Battle of the Secure Distros

CrazyEd writes "LinuxSecurity is reporting that EnGarde Secure Linux has received the Network Computing Editor's Choice award to win the battle of the Secure Linux distributions. Well deserved, me thinks." Update: 06/10 15:16 GMT by T : An anonymous reader points out that Linuxlookup.com reviewed this distro last week, awarding it a perfect score.

Comments

OpenBSD

[dirtyhippie]

Call me a troll if you like, but if you want a secure, free UNIX-like system, you don't use Linux. You use OpenBSD. The primary reasons for this are numerous - 1) it's "secure by default", all but the simplest daemons are turned off until you explicitly enable them. 2) it's always being proactively audited, with less-clean and less-safe being fixed all the time - fewer bugs = fewer potential exploits (as opposed to linux, where it sometimes seems developers are just busy adding extra command line switches and a scripting language based on brainfuck to their program ;-) - point being it's been around longer, and the interfaces are much more stable, thus making bug-fixing (not to mention administration) much easier. 3) Cutting edge support for crypto/security tools. OpenSSH was made by many of the same developers, Ipsec, skey authentication, kerberos, support for hardware cards etc. you name it, it's there. Even a tripwire-esque program is included in the default install. I'm sure I'm forgetting much more.

Other pluses: it's Really Free(TM) Software - as opposed to Redhat and others which bundle non-free software in the default distro, it's manpages don't suck, etc.