OpenBSD Webzine

TL;DR

Recent -current changes

Interesting new packages

Let's start writing about some packages that got imported and could be useful to many.

7.0-stable updates (since last webzine issue)

OpenBSD developer Interview

Vincent Finance: For this issue, Solene@ accepted to reply to my questions for a short interview.

Vincent: Hello, could you briefly introduce yourself to the readers?

Solène: My name is Solène, I'm a 32 years old woman living in west France. I have 11 years of experience as a FreeBSD/linux sysadmin. A few topics that interest me: Unix, gaming, minimalism and ecology.

Vincent: How did you join the project, and when?

Solène: I join the OpenBSD project in April 2018, at the p2k18 Hackathon event. I've been invited by jca@ to join, the hackathon was happening near my living place so I had no excuse to decline. After a few days, I've been invited to join the Team and of course I accepted. I wrote my feelings about p2k18 on Undeadly.

Vincent: To my knowledge, you often work on packages integration and ports updates. How did you get into these kinds of tasks? Do you like it?

Solène: I started getting into packages and ports because it was at my reach in regards to skills, and it gives fast results so it's enjoyable. It's often easy to upgrade a simple port to a newer version fixing an annoying bug. Importing software in the ports tree is also fun, some people may not be able to use OpenBSD because a software they need is not available, bringing popular programs into the ports tree allow more people to use OpenBSD and give more choice to our fellow users. I also participate to some documentation work because I love documentation, making man pages more obvious or removing old references is easy and fun.

Vincent: In your opinion, what is your greatest contribution to the project?

Solène: No doubt is associated to the binary packages availability for our stable users.

Vincent: How do you use OpenBSD outside of the development scope?

Solène: There are many hardware at home running OpenBSD for different purpose. My home router is running OpenBSD, using PF to fairly share the available bandwidth. My laptop where I store all my important data and do development is running OpenBSD, I'm even playing some video games on it and publishing videos of it. My personal email server has been running OpenBSD for a long time too, it's absolutely reliable and maintenance free. Finally, I'm using a very old laptop, mostly offline, to keep a diary and listen to music or play nethack.

Many thanks to Solène for playing the interview game and talking about herself and her work!

Shell tips

You certainly know that some ports ship with extra OpenBSD specific documentation stored under /usr/local/share/doc/pkg_readmes.

Take time to read them. You can easily pick one with the following command line: 

d=/usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes; select f in $(ls $d/); do $PAGER "$d/$f"; done

Reader comments

Message received from Panino (on Hacker News): That's so cool! I love Undeadly but it's great to also have this website, with interesting content I wouldn't normally come across. I'd have no idea that OpenBSD was installable on Gandicloud, for example. Or how to play Bach's prelude in C minor on OpenBSD using the MIDI speakers (issue #2). Thanks and keep up the great work!

Artworks of the moment

A wallpaper representing puffy as a kernel in an atom.
Artwork by Péhä

Note from the editorial team

In the comments of the issue 6's post on Hacker News, I read that some people were a little bit confused about the style of this webzine and I wanted to clarify some points. With this webzine, we try to gather some links about updates from the OpenBSD project, but also some interesting links involving the usage of OpenBSD. Solène Rapenne, the creator of this project, is working in the OpenBSD team as a volunteer and she wanted, at first, to create a place to share her passion and to invite everyone to test and use this operating system. The editorial team is composed of people with various levels of skills, not only in IT, but we all share one thing : we all love OpenBSD and we want to share that love.

Note from Solene@

I'd like to thanks Vincent Finance and prx for this 7th issue, they did a great job: I know this issue is late with regards to the monthly release originally planned, I had to deal with many events in real life, and I had no spare time left to work on the webzine. I've also been asked many time about supporting translation, I don't have time to work on this now, however anyone can contribute to our git repository if one wants to help improving the framework to support multiple languages, this would be much appreciated.