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I downloaded this for that purpose. I hear some people also report good results with this and with this, as well.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

We're calling LFS a distro now?

In a manner of speaking, yes. Its on distrowatch http://www.distrowatch.com/ currently at the #56 spot.

OK, now, is Microsoft protecting itself from external threat or protecting it's monopoly?

On a side note I had difficulties installing ZoneAlarm on Windows XP SP2. These was (seems) to be a conflit between the firewall of Zonealarm and the one in WindowsXP.. ( No network connection was possible) Anyway,

It is a GREAT idea to isolate IE from the core of the OS. But I should be able to use the Firewall i want (Either the free or paid one.)

Hargh, it's no use.. Please MS, continue to put barrier and block etc etc.. At least more and more people with understand what you'r up to and will start using Linux (Any distro will do fine)
For more information on alternative please see: http://distrowatch.com/

Unfortunately, the update feature seems to turned off on this release. Grrr...

Ubuntu is now the leading choice for linux by quite a margin. Us poor gentoo users languish in 10th place :(

Wait, are we choosing our operating systems based upon popularity again?

Ubuntu is now the leading choice for linux by quite a margin. Us poor gentoo users languish in 10th place :(

I'll remind you that there was almost 3 years between Woody and Sarge.

yet another choice

http://www.distrowatch.com/

Distrowatch does this... shows the popularity of different distros. It sometimes influences me to try knew distros that manage to make it to the top of the list even if I have never heard of them.

I know that the the Ubuntu numbers that are usually reported are silly, because they are based on Distrowatch, which as 10 year Linux user, was a site I had never been to before questioning the Ubuntu installation numbers, and being refered there.

I also know that you have no interest in getting into a "measuring" contest -- because fedora is not about that. BUT if it were about that -- what do you think is a good way to measure "popularity" of a distro? Any numbers that say that DSL is more popular that Debian, automatically get's questioned in my book. Don't get me wrong, I love DSL, and Debian and even Distrowatch -- I'm just not ready to believe that what is being reported is an accurate representation of who's running what.

There are many good resources on the web. The standard resource is The Linux Documentation Project, or http://www.tldp.org/. Another site, which is much better than it used to be, is http://www.linux.com/. http://www.linuxjournal.com/ has many great articles to guide you through a wide variety of small projects. A great newer site with helpful articles is http://www.howtoforge.com/. For help on the desktop side, http://www.desktoplinux.com/ has many articles you may find of use. Documentation and information about KDE is, of course, available at http://www.kde.org/ and it's affiliated sites (linked from their homepage). IBM is always putting up new articles at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/ that can provide usefull information for development work under Linux. You may also find the articles on http://www.debian.org/, http://www.gentoo.org/, and http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ usefull even though the articles were written for other distros.

If you can't find what you're looking for there, you can always head over to irc.freenode.net. The #suse and #opensuse channels will be of particular interest to you. You may find #kde helpful for KDE applications. ##linux is basically a catch-all channel; we'll generally be able to field just about any question you throw at us there. If we can't, we will point you in the right direction.

Keeping up with the FOSS news can also teach you quite a bit. You already know about Slashdot. http://osnews.com/ is another very nice resource. http://www.kerneltrap.org/ is a less frequently updated site which can provide you with more advanced information. Keeping an eye on http://www.freshmeat.net/ can help you get a better feel for the various software available for Linux. And of course, with gmail you can setup alerts for Linux, KDE, etc.

If you really want to learn more about Linux, there's no better way than distro hopping. Go to http://www.vmware.com/ and download their free VMWare Server 1.0 to allow you to try out various distros without having to wipe your hard drive. This does, however, require you have a decent amount of RAM (I'd recommend at least 1 GB). Go to http://www.distrowatch.com/ for a fairly complete list of the available Linux distros, sorted by popularity.

If all these links really don't solve your problems, take yourself over to your best local bookstore and buy a book or two. The drawback of doing this, however, is that most of them will be pretty much out of date by the time they hit the shelves. On the other hand, they will give you a great foundation upon which you can build (update yourself) easily by utilizing the online resources.

Also, never forget about http://www.google.com/linux!

*cough* Mandriva *cough*
Of course you're been here, I take it. "What distro should I choose?" is THE number one question in the Linux community - I bet if you Googled that phrase alone, you'd find scads of conversations just like this one. Best to grab some live CDS - that way you can "test drive" distros and nibble at them a bit at a time until you feel comfortable with one, then get it's install version.

From what I could find, it's mostly a localized Debian with a few tweaks for ease-of-use and some educational apps and such. Review linked by distrowatch.

What you want is http://distrowatch.com/

---Moving from "Barely Positive Windows User" to "Trapped Windows User looking for the chance to switch".

Go to http://distrowatch.com/. Pick a Distribution that captures your fancy, be it GNU/Linux, *BSD or Solaris. Download it. Install it. Learn how to use it, which means being a worthless noob for over 12 months. After that your MS detox is complete.

That's your chance right now. Any objections to it are excuses to keep using Windows, in which case you simply want what you say you want to ditch.

I acutally got back into Linux when my Windows 2000 machine kept getting "sick" and then discovered that I would have to pay $100+ to get XP... I had never paid for Windows and wasn't about to. I looked around for Linux distros and found DistroWatch and tried Ubuntu. I don't use the machine for much, but Ubuntu did the trick. Hardware crapshoot, as someone else put it, but I guess I rolled a 7 on the come out roll because everything worked great, even my HP all-in-one printer/scanner. My Nvidia card didn't have the "optimal" drivers and that was the toughest thing to overcome, but other than that I havent' looked back..

On the other hand you have hard core Windows apps that just won't port or run under Crossover/WINE, not to mention games.
I have said this before and I will say this again. I beleive Linux distros like Ubuntu are at a level that compete with Windows 98, that is, most stuff "just works" but every now and then you need to Google some stuff and tweak something from the command line, just like when Windows 98 came out and the first "plug and play" stuff was introduced.

"Is it just me or does the report actually fail to mention to mention Linux even once?"

That is correct, the article quotes Graham Cluley as saying that Macs will be safer for 'computer' users.

MS going into the AV business threatening their revenue stream and despite this Sophos depend on Microsoft for business. Linux on the other hand is considered a greater threat than the Mac, both to Sophos and MS. The Mac is seen as a niche player so talking it up is not such a big deal. Previous utterances from Sophos:

a Mac has no more inherent security when it comes to malware than a PC

"Linux has a better history for security than Microsoft, and hackers are more focused on Microsoft.

These are not attacking any kind of vulnerability in the computer They are attacking the vulnerability of people's brains.

http://www.distrowatch.com/

You can't hack an OS X system in 30 minutes? Granted, they were literally asking for it, but the point remains that it was hacked in a very short period of time, and you kind of have to question the security stuff there.

Personally, I'd say that it would make a lot more sense just to switch to Linux – not only does it work with your existing PC hardware, but it's also usually free or inexpensively-priced. And despite what a lot of people have claimed, it's really not very hard to install or use – as a distribution maintainer myself, I get a lot of e-mails, etc. from users, and most of the time if there are problems, they're usually either really small things after installation, almost never something that would render the whole system entirely unbootable. (A lot of my family and friends are using it now too, without any sort of problems, and considering that they were all Microsoft junkies for years it's not as insignificant as it may seem...) Obviously I may as well promote Ultima Linux here, but there are many others available – I'd stay away from Ubuntu, I've had some bad experiences with it myself*, but the hell with it, you have a choice, so you choose what's best for you.

Of course, if security's the number one priority and absolutely nothing else matters, the only way to go is OpenBSD... it's also pretty damn fast, too, even on a P-133/80MB laptop.

Having said all that, I do have to admit my iPod nano is the best thing since sliced bread...

*Tried it out in my spare time, mostly out of curiosity (I sometimes like playing around with other systems just for the hell of it)... among other things I've noticed: No wireless support, slow as hell, and it uses GNOME, which I can't stand. And don't even get me started on apt-get.

DISCLAIMER: Probably some bias in there, since I'm a distro maintainer myself. Take with a grain of salt...

Yes, and sure a link to the Linux kernel is the alternative for Joe user.

A link to http://www.distrowatch.com would have been better.

Despite the Ubuntus, Suses and Fedoras out there, Slackware is still going strong. Still #11 in http://distrowatch.com/ Will release 11 make it go up a notch or two?

Maybe this is too simple of an answer, but INSTALL A VERSION of unix/linux and get a BOOK!

(What a waste of a article.)

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

http://www.apple.com/

http://www.debian.org/

http://www.openbsd.org/

in case I missed somebody :-) -> http://distrowatch.com/

( I could go on and on here, no offense to any I left out )

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubun tu Look at the table on that page.

While Ubuntu has been many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now,

I find it interesting that a distro only first released slightly over 18 months ago [1] [2], could be "many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now" (emphasis added).

Protection * Download virus identity (IDE) file

No, for real protection download a Linux distro

yes you are right even windows needs extra codecs for the average media files some of these are also of uncertain legality and linux can happily play any media files ive ever tryed to play on it. i also regularly burn both audio cds and movies from files with out any problems i think this guy would have had a good linux experiance if he had took 5mins to look for a distro disigned for the linux newbie http://distrowatch.com/ would have got this guy a linux experiance that he could enjoy.

And while you're answering that, I want to know why Slackware is popular in Brazil.

Xgl/Compiz may be key to the widespread adoption of this release. Because Ubuntu's soon-to-be-out next realease (i.e. Dapper Drake) does not include Xgl by default (although it is available via synaptic), I wonder if people will start gravitating toward Suse in search of nifty eye-candy (especially seeing as SuSe is currently hot on the heals of Ubuntu according to http://www.distrowatch.com/'s counter (to the extent that it can be trusted)...

Current operating systems (OSX, Windows, Linux) seem to be focusing on (debatably useful) eye-candy. OSX has included some pretty sweet stuff for a while, and one of the main focus points for Windows Vista seems to be the new Aero UI. Xgl is the open source community's answer to all this (of course, Xgl ended up beating Aero to the punch).

Well, it is the most popular distro, at least at this page: http://distrowatch.com/

Here's an analogy with biology; the reason that the diagram doesn't show Linspire to be derived from Debian is because it is not the equivalent of a phylogenetic diagram, but rather a "mind map" showing relationships based on 'morphology' (e.g. like grouping fish and whales together because they're both streamlined and live in water) rather than descent.

What you'd be more interested in is something like this page, which shows that a large number of distros trace back to Debian or Fedora.

Distrowatch offers information on and reviews for many different Linux distributions. It does not really classify them, though. The distro chart at Linux.org classified distributions using several categories, but it has not been updated in a while. Also, there is a test to determine which Linux distribution is right for you.

If there are 600 distros, surely you have to accept that people are finding plenty of reasons to create new ones? Surely you don't think you can just declare that they are only faking this need or that they shouldn't do it?

It's easy (if a little arrogant) to look at the total and dismiss the effort as needless, but it's much harder to go through each distro and show that it doesn't fulfill some niche or need.

I picked a load of unpopular ones at random:

• FeeSBie
  An Italian FreeBSD group who wanted a personalizable FreeBSD LiveCD.
• Aurox
  An internationalised Red-Hat derivative with better multimedia support.
• Helix
  An improved Knoppix LiveCD for network security testing and forensics.
• AGNULA
  A completely free Linux system, coordinated by the EC and devoted to multimedia work
• Nonux
  A Dutch LiveCD/install cd designed to integrate easily into Windows-based offices.

If there are 600 distros, surely you have to accept that people are finding plenty of reasons to create new ones? Surely you don't think you can just declare that they are only faking this need or that they shouldn't do it?

It's easy (if a little arrogant) to look at the total and dismiss the effort as needless, but it's much harder to go through each distro and show that it doesn't fulfill some niche or need.

I picked a load of unpopular ones at random:

• FeeSBie
  An Italian FreeBSD group who wanted a personalizable FreeBSD LiveCD.
• Aurox
  An internationalised Red-Hat derivative with better multimedia support.
• Helix
  An improved Knoppix LiveCD for network security testing and forensics.
• AGNULA
  A completely free Linux system, coordinated by the EC and devoted to multimedia work
• Nonux
  A Dutch LiveCD/install cd designed to integrate easily into Windows-based offices.

If there are 600 distros, surely you have to accept that people are finding plenty of reasons to create new ones? Surely you don't think you can just declare that they are only faking this need or that they shouldn't do it?

It's easy (if a little arrogant) to look at the total and dismiss the effort as needless, but it's much harder to go through each distro and show that it doesn't fulfill some niche or need.

I picked a load of unpopular ones at random:

• FeeSBie
  An Italian FreeBSD group who wanted a personalizable FreeBSD LiveCD.
• Aurox
  An internationalised Red-Hat derivative with better multimedia support.
• Helix
  An improved Knoppix LiveCD for network security testing and forensics.
• AGNULA
  A completely free Linux system, coordinated by the EC and devoted to multimedia work
• Nonux
  A Dutch LiveCD/install cd designed to integrate easily into Windows-based offices.

If there are 600 distros, surely you have to accept that people are finding plenty of reasons to create new ones? Surely you don't think you can just declare that they are only faking this need or that they shouldn't do it?

It's easy (if a little arrogant) to look at the total and dismiss the effort as needless, but it's much harder to go through each distro and show that it doesn't fulfill some niche or need.

I picked a load of unpopular ones at random:

• FeeSBie
  An Italian FreeBSD group who wanted a personalizable FreeBSD LiveCD.
• Aurox
  An internationalised Red-Hat derivative with better multimedia support.
• Helix
  An improved Knoppix LiveCD for network security testing and forensics.
• AGNULA
  A completely free Linux system, coordinated by the EC and devoted to multimedia work
• Nonux
  A Dutch LiveCD/install cd designed to integrate easily into Windows-based offices.

If there are 600 distros, surely you have to accept that people are finding plenty of reasons to create new ones? Surely you don't think you can just declare that they are only faking this need or that they shouldn't do it?

It's easy (if a little arrogant) to look at the total and dismiss the effort as needless, but it's much harder to go through each distro and show that it doesn't fulfill some niche or need.

I picked a load of unpopular ones at random:

• FeeSBie
  An Italian FreeBSD group who wanted a personalizable FreeBSD LiveCD.
• Aurox
  An internationalised Red-Hat derivative with better multimedia support.
• Helix
  An improved Knoppix LiveCD for network security testing and forensics.
• AGNULA
  A completely free Linux system, coordinated by the EC and devoted to multimedia work
• Nonux
  A Dutch LiveCD/install cd designed to integrate easily into Windows-based offices.

On DistroWatch, there are around 600 distributions, how can people want to make any more?

As far as Ubuntu beeing most popular, this may help persuade you...

http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularit y

"We can afford to take some risks with Dapper+1, because Dapper has turned
out so well."

I love Ubuntu and all that, but jeez, get it out the door first!

"There's, like, ninety-six linux distributions."

According to DistroWatch, there's 497. But who's counting, right?

http://distrowatch.com/search.php?status=All

We owe RMS a huge debt because he single-handedly kickstarted the free software movement. Linus gave us Linux... but he used GNU C compiler to do it. And the Linux kernel isn't very useful unless you have a shell like GNU bash, and you need command line tools like ls, cp, mv... all GNU provided. Thank you, RMS.

But sorry, RMS, you are crazy and I hope your dearest wishes do not come true. RMS believes the only acceptable licenses are the ones he wrote; if he had the power, he would make it illegal to ship software under a proprietary licence. (How do I know this? Eric Raymond publicly challenged RMS about it and RMS did not respond, and I believe it was because ESR was right and RMS didn't want to say it out loud. Google for the words "Freedom Zero" to get the context of all this.)

Somebody asked RMS how can software writers make enough money to live. RMS said that he would be in favor of a "free software tax" to pay the salaries of people writing free software. If it was illegal to ship software under a proprietary licence then maybe you would need something like this, but I do NOT want government involved in deciding who gets to write what software for pay. The free market is better.

Only RMS could think that government paying of salaries to selected software writers is more free than people deciding what software to write and what licence to ship under.

Actually that's an important point. RMS wants to maximise freedom for the USERS even at the expense of the PROGRAMMERS. He is willing to constrain the freedom of a programmer, because he wants all software to come with source code.

The worst thing about RMS is that he doesn't care about anything else as much as his particular ideal for free software. Of all the Linux distros out there, you would think he would recommend Debian GNU/Linux, right? The only major distro that actually puts "GNU/" in their name?

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

But in an interview he recommended some obscure Linux called Extremadura or something like that, because he had read somewhere that they only provided GPL software.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/08/msg029 01.html

If you set up a default Debian system, you will only have free software; Debian's "main" servers have nothing RMS would not approve. But Debian has for years had a server called "nonfree" where you could get things like Netscape Navigator. If you know what you are doing, you can set your Debian system to pull packages from "nonfree", and for this crime, RMS snubbed Debian in favor of the other one. And it turned out that the onther one isn't actually freeer than Debian; RMS had heard it was so, but it wasn't, really.

It's sad that RMS can't even say something nice about Debian, the closest thing the world has seen to what RMS says he wants, because they aren't PERFECT and if they aren't PERFECT they aren't good enough for RMS.

RMS, thank you for kick-starting the free software movement. Thank you for GCC, EMACS, and the other GNU utilities. But you are crazy.

"It has been three long years to the day since we last looked at that unusual distribution called Windows. Although at that time it was considered by many to be little else than a bizarre joke (who on earth would design an operating system that doesn't provide a way to grep files?), a recent rumour about a new release has piqued our curiosity. Developed by a large group of programmers who, believe it or not, all work in one building, the new version is predicted by some journalists to be one of the most secure operating systems ever created. Robert Storey, our ardent distribution reviewer, couldn't hold on any longer and downloaded the most recent beta version of Windows Vista from a nearby mirror to take a look."

You meant http://distrowatch.com/.

After looking at distrowatch.com, I'd say yes it is #1: http://distrowatch.com/ (I still prefer Ubuntu's "parent" Debian though).

http://distrowatch.com/

Top 5 are:

1 Ubuntu 2711
2 SUSE 1827
3 Mandriva 1542
4 Fedora 1199
5 MEPIS 632

Jonathan
~~~~~~~~
"I really wish I hadn't recommended http://www.justgofaster.com/ driver training to that Spanish twat" - Michael Schumacher

Could MS actually be taking security seriously?

Yes - yes they are.

You see - MS's customers are demanding it - and MS is trying to deliver - after all, their competition (mostly) is delivering. (See, this is why F/OSS is good for you even if you dont use it:)

Anyway, I do think MS is making an attempt to take security seriously, but security needs are ultimately outshadowed by their marketing needs.

Anyway, to bring things (mildly) back on topic, I'll repeat myself:

Note to Microsoft

We have more then enough hat colours as things stand.

Blue Hat hacker sounds like an IBM employee anyway (or an Anti-Fedora agent?)

Yeah, I have listened that Y distro will *really* replace Linux since the Caldera or Corel linux times.

The Linux distribution that will really fight against Windows is one like Ubuntu that just expands and expands without nobody noticing.

For the slasdhot editors, it would be a nice poll to see which are the most used Linux distributions. The only poll I found is this and it seems quite outdated.

Another interesting place for similar statistics is Distrowatch where the 3 most popular distributions are: 1st. Ubunty 2nd. Mandriva 3rd. SuSE, 4th. Fedora.

I'm probably walking into this, but just in case: Ubuntu is a version of Linux - a Unix-like OS which fully supports GUI's. Check it out at http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

And that, right there, is the crux of the issue: Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Mandriva, SuSE, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, ... (and hundreds more at distrowatch.com) are all seperate operating systems. I'm well aware that that is the state of things now. What I'm trying to say is, it doesn't have to be that way.

Statically linking (or the equivalent: packaging your own dynamically linked libraries and using those) is an acceptable solution, provided it's used on programs without too many dependencies, and only used on a small scale. Otherwise, the system's memory usage will increase dramatically and performance will go down. The downloadable Linux versions of Firefox and OpenOffice.org take this approach. It works for them because they reimplement almost everything (including their UIs) as internal libraries. They're both genetically related to formerly proprietary codebases, and therefore they don't represent typical Linux programs.

I've been following Autopackage for a long time. It's got a lot of potential. I hope they can work out the kinks, and get a larger body of software packaged, so I can get new software releases without worring about someone packaging it for my distribution. Another interesting project along similar lines is Klik.

Incidently, the Autopackage developers have a page that explains the problems with Linux application portability much better than I did. They also talk about why massive distro-specific package repositories aren't a good idea, in the same FAQ.

“That's what I was thinking initially. However, this is a school we're talking about. Many (most?) schools allow students to plug their desktops into the network ethernet and use their laptops on the school's wireless LAN. We are talking about private machines here. Of course, there is the acceptible use policy (or whatever a given school calls it) dictating what is okay for the student to do. I can't imaging it saying "no running viruses", though. ”