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Because your most precious data is usually stored in your home directory (or whatever the windows equivalent is). I don't want a web browser flaw to allow access to my financial data, email, confidential work files, or other personal private data.

I agree with you about the prompt being annoying, though. On my system, I can only upload/download from a default non-executable "sandbox" directory, but my wife's account is configured to only hide specific sensitive files and directories from firefox. The extra security is completely transparent to her unless she downloads a bank statement or something, when she has to use nautilus to move the file to a secure directory after downloading it.

I recently had an experience on how certain aspects of opensource software development work, and work together incredibly well.

I have been running Gentoo Linux as my sole operating system for over a year, I do not even own a copy of Windows. The system is used for development and general desktop computing stuff. Over time I have developed my own customisations and configurations that suit my way of working. Specifically I have a fluxbox setup with Xorg to run on a dual head display thanks to xinerama and nvidia TwinView. This has been working like a dream for me.

Recently however I realised that I wanted a specific user interface optimisation. I like to make use of having 2 monitors the screen real estate, so I have a web browser open and maximised on one monitor and my editor where I code, maximised on the other, along with an xterm running my test harness. Recently though, I realised that I spent far too long cycling (alt-tabbing) through windows on the other monitor, when I knew that the window I wanted was on my current monitor, it just didn't have focus.

So I logged into the #fluxbox irc channel, and I asked if it was possible to create a keypress (e.g. CTRL-TAB) to restrict window cycling to the monitor with the active window on it. Within 5 minutes, of my asking one of the fluxbox developers (_markt?) had prepared me a patch. All I needed to do, was to copy a different ebuild for fluxbox into my portage overlay and add a single line to patch the source. This ebuild was then set to download the fluxbox source straight from the current development branch apply the patch and install it onto my system. This included adding in an option to my display managers configuration which would allow me to select between my modified fluxbox, (normal) fluxbox, kde, gnome etc...

In short the gentoo portage system is tailor made for opensource, and it makes it incredibly easy for users and developers to support. This coupled with Internet Relay Chat allowing users and developers to easily request and test new features make for a powerful system. Not to mention the use of traditional unix patch tools, version control (svn/cvs) and a bit of webspace to facilitate file transfer.

Don't mean to dis slackware. Gentoo allows you to keep your machine updated daily, quarterly, or never if you prefer. You will have very fine control over what you install. You can use spacific compiler options that apply to your flavor of CPU. The Gentoo forums are a great source of help. They are very active. A lot of people have suffered over the years to make things nice (if not easy). You should not have to suffer. Start here: http://www.gentoo.org/ Good luck!

I'm sticking to GPL projects because I don't know about other ones as well. This is not meant to diss the BSD crowd.

• ALSA everyone welcome to submit a driver for their card. I might add that most Linux Kernel drivers and most drivers for a number of other projects (X, CUPS, gcc backends, etc.) are fairly open and you can jump right in.
• gentoo packages you might not get into the main distribution right away, but the community is very open and will try out pretty much anything you have to contribute. Like drivers, above.
• GIMP and GTK at least, pre-2000. Now there are a lot more developers, so jumping in isn't quite as easy.
• kino has a very flat hierarchy. linux1394 is the same. Like drivers, above.
• MediaWiki

Okay, but I also think that cataloging open source projects is kind of fruitless, since there are so many. The internet connects people with common interests. They develop projects. Some are more open than others. Still, if the project gets too rigidly hierarchical, someone will fork the code and head off in a different direction. Example: the different flavors of BSD.

Debian (and by extension ubuntu) has always fought with me when I want to do things, especially the package manager. I find gentoo's portage works better for me. Portage allows one to customise a system a *lot* more before it descends into anything even resembling dependency hell, and one doesn't need to scour the internet for alternative repositories which, in my mind, is one of the main reasons that apt always chokes when installing more than 10 or so applications.

Note that I'm not saying debian has a poor system, just that its often completely incapable of doing things that I do on a daily basis.

I find Gentoo's longer and more involved (hence easier for those who know exactly what they want) install process is well worth it purely for its package management system, especially since debian has descended into dependency hell immediately after a fresh install every time I've touched it in the past couple of years.

Installing KDE without the crashtastic aRts? debian: requires manual compile from source. gentoo: unset a "use" flag
Use a different mpm with apache? debian: manual compile from source. gentoo: change a use; flag
Set up transcode on a headless machine without pulling in xorg (for clustered encoding)? debian: manual compile of transcode from source, and most other packages it uses too, plus some clobbering of apt so it doesn't choke. gentoo: set a couple use flags.
Samba without ldap or kerberos?
PHP with x,y and z but not a, b or c? gentoo has 108 use flags for php alone last time I checked

The list goes on...

ps: one could substitute almost any binary package based distro in the above list with the same outcome, so don't take it as a tirade singling debian out from the flock

Next we have USE flags. These do strike me as an insanely useful thing. But I have one niggling little doubt: I suspect they only work for code that supports it. e.g. project foo has optional support for libbar. If the upstream/original code doesn't have a feature marked as optional I don't imagine the Gentoo people would rework it to strip it out.

Almost all large programs have optional features; I suspect USE flags were a realization of that fact.

As far as Gentoo devs reworking stuff, check out the KDE Split Ebuilds stuff. Instead of installing several monolithic KDE packages, you can now install just the KDE apps that you really want. That sort of splitting effort isn't the norm, but that is probably related to the fact that most large packages already have optional features.

Yes, you can set permanently keywords for individual packages: /etc/portage/package.use
And you can also individualy decide to use stable vs unstable packages (package.keywords) or ignore specific versions (package.mask)

The killer for me with lynx.

"Lynx" doesn't have any dependency on X Window. "Links" does. Just add a line "www-client/links -X" in your package.use and "links" will never add support for X Window.

The problem is the USE flags are global.

Obviously, not everyone agrees with you...

I feel that Gentoo Linux offers the best of both worlds, with their ebuilds. :-)

How far would you take this? Would Slashdot be a red site, since it links to gentoo.org, which links to cafepress.com which links to cometcursor.com, a red site? What about site that link to Slashdot?

Start wetting:

http://www.bootdisk.info/articles.php?action=cat&i d=7
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/liveusb.xml
http://frontier05.blogspot.com/2006/01/installing- ubuntu-to-external-usb.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2004/1 0/utility_to_make_usb_flash_driv.html
http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/


And, you can even buy a pre-loaded, live-USB stick:

http://damnsmalllinux.org/usb.html

These are all bootable OSs on removable drives... or did you mean bootable *Microsoft* OSs on removable drives? ... then, you're probably SOL.

I would actually suggest, as GP is a KDE user, Kuroo. It is like Porthole, but for KDE. I haven't tried it myself and it is rather new but looks rather promising. I still prefer emerge via the command line though.

Funny you should mention this just as I'm reading http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-upgrading.xml. This just doesn't feel like it's the right way to do things - I upgraded portage yesterday, and there was no mention of changing to the new profile. Are there any messages when your profile becomes deprecated?

-coshx

Better than the screenshots are the demo videos made using vmware of sample installations. One shows a less than 7 minute full base system Gentoo install! The 6 videos are available via bittorrent at: http://torrents.gentoo.org/

Any non-trivial instructions for migrating from current profile should appear here, according to the upgrading guide.

Any non-trivial instructions for migrating from current profile should appear here, according to the upgrading guide.

I'm not a buisness expert, but can't you uninstall anything the hell you want from windows ('cept IE, admittedly) and make an image from that disk, and image it to 50,000+ PC's you sell? Also, can you put firefox on that 1st pc, and make it the default before you make the image? They do it with Symantec/Norton Security Suite all the time. And, can't Dell write a program to present the user with choices of defaults to use?

How much other stuff does OS X stuff in to an operating system? Safari. iChat, iTunes, iWeb, f**king DVD authoring. MS doesn't include half that stuff, and the Mac folks see iLife as a feature. You have to feel sorry for Microsoft.

Sally has no choice but to pay for another copy of Windows,

• freebsd
• openbsd
• netbsd
• gnu-darwin
• ReactOS
• SuSe
• Fedora
• Debian
• Gentoo

-- Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.2).

Let me tell you a story.

Once, I was browsing the "Off the wall" section of the gentoo linux forums http://forums.gentoo.com/. The usual discussions were about - the " Desktops" thread, the "Linux rulezz" kiddies, doomsday prophets, and other normal forum-goers.

Something caught my attention though. It was this thread: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-418958.html. A sixteen year old, who cannot multiply two numbers. A calcualtor is useful only to a person, who needs to multiply two numbers quickly. Math classes are where you learn Math. Not how to use a calculator. If you cannot multiply without a calculator, you should just go back to second grade (or whatever grade it is, you Americans first learn the multiplication table) and start over.

Also, what use is a calculator in a Math class? It cannot solve equations, compute differentials or integrals nor even draw functions. The most advanced, I've ever seen can at most raise numbers to an arbitrary power and have a built-in table with sine and cosine values. So, pray tell, what use is a calcualtor in a Math class?

Regarding your sig, I'm not sure you'll get that big of a boost in battery life from a different hard drive type. Check out the Gentoo Power Management Guide at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guid e.xml - they have a neat pie chart that breaks down power consumption for each component. The main loss is obviously in the display, followed by the CPU, but then comes the power supply. Also, remember how hot the bottom of the laptop gets? All that is lost energy that could be running the machine longer.

man, from beijing, trying to access http://www.freebsd.org/ I got "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading." from firefox...

go and have tor (http://tor.eff.org/) and privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/) set up, that's the perfect tools combination for web surfing...

and if you have gentoo linux (http://www.gentoo.org/ just type:

# emerge tor privoxy

to install and play with them :)

BTW: Here are some BE-AU-TI-FUL Xgl videos. Real videos, as in captured with a camcorder ;-)

http://forums.gentoo.org//viewtopic-p-3081186.html #3081186

The open source Broadcom driver is VERY VERY close to being pretty much fully functional. Broadcom chipsets will not be paperweights on Linux much longer. Ndiswrapper is going to have to go away soon anyway...I'm not sure when it's going to happen, but I've heard that the Linux kernel is going to go to exclusively 4k stacks in an upcoming release (I'm not sure which one, 2.6.15 is still using 8k by default). Right now the default is 8k stacks, you can change it to 4k but this has to be done in the "kernel hacking" section of the config. Anyway, Windows drivers are usually written to expect 12k or greater stack sizes. Ndiswrapper seems to mostly work okay with the default 8k stack size, but once the kernel is switched to 4k, ndiswrapper will not work anymore. Native drivers are going to be necessary as soon as this change is made. Here's a thread on the native Broadcom driver: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-409194-highli ght-.html

This thread is mostly concerned with getting it working on ppc (since ndiswrapper only works on x86, ppc people don't have a choice and have to have a native driver), and it's mostly centered around Gentoo, but the driver developers are posting on there a lot and they're trying to track down specific issues with the driver. However, x86 people are also following this thread and posting on it. Right now I'm using the 0.0.1-20060105 snapshot (the only one Gentoo currently has in the portage tree). It *almost* works, I can bring my interface up, scan for access points, WEP and WPA are supported, it just has trouble actually associating with access points. Some people are having more problems than others, and some have been able to work around the problem by writing a shell script that hammers the interface until it successfully associates. The driver developers are working on this, once this is resolved it will be more functional than ndiswrapper.

Okay, maybe I'm just a little unaware, this is not flamebait. Can anyone compare Debian's freedom to Gentoo's freedom. I'm a Gentoo user, and I found this: Gentoo Social Contract. IIRC, Debian is GPL'd also.

What am I missing here?

If you want wireless now and can't get your AE card to work, there are few options. The Linksys WUSB11 USB 802.11b card works "out of the box" under Ubuntu PPC. You can get that for $10 or so at CompUSA. That is the only USB wireless adapter that I have gotten to work natively in Linux on PPC so far.

BTW, ndiswrapper is x86-only at the moment, so that is why it is such a pain in the neck.

For you Linux-ers who have ATI cards with no PowerPlay (it's disabled in my video BIOS - bastards!!), I'd recommend checking out rovclock.

While it doesn't actually reduce voltage, it can be used to underclock GPU and memory speed. My somewhat unscientific testing has shown no major differences between fglrx and radeon + rovclock with 2D, but I did note a 27% decrease in battery draw for 3D using the fglrx driver.

Of course, you're trading performance for battery life, and why you'd want to eg, play a 3D game on battery I wouldn't really understand

YMMV
ws

Try it out. I know it's for gentoo, but there is a nice howto here: Anonymous web browsing / instant messaging etc.

Yes, it is a little slow, but nothing like freenet. Just slow enough to be too annoying to use consistantly - for me, anyway.

Gentoo, like all GNU/Linux distros, uses Linux kernel.

Actually you can choose Linux or BSD.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/

Yeah seen it on bugtraq recently, here's the url's

13-Jan-2006 07:12
From: Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen
http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/glsa/glsa-200601 -09.xml
http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name= CVE-2006-0106

That's Debian's push, though: be secure and stable. Gentoo isn't pushing to be stable, but to allow the user to be as cutting edge as possible. I'm sure you can be cutting edge in Debian (although I wouldn't know how) or secure and stable on Gentoo, but that's not what those distros work towards, in general.

Luckily, we *nix folks generally have choices for our home boxes.

Oh, and it's easy to install with or without X.

Yes you can. Go to How to Costomize Windows XP for Security for a howto on costomizing Windows to be as secure as you want it!

Actually, thanks to some clever reverse engineering, it is up to Yellow Dog now. The folks at http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ have released an open source driver for Airport Extreme. In fact, I'm using it now to submit this post on Gentoo running on a 12" Powerbook. Instructions can be found here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-409194.html

So, when the next vulnerability is found in a commonly used Unix library, will we be in any better position?

Yes, we will be. With source comes flexibility, such as the ability to use PIE / SSP when building code. Even if no major distros like RedHat pick up such technologies, individuals still have the choice to use them if they wish.

Such things aren't perfect by any means, but they greatly raise the bar for potential intruders. Combine that with the relatively low payoff of compromising a particular flavor/version/build of Linux software (there's far more diversity in the Linux world, thus a far fewer percentage of users that any one exploit applies to), and it's unlikely that anyone will even bother trying to target you anyway.

You make good points otherwise - on most desktops, a user-level compromise can be just as deadly as a system-level compromise, and we shouldn't think that *nix is immune from attack or that these things won't affect us. But there is an inherent difference between the options available to security-conscious users on Linux vs. Windows.

This argument stills keeps coming up in KDE debates and STILL keeps getting modded up. It really makes me sick.

Dude, stop being a slashbot and do some research before posting another worthless commentlike this one. KDE can be installed bare-bones, with only the WM KWin and the basic framework if you so desire. Not even Konqueror. You keep installing bloaty applications because you don't have an idea on what KDE really is and how its structured.

Read this to see how a minimalist install is done on Gentoo.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/ldap-howto.xml

Not yet, but since the release of 1.0 hit slashdot, I guess it will come soon... ;)

Nitpicking: I think emerge being slow is not exactly an issue of bloatness... An interpreted language will always be slower. But we usually associate bloatness with, e.g., OO applications having to load tons of probably useless objects, just to say hello...

However, "emerge --sync" does have a speed issue. Check out this discussion forum and, in particular, this bug report .

Hopefully things will get fixed soon...

Nitpicking: I think emerge being slow is not exactly an issue of bloatness... An interpreted language will always be slower. But we usually associate bloatness with, e.g., OO applications having to load tons of probably useless objects, just to say hello...

However, "emerge --sync" does have a speed issue. Check out this discussion forum and, in particular, this bug report .

Hopefully things will get fixed soon...

Autopackage is not exactly loved by the distro people. See commentary from Gentoo, Debian, more Debian... Might be wise to keep those remarks in mind when considering using Autopackage packages on a distribution...

And now for your regularly scheduled Gentoo plug: ever heard of glsa and glsa-check?

Set up Ssh to allow you in to your usual haunts without a password.

By which, of course, lheal meant that you should use a strong passphrase for your SSH key, and set up ssh-agent so you only have to type it once a day or so.

The Gentoo folks wrote a tool called Keychain, which works in terminals (and, presumably, consoles). For Mac OS X, SSHKeychain hooks into Apple's Keychain password manager, screen saver, and so forth. I use it on my laptop -- when it sleeps, the machine drops my SSH keys. When it wakes up, I run an ssh command, it asks for my Keychain password, and the agent takes over again.

For X in Linux, I just use the standard ssh-agent. The agent is started when I log in (check your X session scripts), so I have two buttons on my top panel. One runs ssh-add to add my SSH keys to the agent's keyring. The other runs ssh-add -d to drop the keys. (I could have them time out, too, but haven't bothered thus far.) By setting SSH_ASKPASS to /usr/libexec/openssh/gnome-ssh-askpass, I even get a nice graphical passphrase dialog.

Also, as a quick comment on Keep your current work files backed up where you can get to them without relying on someone [to change a tape], I have two suggestions.

First, version control (CVS, Subversion, arch, or whatever else you like) is your friend. If it's important, it's probably important enough to be kept in version control, preferably with the repository on a different machine (e.g., work, for home, or another machine at work).

Second, it's pretty easy to set up a hard-drive-based backup system that uses cp -al to duplicate the archives, and rsync over SSH with the -W flag (among others) to overwrite an entire file if it changes. That way you get multiple backups with only the changed files taking up additional space. Run it with cron and you're good to go. Oh, and make sure it's a different machine, just in case.

Again, though, if it's important, having tapes that you can take offsite is a very, very good idea. They're also nice for preserving large amounts of data you aren't using right now, but that someone will ask for as soon as you delete the last copy from disk.

1. To even unpack the package, you must run arbitrary code supplied by an untrusted source.
2. They install directly to the live filesystem.
3. Their intrinsic dependency resolver is broken.
4. They do not support the filesystem layout used by Gentoo.
5. They do not support configuration protection.
6. They can clobber arbitrary files on uninstall.
7. The linking mechanism used is insufficiently flexible.
8. The entire format is completely unportable and highly tied to x86 Linux systems.

i think he's talking about the 4.x.x chain.

http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=gcc

3.4.4-r1 and 3.4.3-r1 are the only stable gcc's for amd64

Hmm...looks like your sources suck. I've been happily running amd64 Gentoo for more then a year with no complaints, and loads of stability. See for yourself.

Looks just like the Gentoo installation process to me.


Not anymore. Gentoo has deprecated building the system from scratch and only supports binary installs now. Add on software is still compiled from source though.

I don't think most people would agree with the following: "So, does Slackware matter? Simply put, YES. Slackware matters because Slackware IS Linux." The reality is that many people who are experimenting with Linux for the first time now use Fedora or Ubuntu.

I will say this though. I definitely harbor fond memories of using Slackware from 1995. I remember vividly those Boot and Root 1.44MB floppies and trying to install from their extremely early packaging system. Ah the memories...
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE

As an 'expert' system administrator (albeit unpaid) I have four servers. One is running Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, one is running Microsoft Window Server 2003, one is running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Server), and the other is running Apple OS X Server (10.4).

I can tell you now that when I first started my company, although I was a major advocate of Linux, I soon found that I did not have the time to maintain a then Gentoo or custom LFS distribution, Debian was far too heavy to pick up, and Slackware felt a little dated. So I took a look at Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, liked what I saw, and bought a Dell PowerEdge 400SC with an OEM install.

At first Small Business Server was a breath of fresh air. It was easy to maintain, with a full complement of features, having been bundled with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Window Sharepoint Services. I actually enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - using it.

Until backup stated to fail. Until my tape drive disappeared. Until the sharepoint website database got corrupted. Until exchange monitoring failed. Until the POP connector started to thrash the CPU. Until the Windows Update website failed to check for updates.

These things happened. I'm not saying that they wouldn't happed with another system, but that is not the point, since they happened to me, and that caused me grief, and time, and money to resolve. I ended up trying to build a new system based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, since I already had Microsoft specific data (files and tables), but this proved even more difficult to maintain.

I struggled for eighteen months, and then decided to build an Ubuntu 5.10 server. I use Ubuntu on one of my laptop, and had gently learnt the apt- way, and liked it. I set up a server with similar features to the Small Business Server, using Postfix, MySQL, and Plone, and even went some ways to transferring my sharepoint data. It works. It hasn't failed yet.

I bet the guys who took part in the survey only set up a server, installed some applications, and patched it. I bet they didn't try running a business for 18-months, just to see what it was really like.

I must say that we recently purchased an Apple PowerMac, and were so impressed we are now looking at completely switching, hence the OS X Server. It is a dream to install and configure, but we are going to run it for several months until we are satisfied that it can do the job.

"Linus Torvalds has released his final 2.6.0-test kernel, calling it the 'Beaver In Detox'. Following this release, Linus says that 2.6 development will be led by Andrew Morton."

"Linux 2.6 is maintained by Andrew Morton, who works closely with Linus Torvalds to deliver a fast, powerful, and feature-packed Linux kernel. Development is happening at incredible pace and this kernel tree is now very mature."