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Little Johnny woke up early to get ready for school. Johnny was a nice boy, loved by his parents, respected by his friends, and likened by his teachers. Like all other good boys, he hated Microsoft(R) and all it's products including Microsoft Windows (TM) and Microsoft Office (TM). He ran Gentoo on his home computer, and used StarOffice for all his homework.

Johnny walked off to the bus stop after kissing his mom goodbye, whistling a little tune to himself. His bus was late again, the third time this month. Johnny didn't like being late for school. It made him feel guilty. So he decided to walk to school, as it was no more than a 15 minute walk away. The bus would take longer anyway, after picking up all the other stupid little kids. Annoying little twitches...they wouldn't know the difference between Gentoo and Knoppix if it stared them in their pimply little faces.

Little Johnny made good time. Before long, he reached the Wal-mart across which his elementary school was. It was just 8:36. It was still 24 minutes before school, and it would take just 45 more seconds to cross the road and enter the school grounds. He liked being early. It gave him time to catch up on the latest geeky news on Slashdot and get a First Post or two before classes began.

Johnny was halfway across the street when a Chevy Avalanche zoomed up and squashed him on the pavement. Little Johnny was no more.

What is the moral, that we, as self respecting geeks, can learn from Little Johnny's short but noble life?

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Always look right and left before crossing the road.

Little Johnny woke up early to get ready for school. Johnny was a nice boy, loved by his parents, respected by his friends, and likened by his teachers. Like all other good boys, he hated Microsoft(R) and all it's products including Microsoft Windows (TM) and Microsoft Office (TM). He ran Gentoo on his home computer, and used StarOffice for all his homework.

Johnny walked off to the bus stop after kissing his mom goodbye, whistling a little tune to himself. His bus was late again, the third time this month. Johnny didn't like being late for school. It made him feel guilty. So he decided to walk to school, as it was no more than a 15 minute walk away. The bus would take longer anyway, after picking up all the other stupid little kids. Annoying little twitches...they wouldn't know the difference between Gentoo and Knoppix if it stared them in their pimply little faces.

Little Johnny made good time. Before long, he reached the Wal-mart across which his elementary school was. It was just 8:36. It was still 24 minutes before school, and it would take just 45 more seconds to cross the road and enter the school grounds. He liked being early. It gave him time to catch up on the latest geeky news on Slashdot and get a First Post or two before classes began.

Johnny was halfway across the street when a Chevy Avalanche zoomed up and squashed him on the pavement. Little Johnny was no more.

What is the moral, that we, as self respecting geeks, can learn from Little Johnny's short but noble life?

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Always look right and left before crossing the road.

Little Johnny woke up early to get ready for school. Johnny was a nice boy, loved by his parents, respected by his friends, and likened by his teachers. Like all other good boys, he hated Microsoft(R) and all it's products including Microsoft Windows (TM) and Microsoft Office (TM). He ran Gentoo on his home computer, and used StarOffice for all his homework.

Johnny walked off to the bus stop after kissing his mom goodbye, whistling a little tune to himself. His bus was late again, the third time this month. Johnny didn't like being late for school. It made him feel guilty. So he decided to walk to school, as it was no more than a 15 minute walk away. The bus would take longer anyway, after picking up all the other stupid little kids. Annoying little twitches...they wouldn't know the difference between Gentoo and Knoppix if it stared them in their pimply little faces.

Little Johnny made good time. Before long, he reached the Wal-mart across which his elementary school was. It was just 8:36. It was still 24 minutes before school, and it would take just 45 more seconds to cross the road and enter the school grounds. He liked being early. It gave him time to catch up on the latest geeky news on Slashdot and get a First Post or two before classes began.

Johnny was halfway across the street when a Chevy Avalanche zoomed up and squashed him on the pavement. Little Johnny was no more.

What is the moral, that we, as self respecting geeks, can learn from Little Johnny's short but noble life?

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
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Always look right and left before crossing the road.

Now, when his system borks, how does he restore?

Boot from Knoppix, then restore. Sure, he would need to partition and format the disk by hand.

His solution is also fine for the more common case where he just needs to recover one or two files, rather than his whole system.

Mondo/mindi sounds good too, but I think you were a bit harder on him than you really needed to be.

These also support RDP and VNC protocols by converting to the compressed X protocol, which also gives bandwidth gains over the raw RDP/VNC. Check out this description of the technology.

Recent versions of Knoppix live-CD include the NoMachine client and FreeNX server, making it easy to test it out.

A good rootkit will only let you see what the rootkit wants you to see

you want Knoppix (click on the anglo-american flag for English)

you should try out knoppix. Let's you run from a cd, and will detect almost all normal hardware.

I guess it's official, Linux is a real threat to Microsoft's OS dominance. Now that Balmer seems to be going out of his way to put Linux in the limelight, everyone who's been on the fence to this point should take a look and see what all of the fuss is about. Here's a link to the Knoppix to help if anyone wants to try before they buy! The Slackware based Slax is worth a look too.

Balmer's attacks certainly mean that the threat on the server is real, but it may also speak to what MS projects on the desktop. No, Linux isn't likely to take the desktop in the US, but MS is probably projecting lowered sales of Windows there too. Why? Because the PC market is reaching saturation with today's machines more than powerful enough to meet the needs of most, which means fewer new PCs will be sold. Most sales of Windows are in new PC bundles. PCs also face competition from other increasingly capable consumer electronics like cell phones, music players, and handheld game consoles. These competing devices are less expensive than a PC and much easier to use. All of this means eroding sales of Windows over the next few years. Microsoft may have been holding out hope that the growing PC market in Asian might rescue Windows, but the Chinese-Korean-Japanese joint Linux venture threatens to close that door. So Balmer is probably getting a little desperate. Personally, I think if Microsoft is to survive, it'll be Bill Gates who figures out what they need to do. I think that in the end Microsoft will have to learn to play nice with Linux just as Sun seems to be doing now.

It's a pity that, at the peak of the Linux desktop hype in the late 1990s, when evangelists predicted the near death of Microsoft, KDE and Gnome were rushed out of the door, and GNUstep development remained obscure.

Very true...

It is interesting to note that the new GNUstep Live CD was announced on GNUstep Core News in June:

What is it?
GNUstep Live CD contains a lot of software for GNUstep, a free implementation of the OPENSTEP framework (which was also the base as Cocoa in Mac OS X). Display Postscript is one of its powerful features. It includes an excellent application called Gorm for RAD (Apple Software Design Guidelines). More about the Objective-C Language.

Features
Software using GNUstep (Addresses, Agenda, AClock, Affiche, CamelBones, Camera, Charmap, Cenon, Connect, Cynthiune, DisplayCalibrator, EasyDiff, EdenMath, Gridlock, GMines, Gorm, Gomoku, GNUMail, GNUstep-icons, GNUWash, GWorkspace, HelpViewer, ImageViewer, LuserNET, MPDCon, ProjectCenter, PRICE, Poe, Preferences, PlopFolio, Preview, Renaissance, Stepulator, StepTalk, StepBill, Terminal, TalkSoup, TextEdit, ViewPDF, VolumeControl, Waiho, WildMenus, Zipper)

In development and not yet on the CD (3DKit, AgentFarms, Burn / CDPlayer, Duncan, Emacs on GNUstep, Encod, Expense, GTAMS, GRASStep GIS, GShisen, GNUstepWeb (WebObjects 4.x), GNUstepWrapper, ILogin, Installer, InnerSpace, LaTeX Service, Localize, MusicKit, MyWiki / MyLibrary, ModPlugPlay, Paje, Pixen, Popup, Position, Rhydot / Skfxdemo, RSS Reader, WebKit / SimpleWWW, Tryst)

The currently used window manager is Window Maker.
Rescue System (lde, gpart, parted, grub, raidtools, portmap, nfs-common, QTParted)
3d Software Blender, Wings3d, Games NetHack, Jump n Bump and SuperTux, LaTeX, TeXmacs, Emacs, GIMP2
Tools (screen, irssi-text, ngrep, tcpdump, openssl, ssh, imagemagick, netpbm, nail, iptraf, mc, gnupg, ibackup, cowsay, hdparm, feh, tetradraw)
The Debian GNU/Hurd K6 mini.iso for easy installation in /cdrom/hurd
C Compiler and development environment
Webbrowsers (dillo, links2), TV Software (xawtv, alevt)
Some music (www.chiptune.com, www.maktone.tk)

This is a very interesting project, though of course not as popular as Knoppix.

It was the first time that distributed free software development defected from its proven practice of implementing standardized, proven APIs and technology (like POSIX) and created major APIs of its own. [...] Imagine the massive development efforts on KDE and Gnome, including the massive rewrites of their codebases, would instead had gone into GNUstep, so that the GNU/Linux and *BSD desktop would be OS X/Cocao source compatibile today [and companies developing for OS X port their software to Linux basically with one more compiler run]...

Imagine the efforts on Knoppix would instead had gone into GNUstep Live CD... Imagine the development efforts on Linux would instead had gone into The Hurd... Just imagine... The entire computing world as we know it would be completely different. But what do we expect? People have no idea that GNU even exists, let alone the kernel development! Just few days ago Slashdot posted a story about the Seattle Times interview with Linus Torvalds with this opening paragraph: "Linus Torvalds [pronounced LEE-nus] started a revolution of sorts in the computer industry when he created the Linux operating system and decided to share it with fellow programmer

Is Windowmaker dead? (No, I'm not a troll.) The website hasn't been updated since February, I've gotten no CVS updates since July, there's been no official releases since 0.80.2, there's no working mailing list archives on the site, and my emails go unanswered.

First of all, Window Maker is quite a mature project in my opinion. Right now as we speak I am using even an older version 0.80.0-4 in Debian GNU/Linux (the stable Debian 3.0 "woody" which itself was released in July, 2002) and quite frankly I have never thought that I even needed any update. It's lightweight and rock-solid. Usually I have about 20 active workspaces with at least ten of them completely filled with tens of windows each, and it have never crashed since I started using it. And I've been using Window Maker exclusively on all of my desktops for at least five or six years (and in fact those were even older versions in Debian 2.2 "potato" and Debian 2.1 "slink"). I remember that switching from "potato" to "woody" I noticed few minor changes, mostly in Preferences Utility, if I remember correctly, but to be honest I'm not sure since I don't use it. Few years ago I was playing with Window Maker Themes but I observed that I am more productive without anime title bars and hentai background distracting me all the time, so after I got bored changing themes every day couple of years ago, I keep using one of the standard Styles, not Themes, and have blue solid backround and blue everything with very soft gradient but anything more fancy is just distracting becasue it makes me focus my attention outside of xterms instead of inside of them where it belongs, so it's quite pointless. Of course when I use Knoppix I always start it with knoppix desktop=wmaker, or at least always when I don't start it with knoppix 2, and using it I saw that icons are prettier and everything else seems the same. And quite frankly, I don't even want it to ever change, since I like it the way it is now. On the other hand I don't really care if it changes as long as I'll be able to use the old version in future Debians, and I know I will. I think all of you can already see my point. Window Maker is not dead, not because it is in active development, it doesn't even have to, but because it is immortal and cannot be killed at all, ever. As you see I will gladly keep using it even if no one develops it or even if I am the last and only user. I seriously couldn't care less what window managers other people use. It's not like I use it as a pick-up line or whatever.

I'm seriously interested in knowing. I'm a big Windowmaker fan, but I'm worried about its' apparent lack of development. Does anyone, anyone at all, know what the heck is going on?

I am a big fan of Window Maker either but I completely don't care about its development, just like I don't care much about the development of rxvt. Window Maker is exactly what I need and I'm quite sure I will keep using it even twenty years from now even if it doesn't change at all. I don't want it to change. I just want it to keep working. And I don't want it to be another KDE or Gnome. I don't even need other people using it, I don't need other people at all.

Our apologies...

The IBM developerWorks Web site is currently under maintenance.
Please try again later.

Thank you.

Wow... We slashdotted IBM! But to the point: I wonder what is your experience. What is better for system recovery? Standard Knoppix which is a general purpose desktop system meant to be an impressive demonstration tool but lacking many security programs, or some specialised versions like Knoppix STD or Local Area Security which have more tools but are kind of "script kiddie friendly" and look very unprofessional with their Martix themes, leet-speak, "proving no localhost is safe" slogans etc. making them look more like intrusion than recovery tools? Or maybe Morphix is the answer thanks to its ease of customisation and apt-getting new packages on the fly? Do you have any Real World(TM) experience?

knoppix

I wouldn't switch, because I'm perfectly happy with GNOME running on a Linux kernel.

OSX is really pretty. But GNOME is pretty enough for me. I love the clean, tidy look, and the antialiased fonts. And I have chosen a desktop theme that I like.

OSX is really stable. So is GNOME.

If you want to try out GNOME, the best way is to install Ubuntu Linux on a spare computer. (It doesn't have to be a brand-new computer, but the older and funkier the computer is, the greater the chance of a problem.)

The easiest way to try out GNOME is to get a Gnoppix CD. You boot from this CD and it will run GNOME on a Linux kernel, without touching your hard disk in any way. So you don't risk your data. And by the way, this makes a great disaster recovery tool, even if you are a Windows user and you aren't ready to switch yet.

I'll bet there is someone writing a "KDE works for me" posting right now too. KDE is also a good environment, although I personally prefer GNOME. To try out KDE, you could get a Knoppix CD. This works the same way as Gnoppix (and in fact Gnoppix was derived from Knoppix, not the other way around).

In short, anyone who has already switched to a *NIX desktop (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, whatever) is unlikely to be tempted by an x86 OSX.

steveha

Not sure they would mind people doing this as it will give them more (and likely better) information for their targeted ads which make them money.

Maybe we will see Google expanding gmail into a kind of roaming profile and home folder as well as roaming email? (roaming email is what web email is after all). Put two-party public encryption on top of that (Google and you combined, ie. a fix so they and you can read it but only you can edit it) and the Sun idea of "the network is the computer" is one step closer.

If secure enough it would be great if one could use Google this way - boot your Knoppix cd (or similar) and get your 1GB of "anything" at any machine on the net. All of this is just as possible without Google of course, but letting Google foot the bill has a cretain appeal ;)

All of your bullet-point suggestions are practically impossible for a normal human user to implement except for Long-term backups are important. This is an excellent point and one that I forgot to include.

Firewalls are important in malware control for two primary reasons:

1. They separate the target system from the hostile environment.
   Even the simplest firewall protects you from most IP-borne worms
2. They provide a choke-point for information where it can be restricted and audited.
   This allows you to stop infections before sigs/patches are available and determine if machines are infected with unknown malware.

Automated patching is critically important for the masses. This doesn't mean that windows update should be set on all machines to 'download and install' mode. It means that there should be a mechanism for machines to be easily updated to correct problems. WU is a step in the right direction and so far having 'download and install' enabled would have prevented almost all of the major outbreaks that involved the Windows OS components and would have broken a small percent of machines with mostly rare configurations.

I wish that MS would have taken heed of my suggestion to allow for multiple signatures on patches (and a mechanism in the OS to verify/act on them.) This would allow users to delegate any number of trusted third parties to verify that the patch: came from MS, actually works, and doesn't adversely affect the other apps that I run. This could all be done without the user having to look at any code or test it themselves.

Warning when things on the machine seem strange can definitely prevent virus outbreaks because it provides the user with an indication that something may be amiss. Many people have spread malware for months because they didn't realize that it was there. Simple things like 'Are you sure you want SpamPasser.exe to access your address book?' (implemented in OL 2002 SP2) or 'Should fileBot5.exe be granted access to the Internet?' (implemented in XP SP2) are steps in the right direction to at least clue-in people that there may be a problem. In fact, I think that behavior-based detection will be used in favor of signatures in the NearFuture(TM).

To put a system in a 'known-good' state, boot from your favorite OS CD. Knoppix is an excellent example of this. There is also a very good Windows XP-based CD called BartPE.

Finally, limited execution environments are excellent for dealing with untrusted code in a secure system, but make it more difficult to allow useful (and fast) interaction between processes. In the *NIX world there are quite a few options that work reasonably well (jail, chroot, emulated execution, VM.) In Windows NT+ you can launch processes in different user contexts with limited separation. These have existed for a while and work well for some medium-security applications. Unfortunately, it usually slows down execution and as one wise security guru once told me, 'Functionality trumps security every time.'

Guess I'll have to get the chunker PS2 instead to use this unless anyone out there knows a Knoppix equivalent for the PS2/two?

If I'm going to put a network aware console into my TV I'd prefer one that I and fire up a web browser on.

What of your tone? You make an assumption and respond with sarcasm. I'm supposed to listen to a messenger that can't set aside bias to have an actual discussion?
It seems to be the only way I'm getting through to sheep these days. To be honest I'd rather grab them by their shoulders and shake some sense into them, or at best shatter their paradigms.

Driver support is included for all dsl modems?
Try using google.com or joining a linux distro forum...they're much more helpful, patient, but twice as sarcastic so I don't recommend sensitivity to commentary.

Yes, I don't know anything about Linux. Yes, I am open to trying new things.
That's good lad...I hope you continue. You ought to try out Knoppix, it's a LiveCD so there's no installation or changes required!!! Yup, just boot off this sweetheart and see for yourself why Linux is the cat's meow.

Perhaps one day you'll realize that attitudes like yours are hampering acceptance of Linux.
Probably not, I live in my reality not yours.

BTW - Go and read other comments I've made here. I don't belittle people when talking. Perhaps if you scan thru the comments - you can come back - drop the attitude, and share some info.
*Golf clap to you lad!*

You're right though....it's a good day indeed.(wanting that last word is a tweaker ain't it?)

A Knoppix CD

This is the original live CD. Pop it into any reasonably modern PC and reboot to experience Linux without installation hassles. It's horribly slow but does give you a decent start.

The Linux Professional Institute lpi-101 Objectives.

This is what you have to learn to just start out on Linux admin. Skip the hardware stuff and start out at Objective 103. Go back to the hardware lessons after you are more confident.

The RUTE book

This is by far the best book for the root user. It's in serious need of a second edition, but it's 600 pages of good solid stuff

Gentoo

Once you have got a bit of experience with Linux this is the distribution to go for.
The install manual is a lesson all of its own!

Don't waste your employers money on courses which are simply not necessary provided you can read and understand English, and have sufficient self disipline to do the reading. The money would be much better spent getting a small laptop, and giving it to you once you have an LPI certificate or two.

For server skills, you might try installing FreeBSD and set up the services you need (apache, dns, dhcp, samba, etc) using the FreeBSD Handbook. The Handbook contains step-by-step instructions for all of the common services and is very well written. I used this approach in a college class I taught last semester and the students were able to set up services unassisted by the end of the class.

Once you know how to set services up in FreeBSD, you can easily port that knowledge to Linux. In most (if not all) cases, the config files have the same name, they're just stored in different locations.

For workstation skills, you might start off with one of the live CD distros like Knoppix. Just pop in the CD and boot your machine. It's a bit pokey running off the CD, but it won't touch your hard drive unless you run the installer. My 16-year-old son has been using Knoppix for several months and loves it.

What if developers started writing and shipping games that were preinstalled on a bootable CD using something like Knoppix?

but driver issues alone would prevent doing the same with modern PCs.

These Guys seem to do a pretty good job with it...

Not there... here, oh wait, floppy... what's that?

Even better to make a ghost image of a good install, and then restore it whenever you need to.

Yes yes... that would be a good idea. Get Knoppix, run it on an old PC or something, route port 22 to that machine and enable ssh. Don't forget to set root password "root", you wouldn't want to make it too difficult, would you? ;-) Imagine the attacker's face, when he/she found out everything is on a CD! As for your real SSH, maybe you want to give portknocking try.

How about using Knoppix?

Even after the Novell take over of the Linux Terminal Server Project, I believe that is still available. That will provide the most useful information that I have found for building a kiosk base system. I have personally been involved in creating a diskless kiosk that is widely used in a particular environment and know that you will have to either invest a lot of time to perfect it, or have someone else do it for you. I haven't looked at the LTSP in a while, but if they don't have what you need, they probably have a link to it.

There were some others developing clients like that before such as the Neoware systems. I had an opportunity to demo one of those. I wasn't impressed with the way the PXE boot worked, but otherwise it was ok. IBM has developed a few as well. They used to offer a kiosk like image with their Netvista 2200 products.

You should definately watch out for two things: compression types, and flash disks. Depending on the number of clients, you could face issues with using flash drives. Compression is a wonderful thing and when done properly on an image (such as knoppix) it will run just fine. One model I tested years ago tried to use gzip for the compression on the filesystem. It ran like a slug trying to cross the road with salt on his back. Knoppix is also not a bad idea. It would make a good start at an image. Just lock down certain keys in your Xdefaults file or using xmodmap (re-assign to nonworking keys essentially) and add in a front script to mozilla that forces a java based lock down of the browser when started. With that and a few small tweaks you could create a kiosk type system.

Some distros suck at recognizing some configurations, while another distro will recognize it without problems. A pain in the butt, but go figure.

You didn't mention which distro(s) you tried, but first try the Knoppix live CD here or here. Its hardware recognition is very good and if it recognizes your hardware, it takes about 20 minutes to install to your hard drive (YMMV).

Regarding printers. Some printers are better supported under Linux than others. Go here to see how well your printer is supported. Go here for more help.

Check your scanner compatibility here. And find more help here.

If you still can't get Linux to work, stick with windows, it's not that bad.

This doesn't help on the Mac end of things, but why worry about having a "linux machine" or dual booting when you can just boot to a live CD distro like Knoppix and test with Konqueror. As long as your PC hardware isn't too funky, this should be relatively painless.

I don't think you can run OSX on x86 using any emulator/vm yet

but you can use vmware and an iso of knoppix to check out different browsers available for linux

Knoppix.

Oh dear. You don't say that it has a CD-ROM so MandrakeMove, Knoppix, and PHLAK are all out of the question. *sigh*
And they are so easy to use too... :'(
Oh well.....A USB-CDROM boot option in the BIOS looks promising.

I have been keeping an old compaq laptop alive with Knoppix 3.4 for a while. Of course its saving grace is a CD drive to boot it from... I would say get a cheap USB CD drive but: a. USB 1.0 at 1.1mbps will not be fun to run an OS from. b. I don't think the chances are too great of such an old device's BIOS of being capable of supporting booting from USB. c. No storage space other than floppy. Unless you run the CD and a USB key on a USB hub, which sounds just nasty performance wise. Time to pick up a cheap notebook or palmtop. An old HP jornada off ebay can be formatted to run linux off a 256mb CF card. Maybe that would be something to replace it with on the cheap?

Boot into Knoppix, and then you've got root access to the box. Once that happens you can have all sorts of fun, including accessing your files.

But why in hell would you put your good pr0n on a work box? Do you want to get fired?

RTFM and follow directions on how to make a bootable BartPE CDR, and then how you can install BartPE to a hard drive.

Then download and install OOO.

Then give Microsoft and Billy Boy the middle finger. ;)

Or try this alternative and install it to your hard drive for a Non-Windows edition and still give Microsoft and Billy Boy the middle finger.

As others have mentioned, the new IE patch for this weakness is here and here. If you don't have time for that, you can try a temporary but standard Microsoft workaround over here.

I wish they would do another tour in Flanders. I would know what to wear.
what to bring along.
And where to get someone to get me out of prison again.

Once you make the switch you never really want to go back. Linux and free OSs in general have so much more to offer. And it is all free. For example, I can go and talk to one of the developers for something in an IRC channel, and ask them for some help, and chances are they will help me (or say RTFM, which is commonly used as well). And you can get all sorts of things that are interesting, for example, if you get Debian then you can simply update all of your programs in a matter of minutes (depending on DL speed). And all of this is free, as opposed to paying hundreds of dollars for an OS that isn't even STABLE. Linux has so many good things about it that it is hard to list them all in one comment. But to anyone who might be considering getting started using Linux, just to try something other than Windows. I would recommend installing a LiveCD such as Knoppix or Gnoppix. You don't even have to install it, you can just boot off of it and have fully functioning Linux. Give it a shot.

....so no it doesn't use any swap

It does if you don't have the minimum memory requirements.

From the knoppix website

"20 MB of RAM for text mode, at least 96 MB for graphics mode with KDE (at least 128 MB of RAM is recommended to use the various office products),_"

Not to mention, you can still mount your local drive and store data on it.

hmm seems like a whole lot of touching going on....

Easy enough on recent Macs; boot to target mode, and the Mac's an external FW drive. (NB: this can be disabled by owner.)
Much Unix/Windows stuff gives way to a Knoppix-type boot CD-- about the easiest "parallel installation" possible.

My standard computer B&E tools:
Knoppix Linux-on-CD distro
Two USB/FW drive enclosures with cables (a SCSI enclosure, and USB/SCSI adapter for it, are in my advanced kit).
One 1GB ATA Hard drive, with DOS and a general Clear-CMOS utility. (SCSI version is in my advanced kit.)
Offline NT Password editor floppy.
DOS/Clear-CMOS boot floppy.
One "friggin huge" hard drive for putting retrieved data onto. (The first 5GB is a HFS partition with Mac OSX.3, followed by a 32GB FAT32 partition, with the remaining couple hundred GB also formatted FAT32.)
Screwdriver (Philips/Standard reversible combo)

The advanced kit also includes dual boot Windows/Linux and OS X/Debian laptops; a USB/FW DVD drive; Windows, Mac OS 9&X, Linux, and Solaris-x86 install disks; crossover ethernet and serial cables; a Torx driver set; lockpicks, bolt cutters, a mini-sledge, and a 1-liter flask for the liquid helium-- which needs to be filled shortly before using. (Haven't needed that yet, though.)

Various combinations of these will retrieve from almost anything... but be wary of RAID arrays and encrypted (eg: Windows EFS) folders; inexpert attempts may make the data unretrievable.

One of the biggest problems with voting machines is cost per use. Voting machines are relatively" expensive and are used at most twice a year, and often only once every 2-4 years. If they aren't being used, they are simple taking up room in storage (which costs money).

Cost Advantages:
NOW as distros like knoppix have proven, putting a full featured desktop on a CD is possible. That being said - putting your "voting machine" on a CD, and using standard PC hardware makes a lot of sense. You don't have to buy a bunch of larg proprietary machines that only get used ones in a while. The CD's can be verified. If one is careful it would even be easy to use hardware already in place - or obsoleted hardware. Such a system would also use a simple standard printer to print an encrypted voter verification (audit) record in case a recount is requested. This should eliminate the long standing problem with most other electronic voting systems (no real audit trail).

Development is spread out over a large not for profit group of programmers with the end result being free. The only real cost is the certification procedure each state decides to institute - and thus it is the state that becomes accountable. If a states procedures are not robust enough to catch dangerous bugs then it's their own fault. I would think that several states go in together and split the certification costs. Since the buy in price is almost nothing (essentially media) the states have more money to play with and spend on voter training AND certification.

Considering Diebold and others - this seems like a natural, easy and simple solution.

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country - Come up with a simple, secure, reliable voting system on a CD that will boot from standard PC hardware.

SIDE NOTE: If my county uses electronic voting machines that do not have a paper trail - then I will vote by absentee ballot. I would STRONGLY urge any US voter to do the same.

cluge
AngryPeopleRule

Knoppix is your friend.

What distro did you use? Have you reported the bugs? Have you tried the latest kernel? Hardware support is improving all the time, its just that you need to help the kernel developers help you.

Why not give Knoppix a spin?

If you are angry, then this is why you should be uing Linux.

If you are increasingly interested in Linux, but do not know where to start, grab knoppix.

Download here.

No installation required, try it from the CD and if you decide you want to make the jump to the penguin world,. just run the install to disk program. Best of all, it is free. If you don't have the bandwidth, ask a freind, I have given out over 20 knoppix disks to my freinds, and 15 of them have converted to Linux 100%. Don't forget to checkout Wine and Crossover office, It will help your transition!

Seems like with Linux distros you need to hit the sweetspot of hardware that is not too new or too old.

If you haven't used Linux yet, now its time. Grab the new Knoppix 3.4. This version includes KDE 3.2, which has surpassed Windows AND Mac OSX in usabillity and user friendlyness. I'm not just saying this, KDE developers have worked in conjuction with usabillity experts.

So go on have a go, and since its a live CD, you have nothing to lose!

Better yet, you do a minimum install and I do a minimum install and we compare cos who needs this 1gig shit? I can still do an install in a couple hundred megs easily.

Oh wait, let me use any linux distribution I want. That way I can install smalllinux with smallX (real projects) and run a full OS with a graphical interface similar to windows 98 (of course much more advanced under the hood, reiserfs, preempt kernel etc etc latest tech) on a pentium with 4mb of ram and a 50-100mb hard disk.

Oh no wait we're *not* done. How about I burn a knoppix CD, plug in a small usb key and run without a HD at all?

Oh we're not done yet, how about I take an embeded linux system designed for a mobile phone and put it on a usb key, boot from it and THAT is my OS?
My OS, with full rights granted to me under the GPL on a USB key, yours still the same bloated shit you paid $100 for and have no rights over.
I'll even know what mine is doing on my hardware, imagine that.

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

oh I don't know but I think this does a good job as well.

since knoppix.org is very slow in responding and the bittorrent tracker is down too i've put up a mirror here.