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Old 4th November 2013
looop looop is offline
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Default OpenBSD on study laptop - a good idea?

I am getting really frustrated with both Microsoft and Apple.
So I am considering installing OpenBSD on my MacBook Pro and use it as my main operating system.
But I am not certain it is a good idea (I am used to use OpenBSD for server).
What I am doing is:
Programming C
Writing reports in LaTeX
Need access to wireless network
Doing Linear algebra in MathLab (for this I believe I need a small OS X partition)
So would it be a good idea or should just drop the project?
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Old 4th November 2013
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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Hi looop !
I've never done dual boot on my iBooks as I've never needed nor wanted an OS other than OpenBSD.As for Latex , there are some nice apps for OpenBSD (lyx,gummi,texmaker,texworks} .. for Algebra , there is a port category where you may find alternatives to Mathlab .. I'm not sure though :

http://openports.se/math
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Old 4th November 2013
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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Maybe freemat & octave are good alternatives .. both are available as packages for OpenBSD 5.4 macppc.
http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/5...kages/powerpc/
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Old 4th November 2013
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by daemonfowl View Post
Maybe freemat & octave are good alternatives ..
Note that the official Octave port available is 3.0.5. The most recent release of Octave from GNU 3.6.4. For general usage, this version difference may not be important, however, I have taken Coursera courses which require 3.6.

There has been some discussion on ports@ about work done towards updating the Octave version available as an official package, but no commits have been made since.
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Old 5th November 2013
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Oko Oko is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by daemonfowl View Post
Maybe freemat & octave are good alternatives .. both are available as packages for OpenBSD 5.4 macppc.
http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/5...kages/powerpc/
No they are not! FreeMat replicates about 70% (percentage is made up not scientific) of the core MATLAB numerical system environment. However bare in mind that most useful MATLAB functions are sold separately as "toolboxes". GNU Octave language is not even 100% compatible with MATLAB language. Scilab is even less compatible with MATLAB than GNU Octave. So no. There is no free alternative for MATLAB numerical computing environment. If somebody is just trying to learn little bit language FreeMat would be the best choice.
There is a reason MathWorks can charge people tens of thousands of dollars for their product. If it was so easy to reproduce open source don't you think that MATLAB would not be that expensive.

As somebody who is using MATLAB in my day job I can attest that is becoming increasingly painful to use MATLAB even on Linux. BSDs (all of them) are more or less useless for scientific computing (lack of proprietary compilers, drivers, applications I can go on and on). The 800 pound Gorilla in the room is RedHat.

FreeMat OpenBSD port is 4.0 current release is 4.2 and it is unlikely to be update due to the lack of interest and problems with JIT compiler. More worrisome for me personally
is that numpy and scipy have not being updated for 3 years which means that even people who use open source tools to do prototyping have no business using OpenBSD.

Unfortunately all of above comes from the mouth of hard core OpenBSD user and the person who actually used/uses OpenBSD for scientific computing at least on my personal laptop.

P.S. Linux emulation layer is useless and as the recent example with Opera essentially self terminating demonstrates developer's time is better spent doing things OpenBSD way than maintaining Linux emulation just
to run one stupid application.

@looop

It is actually a very good idea as long as you do not need a genuine scientific computing. TeXLive works like a charm on OpenBSD (hopefully 2013 will be in ports soon). gcc version is newer than on RedHat and works like a charm. Similarly binutils, gdb (one from ports egdb). Python unfortunately is becoming useless due to numpy and scipy problems. OpenBSD as a network appliance is second to none when it comes to any network related tasks. Full soft raid drivers is a gem. The Achilles Tendon of OpenBSD is a luck of modern file system (read Hammer).

Last edited by Oko; 5th November 2013 at 03:29 AM.
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Old 10th November 2013
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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oko , thank you for enriching the thread !!
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Old 13th November 2013
girarde girarde is offline
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As always, of course, if you need Flash, there's a problem.
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Old 14th November 2013
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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flash ? who cares .. :-)
You don't like youtube-dl ? then a firefox addon : mp4 downloader .. hehe
I can't believe I'd opt for another OS just because flash is missing .. ppc was made for OpenBSD :-) .period.
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