I've been using Conectiva Linux 6.0 for the past few months and have been very happy with it. Conectiva uses apt with a rpm backend (as opposed to debs) which is great since it gives you all of the pluses of both formats. The ease of use of apt (and it's wonderful dependency checking) and the compatibility of RPM (let's face it, it's the better represented of the 2 formats.) Also, you can still use RPM seperately from apt to install and query packages. I wish that more of the distros would adopt this way of doing things instead of fighting over which one is better. Just use both:)
I haven't actually done this, but a friend of mine that's an old school hacker told me this trick that he used to use back in day on IRC.
Go to your/usr/src/linux/net/ipv4 directory and edit the icmp.c file. Look for a section in there that says: Handle ICMP_ECHO ("ping") requests.
Immediately below that comment is a function that handles ping echo requests. simply comment out the body of the function. Here's what that part looks like.(roughly, I didn't spend that much time formating this.)
Actually, you are wrong about the open source bit. MySQL has been GPLed since June 28, 2000. Also, there is some new support for transactions thanks to NuSphere (they are contributing code that allows row locking) Read the story here.
It hasn't been too long for me to remember what it was like. My First first installation of Linux was Red Hat 5.2 and after getting it installed and going through the painful process of setting up X manually, I gave up on it because all I could get was a gray screen with a little "x" on it. In retrospect, I know what the problem was and it was something simple. But at the time it was too frustrating and I ended up putting Win95 back on that box for a while. (My next attempt was much more sucessful. Thank you SuSE!) But the point is, there is little in the way of DESKTOP support for linux. Especially for those of us who choose to download linux, and therefore give up any support that a vendor might provide.
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I've been using Conectiva Linux 6.0 for the past few months and have been very happy with it. Conectiva uses apt with a rpm backend (as opposed to debs) which is great since it gives you all of the pluses of both formats. The ease of use of apt (and it's wonderful dependency checking) and the compatibility of RPM (let's face it, it's the better represented of the 2 formats.) Also, you can still use RPM seperately from apt to install and query packages. I wish that more of the distros would adopt this way of doing things instead of fighting over which one is better. Just use both :)
I always have to do things the hard way :) Thanks for pointing out something that I should've seen though.
I haven't actually done this, but a friend of mine that's an old school hacker told me this trick that he used to use back in day on IRC. Go to your /usr/src/linux/net/ipv4 directory and edit the icmp.c file. Look for a section in there that says: Handle ICMP_ECHO ("ping") requests.
Immediately below that comment is a function that handles ping echo requests. simply comment out the body of the function. Here's what that part looks like.(roughly, I didn't spend that much time formating this.)
Comment out the code between the first set of curly braces, recompile your kernel, and your machine won't answer pings anymore ;-p
Isn't it great having the source code to your OS?
Actually, you are wrong about the open source bit. MySQL has been GPLed since June 28, 2000. Also, there is some new support for transactions thanks to NuSphere (they are contributing code that allows row locking) Read the story here.
It hasn't been too long for me to remember what it was like. My First first installation of Linux was Red Hat 5.2 and after getting it installed and going through the painful process of setting up X manually, I gave up on it because all I could get was a gray screen with a little "x" on it. In retrospect, I know what the problem was and it was something simple. But at the time it was too frustrating and I ended up putting Win95 back on that box for a while. (My next attempt was much more sucessful. Thank you SuSE!) But the point is, there is little in the way of DESKTOP support for linux. Especially for those of us who choose to download linux, and therefore give up any support that a vendor might provide.