Re: Newbie question

[Jack Woehr <jax@purematrix.com>]

Michael P McIntyre wrote:

> I am new to OBSD and the Unix world in general. I have OBSD 2.6 working
> just about the way I want it at the moment. What benefits are there to
> upgrading to 2.7 or 2.8.

As a happy 2.6 user, I was worried about the same thing. In 2.8, the kernel and networking have
advanced considerably. In 2.7 the UVM was introduced which adds to security. Also, X was upgraded.
And lots of VERY GOOD work in the ports tree (THANK PORTERS!). And the hardware support is better,
my 133-bus works lousy under Linux 2.3.x and OpenBSD 2.6 but great under OpenBSD 2.8.

So I upgraded. I didn't unpack X, since I had already gone to XFree86 4.0 on my own. No problems
once I had:

  1. Installed
  2. Applied appropriate patches
  3. Rebuilt kernel
  4. Rebuilt system

> Also, should I upgrade, does it do anything destructive, IE, over write
> .conf files that I have since customized?

No screwups on conf files during upgrade. Amazing! The upgrade and rebuild took less effort than
simply *installing* RedHat Linux 7.0.

--
Jack J. Woehr
Senior Consultant, PureMatrix, Inc.
http://www.purematrix.com
"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers." - Picasso