I’ve been using OpenBSD since the 4.3 release and am starting to track -current. I’ve also been heavily coding in Erlang lately. CVSsup seems like it might be able to receive a performance boost from the lightweight process model of Erlang. I haven’t looked too closely at the protocol yet, but this seems like it might be an interesting and useful thing to try.
Michael Deng to Steve Vinoski:
“Why don’t you finish everything so the rest of us can sleep!”
If your OpenBSD 4.3 laptop is extremely hot and noisy, you can put it in Cool Running Mode with
apm -C
This took my Core2Duo T5300 from 1.73 Mhz to 800 Mhz and significantly reduced the noise and heat, when not in heavy use.
So, I still can’t correctly configure my /etc/xorg.conf file using xorgconfig or Xorg -configure. Everytime I try to add my native laptop resolution of 1280×800 it still goes back to 1024×768. So I keep deleting it and using no xorg.conf. OpenBSD then correctly detects my resolution.
However, I can’t downgrade it to 1024×768 at runtime. My main goal for doing that was to use the VGA cable to hook up my laptop to my Samsung 46″ LCD to watch movies and such. Under Ubuntu, I had to do this because my tv wouldn’t accept the 1280×800 resolution, but worked fine with 1024×768.
Just for the hell of it I decided to just hook up my OpenBSD laptop and reboot. Amazingly it actually output at 1920×1080 to my TV! I couldn’t get Ubuntu to do that! Simply Amazing. I just keep being impressed by the quality of OpenBSD. And I haven’t even started digging into the kernel sources yet 
I just installed OpenBSD 4.3 recently. I’ve played with it before and even purchased the 3.6 CD set. However, I never had much success running it as my hardware wasn’t supported and usually just went back to Linux. I really am trying to get back into the security mindset and figured I might as well throw OpenBSD on my HP dv6345us laptop.
The Install was a breeze! At least it was until I realized that GDM wasn’t included in the AMD64 packages. So I had to reinstall the i386 version. I got Gnome up and running trivially and the native 1280×800 resolution was detected. The weird thing here is that there is no xorg.conf file in /etc/X11. Being used to Ubuntu and other various Linux distros, this seemed strange. Each time I tried to add one and tweak by hand I would end up with a 1024×768 resolution. So for now I’m sticking with the default config.
At this point and then it was on to configure the wireless. My laptop has an integrated “Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG” card. Surprisingly enough an open source driver is installed out of the box for this. Terrific! What is lacking however is the firmware. But that is easily added with the package created by Damien Berganini. It can be installed easily enough with the command:
pkg_add http://damien.bergamini.free.fr/iwifw/OpenBSD/iwi-firmware-2.3.tgz
Information on how to configure wireless with ifconfig was also readily available with a quick search of the web.
I then installed firefox, emacs, and a whole host of other thirdparty packages.
The only things that disappointingly don’t work are my function keys (f7 and f8 for brightness, etc…) and my softkeys. I will eventually have these working as they work out of the box on Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04.
I also can’t use an external monitor, once again do to the lack of use of the function keys.
I now have to decide if I’m willing to install Linux binary compatibility and the Adobe flash plugin so I can watch tv on sites like hulu.com. I still haven’t decided If I want to go down that road, although hopefully gnash will catch up soon, since Adobe just opened up their specs.
I’ll be back with more updates soon.