OpenBSD 4.5 rides the Tron Light Cycle

From the ‘BSD people with a great sense of humor‘ files:

There are a lot of things that can be said about OpenBSD releases. For one, they’re always entertaining. Today, OpenBSD 4.5 is officially being released along with a new song to promote the open source operating system release. Yes this BSD has its own song, for the 4.4 release it was the ‘Trial of the BDS Knights’ (a Star Wars spoof).

From a technical point of view, the new release includeS updated hardware and driver support (including support of SDHC flash media now) and a whole lot of packages. The release notes claim, over 5500 ports and minor robustness improvements in package tools.”

On the new hardware side the interesting thing to me is an initial port to  the ARM based OpenMoko
platform, which could mean we might see OpenBSD on handheld devices at some point soon.

Then of course there is OpenSSH, which is the flagship feature of OpenBSD in many ways (even though OpenSSH is now widely deployed on nearly all *nix systems). OpenSSH 5.2 is included in OpenBSD 4.5, providing new command line features and a number of key bug fixes.

All right enough of the details, back to the song. OpenBSD has no love of Microsoft and they are frequent targets of OpenBSD’s songs. With the Tron theme of this release (good timing since TR2N is coming soon) , they’ve woven in that distate with the ‘user’ and ‘motherboard’ ideas.

Here’s one of my favorite sections:

Yes I’m a user

And I’m not the only one
I’m not a loser

With help from Puffy Tron

It’s a busy time in the BSD community for sure. Just yesterday, NetBSD 5.0 and a DragonFly BSD release came out and FreeBSD 7.2 is in the works too.