Slashdot Mirror
IBM's Answer To Windows 7 Is Ubuntu Linux
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like IBM isn't much of a friend of Microsoft's anymore. Today IBM announced an extension of its Microsoft-Free PC effort together with Canonical Ubuntu Linux. This is the same thing that was announced a few weeks back for Africa (a program that began a year ago), and now it's available in the US. The big push is that IBM claims it will cost up to $2,000 for a business to move to Windows 7. They argue that moving to Linux is cheaper."
A standard user account doesn't exactly have alot of control to begin with. The way Windows does things is they open up access and lock things down while in the UNIX word its all locked down and open things up (i.e. sudo)
Your point is only valid if you want to prevent a use from changing his wallpaper, screen savers and the like. There are (expensive) tools out there but dont handle very well.
Also in GNOME you have gconf and can put custom settings into a SOE very easily.
This sig has been distributed under the Creative Commons license.
Huh wah?? Obviously you must be from a parallel universe, rather uninformed or a clever troll. I manage the desktop branch of a medium - large sized organisation and the amount of pain involved in locking machines down in the distributed workforce age is quite painful. Sure there are apps to aid this (we employ ZenWorks) and they do work really well, but you can't have used anything more then a default install of Ubuntu. Honestly the amount of fine grained control mixed with sudo (neither run-as or UAC are sudo, they impersonate another user rather then privilege escalation) you get with *nix environment is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows. Admittedly group policy has some nice default templates, but as soon as you step an inch outside the norm (which is hard not to) be prepared for pain, so much so that the only place we employ GP is on our Terminal Services boxes. Even then a lot of the "Lock Down" is pretty much just obscuring things without actually adding any security.
Nice try, but I suggest you undertake a bit of a learning curve and you will be enlightened.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Uhh . . .
Ubuntu needs 256 MB RAM and ~8 GB (they say four, but from personal experience, you need at least 8) of Hard drive space.
Windows 7 needs 1 GB RAM and 16GB Disk.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I swear, some people can't be helped
I don't know of anything similar in the Linux Desktop Environment to Windows Access Control or the other programs that are out there. Does anyone else?
The reason you don't know of Linux programs that let you lock down the desktop is that no such program is needed. A default Linux install will allow you to control access to files and programs on a user by user, or user group basis without the need for extra software. It will take a little bit more expertise than using some program with a gui on windows might, but it also allows much greater control of precisely what user can do.
Successful exploitation requires that a threaded Multi-Processing Module is used and that the mod_proxy_ftp module is enabled. (...) An error in the included APR-util library can be exploited to trigger hangs in the prefork and event MPMs on Solaris.
And the second (first in order on the site) unpatched vulnerability deals strictly with a mod_ftp input validation issue. Again, I rarely even see mod_ftp even used as opposed to an entirely seperate FTP server daemon but disabling the faulty module is simple enough in environments requiring absolute security.
And input validation issues are usually patched fairly quickly anyways, I mean come on, this is 2009 and there are too many developers for the project that wouldn't let this sort of thing continue for this amount of time. Not to mention the fact that these unpatched vulnerabilities are nothing compared to the olde IIS Webdav exploit of a few years ago - too bad there wasn't a community aware of it sooner other than the underground black hats already using it to their advantage by the time it was brought to the attention of MS.
And to quote from the secunia website:
"PLEASE NOTE: The statistics provided should NOT be used to compare the overall security of products against one another. It is IMPORTANT to understand what the below comments mean when using the statistics, especially when using the statistics to compare the vulnerability aspects of different products."
But just for fun - don't forget that IIS needs to run on Windows: 212 Secunia advisories, 282 Vulnerabilities, 12 Unpatched...
That's the secunia report for Windows 2003 "Web Edition" - which is reasonably representative. Compare that to OpenBSD.
Goodluck with that! :)
Che? Synaptic. 2 clicks.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
You clearly have never worked inside a large company, or if you did, you didn't pay attention. They have better things to do with their precious developer talent than recompile Firefox and Linux kernels all the time. Stuff like writing Visual Basic applications to assure that they will forever be tied to Windows, leaps immediately to mind. Oh, wait...
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Please don't ever use the Wine as an example of Linux being compatible with Windows software. Because a huge majority of programs simply don't work with it, and those that do have had special coding done in Wine to make them work, and even then they are as buggy as hell.
No, Wine has a strict policy of not letting app-specific hacks into the mainline tree, if that wasn't the case things would be a mess and nothing would run. Certainly not everything works 100%, but there are many apps that run very well. For example, I played Diablo 2 on and off for several years through Wine, and having originally played it on 'doze, I can tell you it plays identically through Wine.
Also, Wine has made an enormous amount of progress in the last 4 years. It helped a lot that the Win32 API pretty much stopped dead between XP and Vista, as it gave the Wine team a huge amount of time to catch up instead of having to chase a moving target. The huge Vista backlash also helps quite a bit, Wine has only really started on D3D10 support this year or late last year, but the fact that really nothing uses D3D10 (because it doesn't work on XP) makes the lack of support largely irrelevant. There's really no point in comparing Wine 4 years ago to Wine today, so much so that it's probably not unreasonable to say that more has changed in Wine's last 4 years than the previous 12 years before that.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
You're misinformed. IBM is already jumping. You can have a Linux workstation (Open Client for Linux - for Red Hat/Fedora, Ubuntu, SLED) in IBM. What's more the default office suite in IBM is Lotus Symphony now. MS Office is slowly going away. BTW: I've never seen Windows Vista installed on any work PC in IBM.