Hi Javier, > I'm just looking at how openbsd works to see if it suits my needs. I > have a small old box (piii celeron @797 MHz & 32KB $, with 512 MB > ram), and in my experience compiling just the linux kernel takes ~4 > hrs, and compiling gcc/g++ takes ~24 hrs...
When running OpenBSD on that box, it will hardly feel small or old. For example, i'm using three workstations of that class, and they are just fine. Compiling the whole OpenBSD base system (make build) takes less than eight hours, plus a few hours for X. Even running extreme bloatware like firefox is ok. Well, perhaps you should stay away from stuff like KDE and OpenOffice, but in my humble opion, you should stay away from that on any hardware. You can run OpenBSD smoothly on much smaller hardware. For example, our main firewall still is an AMD-K6 233 MHz, 128 MB RAM. Of course, we have newer unused hardware lying around, but changing the hardware is just not worth the effort for our purposes, the current one is already much better than required. Even a 486-SX20 with 32 MB RAM will work out of the box - of course, very slowly, and without X. > I read in the documentation that if there are fixes, they come through > patches, and then to keep things simple, the easiest "fastest" way is > to keep the whole stable source tree up to date with patches, which > imply initial compilation + recompiling any time a patch arise... That process (make release) is good to maintain several -stable machines. For maintaining a single -stable machine, installing -release and /usr/src from CD, never compiling the whole system, but only applying patches and only compiling the relevant parts is very quick and straightforward. But either way, be aware there are no -stable ports right now, so you need to backport fixes for the ports you need yourself, or hope for (and trust...) the partial and unofficial work done and offered by other users, for example http://openbsd.rutgers.edu/ As others said, -current snapshots may suit you better. That way, you get updates for all ports. You cannot mix -current and -stable, but -current is stable enough for almost all purposes, in particular any kind of private use. Yours, Ingo
