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Old 23rd February 2012
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jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,977
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Thanks for asking, Shep.

1) The bind patch is not on these images. They are 5.0-release, as advertised. For two reasons: BIND is not running on them, so it is not applicable, but more importantly these were never intended for production use.

2) You can certainly take live media with you, when you travel. There is no encrypted information on them, so they should be able to clear customs and immigration everywhere. You may freely permit security services to make copies, they are BSD licensed. However, a USB stick version is not currently available. They are CD9660 filesystems with El Torito boot blocks.

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I have been considering USB images that, like the optical media, would remain read-only. Easy enough to create them, though I do not have any tools for Windows users to use to write them to USB device. I could use a recommendation or two, here, since I've never written drive images to sticks from Windows.

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I have been considering removing the "heavy" images -- XFCE, KDE, and Gnome. They are larger than CD, and due to the use of uncompressed CD9660 filesystems, are so slow as to be difficult to really use. As a proof that general purpose workstations could be deployed with OpenBSD, they showed it was possible, but with CD filesystems, are not practically useful.

If I were to make these "usable" I am considering adding some functional, general purpose tools -- and even though abiword/gnumeric are lighter weight office automation than LibreOffice, I'm thinking about the possiblity of the latter. There is better integration with open and de facto document standards. I'm also considering leaving them out, and just providing a browser. A browser-only solution is available now, for those who would use cloud based office automation services.

If I add apps like that, usability with read/write media will have to be considered. And, I will have to alter my scripts to make it easy for non-OpenBSD users to connect to WiFi networks. Today, that's left to the user, my scripts do not handle nwid, wpakey, or nwakey requirements.

I've just started building 5.1-release and packages for live media this week. I've still got XFCE, KDE, and Gnome pathnames in my dpb(1) subdirlist, and I have not put any office automation in the list. No decisions have been made, yet.

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My images are downloaded frequently from the countries mentioned in the Times. I don't think there is a direct correlation.