I have heard was that Microsoft will not include open source drivers thus not to get excluded in Microsoft OS chip set support the HAL remains closed source.
I have also heard that some chips allow you to increase power to levels above FCC approval but this sounds wea
Re:Intel (Score:2)
The BIOS-redistribution-restrictions are pretty stupid, though not always unexpected: for example, if you try to use an Intel Ethernet card under Windows, drivers are often not included in the OS, so Intel get to make yo
I don't buy hardware for the firmware (Score:1)
Re:I don't buy hardware for the firmware (Score:2)
Re:I don't buy hardware for the firmware (Score:2)
I wouldn't limit their analism to intellectual
property issues.
Re:I don't buy hardware for the firmware (Score:2)
Re:Intel (Score:3, Insightful)
IMO they are simply doing Linux work as a lever against MS. If the Linux folks are content with the status of the drivers as is, there is no need to change things. OpenBSD folks care more about openness and good licensing then Linux folks.
Packages BAD (Score:3, Interesting)
At least the core OpenBSD 3.7 is complete and I imagine the packages will be brought up to date in time. Till then, compile your own or use ports.
Re:Packages BAD (Score:1)
Re:Packages BAD (Score:1)
Re:Packages BAD (Score:1)
Re:Packages BAD (Score:1)
Im sure they would be the 1st to cry if it died.
Re:Packages BAD (Score:5, Insightful)
What you don't seem to realize is that if the license says "hey, take this and do whatever you want" then it's not raping -- it's encouraged. Just because you think they should behave in a certain way doesn't mean they're obligated to, nor do the developers expect them to. Otherwise, the developers would have released the code under a different license. Now go read the GPL three times and say five hail Stallmans.
Re:Packages BAD (Score:2)
Is that...posting while eating humus? Or did you mean humorously?
Re:Packages BAD (Score:1)
Re:Packages BAD (Score:2)
The GPL imposes a legal obligation to share code. I think when Henning Brauer was complaining
Re:Packages BAD (Score:2)
Re:Packages BAD (Score:1)
Re:Packages BAD (Score:1)
I see something has happened to package managment. I quote the relevant
ORN: What new features do package tools support?
Marc Espie: A lot!
The most visible new feature is probably the progress meter. If you add/remove packages, you will now get instant feedback that something is going on. A related features is that the message system has been completely redesigned to be more useful: it's much harder to miss things now.
In general, the system is more robust, handles
Re:Packages BAD (Score:1)
Re:Packages BAD (Score:2, Informative)
I've install 60+ packages with no problem whatsoever.
Re:Packages BAD (Score:2)
Re:OpenBSD starts to look as a viable alternative (Score:2)
OpenBSD developers speaking in Calgary (Score:2)
Re:OpenBSD developers speaking in Calgary (Score:2)
Funny, RMS did exactly the same thing last week for me...
Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Henning Brauer: Nobody ever gave us anything back. A plethora of vendors ship OpenSSH--commercial Unix vendors (basically all of them), all of the Linux distributors, and lots of hardware vendors (like HP in their switches)--but none of them seem to care; none of them ever gave us anything back. All of them should very well know that quality software doesn't "just happen," but needs some funding. Yet, they don't help at all.
That just blows. A while back the OpenBSD team had to raise funds to acquire Dell hardware so that their CVS server could scale up. The CVS server that holds repositories for all Open* projects. You would think that one of these companies would have just donated the hardware. But nope.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
A few month ago, I was looking for Opteron-based server racks. I saw on the Transtec [transtec.de] home page a press release like "Transtec gave hardware to KDE developpers".
I thought "hey, these guys are cool". And because of that, the company I'm working for ordered an Opteron server (2500 L) at Transtec. And since the server was performing well, we ordered for $ 300,000 of similar servers afterwards.
Maybe we would have bought the server at Transtec's without this little press release, who knows. But maybe not. It was the little thing that made me immediately think that Transtec was a nice company.
So the KDE fundation gets hardware, the vendor gets free ad and end users think the vendor is nice. Everyone wins.
Another thing is that if vendors help free operating systems by giving hardware, these operating systems will probably be fully compatible with that hardware. Which means that end-users will buy the hardware because they know that OpenBSD/Linux/DragonFlyBSD/etc. will probably work on it. And it does because the vendor helped these projects at the first place, and for these vendors, giving a few servers is cheap. It can only be a win for them.
Re:Sigh (Score:1)
Simple, good
Re:Sigh (Score:2)
It's important to keep vendors motivated into donating stuff...
Re:Sigh (Score:1)
Re:Sigh (Score:2)
Yes, I was pretty shocked at that.
With the incredible resources at these companies disposal, I would have thought that a donation costs so little to them, that the good press would be more than worth it.
"Realtek 'GOOD,'Intel 'BAD.'" (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"Realtek 'GOOD,'Intel 'BAD.'" (Score:2)
But Realtek Wi-Fi adapters work well. I have a cheap one, but I never had any issue with it. On the other hand, my previous Netgear MA301/311 pair (Prism 2.5) was unreliable although it was only 11 Mb/s.
Does this mean good support for RTL8180? (Score:2)
Linux vendors playing against their camp (Score:1)
"And to the Linux "vendors" that regardlessly ship non-free firmware images with their OSes, I'd say that they are playing against their camp. Why would vendors ever change their policies if such things are accepted by the open source community?"
Strange comment (Score:1)
Henning Brauer: Nobody ever gave us anything back. A plethora of vendors ship OpenSSH--commercial Unix vendors (basically all of them), all of the Linux distributors, and lots of hardware vendors (like HP in their switches)--but none of them seem to care; none of them ever gave us anything back. All of them should very well kn
Not troll- I'm dead serious (Score:2)
Do we have to wait for version 5.0 before Theo "gets it?"
Rob
Since when is meaningless fluff insightful? (Score:1)
Re:good work mods (Score:2)
Here you have some smart people making sure that the same can't be said of *nix, and they can't get no lovin'.
Hypocrisy looks better on the other side of the argument.
Re:We tried this... (Score:2)
Notepad is a Windows programme, if you want Windows you should try running Windows.
And of course, Windows doesn't have crashes either.
I'll admit it, I'd not read this troll before, but it's not funny or even very well done. How long as OpenBSD 3.7 been out? Two days you say? So how many days is a "few" then?
Re:We tried this... (Score:2)
There is a difference, snapshots are not expected to be as stable because they're there for testing purposes.
Re:We tried this... (Score:1)
Re:We tried this... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
You kicked an employee out because an evaluation that he suggested didn't work out? That is, pardon my French, completely fucked. The whole reason you do evaluations is so that you don't end up in a position where new products put people's job on the line.
Apart from anything else, from now on if an employee suddenly discovers a product that at a stroke will double productivity, halve costs and save small kittens from drowning, do you think they're going to tell you about it? No, they're going to hide behind conformity, in the hope that that way they'll keep their jobs.
Congrats, you've singlehandedly halted improvement of your company's computing infrastructure. I'm sure it'll mean far less trouble for you, right up to the point where an innovative competitor buys you up and fires everyone.
Re:Wait... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:We tried this... (Score:1)
It all depends on what you define as "desktop"
The OpenBSD FAQ states clearly that they're not trying to overtake the world. OpenBSD is an excellent Unix-like system, and it looks works and feels just like any Gnome or KDE desktop would.
Right now, for me, the biggest difficulty I'm having is with source code full of Linuxism that present difficulty when compiling on OpenBSD for compiling on Unix, because some Linux fuckheads forget they're supposed to be on Unix (I
Re:Upgrade Rants from undeadly (Score:1)