OpenBSD 5.9 Set for May 1 Release; Pre-orders Available

Larry the BSD Guy

The upcoming release of OpenBSD’s latest and greatest comes with plenty of upgrades and improvements — plus the sound of music….

First things first: My German isn’t great. In fact, it would be completely nonexistent except for the fact that it interests me that in the German version of Scrabble you could essentially get 238 points with one word without using a double-word score.

However, the German online publication Pro-Linux.de this week reported (in German, but Google Translate works wonders) that pre-orders are ready to be taken for OpenBSD 5.9, scheduled for a May 1 release.

For those of you keeping score at home, OpenBSD is like other BSD derivatives, however this derivative is regarded as one of the safest systems due to the OpenBSD team’s attention to security (and could very well be the folks on the receiving end of Linus’ infamous “monkey” quote regarding, um, attention to detail on security issues, but I digress).

Features introduced to OpenBSD 5.9 include a wide variety of driver updates and improved hardware support, as well as improvements to the network stack and the installer on amd64 systems with GPT partitions. The OpenBSD team has also improved routing, and other highlights in this release are that it is scheduled to include Gnome 3.18.2, both KDE 3.5.10 and 4.14.3, Chromium 48.0.2564.116, both Mozilla Firefox 38.6.1esr and 44.0.2, Mozilla Thunderbird 38.6.0 and LibreOffice 5.0.4.2.

You can find a complete list of what’s new at the OpenBSD 5.9 website, which also says that OpenBSD 5.9 is likely to be published on May 1.

In the meantime, the Pro-Linux.de article says, “there is … the opportunity to order the new version and … support the team. The official pre-order price … is 44 Euros plus shipping. The distribution consists of three CDs … delivered in a soft-shell DVD case shortly after the release. It supports the i386, amd64, macppc and sparc64.”

But that’s not the best part.

The Hills Are Alive…: Every OpenBSD release comes with, well, a song; at least one song anyway. For OpenBSD 5.9 the music comes in the form of two songs — plural — which includes “Doctor W^X” and “Systemagic (Anniversary Edition).” But that’s not all: If you want to take a trip down the musical Memory Lane in the OpenBSD collection, treat yourself to a look at the list of songs past and present.

I can’t wait for the “Greatest Hits” album.

See you next week.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero