Trying OpenBSD

[JohnDeere630]

Title says it all. Just put together an amd64 system from some bits & pieces I had laying around. It installed (apparently) without a hitch. I have to get used to totally different names for things & different commands. It brings back memories of trying to get everything to work with Debian Sarge, back in the day....The basics are the same; RTFM seems to be working well so far.

[nodir]

I can offer you a "like" for that post, but else i ain't got much to say.
Post a bit of feedback how things work, if you feel like it.

[JohnDeere630]

Prior to this, my only experience with BSD was a FreeNAS server I built about 7 years ago. It had two mirrored 1 TB drives (maybe 2 TB; I don't remember), but one drive died a year or so ago & I haven't gotten around to trying to fix it. I'm a bit rusty at this point. I'm hoping that getting back into a different BSD variant will help dampen the learning curve a bit.

[golinux]

You're braver than I am. I wanted to try a BSD variant about a year ago and finally found a live image but it couldn't deal with my ps2 mouse and keyboard. Wasn't up to installing on metal so that was the end of it . . .

[JohnDeere630]

Well, at this point I think I have the package install thing working. I had to switch to a different NY mirror, but now have libreoffice and kde4 working. I can't get konqueror to connect to the internet, even though the machine downloaded packages from the mirror. I also need to install something (CUPS maybe) so I can try to get my printers working. Interesting stuff, so far. Not sure it's going to replace Debian anytime soon, though.

[JohnDeere630]

Well, it turns out I couldn't get on the internet because the cat pulled the network cable out.
I have CUPS, hplip, and Firefox installed. I'm starting to like this more and more. I wish I had a wireless adapter that was BSD compatible for that computer, cables are a PITA.

[nodir]

kde is installed during installation of the OS ?

[JohnDeere630]

kde is installed during installation of the OS ?

No, the install puts only the basic system on the disk, and a very minimal desktop...I'm not sure which one. I just prefer kde....old dogs, new tricks, and all that.
Adding software so far has been pretty easy; similar to Debian in some respects. You just point it to a mirror and use the pkg_add command to download and intall stuff. About everything I use seems to be there. It is pretty tough to find apps to do specific tasks if you don't already know what you want. I used to use Synaptic to search and find out what stuff did before I used aptitude to actually install it. If there are OpenBSD versions of synaptic, I haven't discovered them yet. Googling various issues is a bit harder, as there isn't as much on the net about BSD as there is about linux.

[golinux]

Googling various issues is a bit harder, as there isn't as much on the net about BSD as there is about linux.

At least you don't have to deal with a flood of ubuntu responses (unless you know how to exclude them with -ubuntu).

[bmc5311]

Found this (you probably did too..).. https://octopkg.wordpress.com (found it here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/does ... ist.51364/).

FreeBSD - you're one step away from OS X..