I used NX over the net to do all my work from my computer at home.
Found a net connection, any open one was good, didn't matter about security. Logged into my computer at home by using WOL, then NX. Did my surfing and email from my own desktop with all the convenience of stored cookies and passwords, downloaded stuff to that machine. Uploaded journals and photos via SSH (yes, of course it was with 4096 bit RSA) and the laptop was then returned to a clean state ready to pass through CBP/TSA.
NX and WOL made sure that the laptop was worth at maximum the price of the hardware, no personal information on it except my SSH keys which have already been changed.
I just visited the US, went to Vegas for two weeks and in the middle of that had 4 days in San Fran via domestic flight.
Took two brand new Asus EEEPCs, one for me, one for my partner. All they had on them were my SSH keys and a copy of NX so that we could log in to my computer back home and transfer our journals and pictures there rather than risk losing them to this kind of "appropriation".
We went through security at Manchester without a hitch. When we went through Mccarran to go to San Fran we got put in the TSA lane and got the explosives sniffer machine done to us:
TSA: Lift your arms and stand still.
(Air jets attempt to dislodge particles from our hair and clothes, then vacuum them into the sensors)
TSA: Put your boots, belts, hand luggage in here, laptops in this tray.
My laptops went through and the agent doing the security actually said "oh, those small Asus's"
To which I replied, "yeah, very handy for travel, got them specially for the trip over here".
Got them back, didn't even have to turn them on, my USB keys weren't searched, my SD cards likewise. My camera wasn't opened, the memory card wasn't inspected.
I went to America with the expectation of having my goods and chattels molested by TSA, but aside from my GF's surgical implant setting the metal detectors off three times, we sailed through TSA three times.
I'm not saying that TSA shouldn't have these powers, but even when you tell them that you're carrying spent pistol/rifle casings, they don't always give you a hard time. My clothes were covered in GSR, I had spent casings, two laptops, numerous memory cards, cellphones and a big knife (in checked luggage), nothing was out of the ordinary. My checked luggage wasn't even opened, I had a UV reactive cable tie on it, so it would have been cut had they searched the bags with the knife and casings in.
Given these powers exist, and as an alien travelling through the TSA "interested" lane, I can say that they don't always use them. I would imagine that they are like any other police officer: Give them a hard time and they will make your life hard, because they can. Treat them like they are doing a necessary job and help them if at all possible and they will appreciate your "cooperation" and not waste your time and theirs.
You're so nearly there, you just didn't connect the dots.
"They" want us to breed (3) so that we can do more consuming (2) and won't know any better if we stay indoors and don't fraternise with each other (1).
Take this framework and apply every new law you hear to it and sooner or later you will have a tinfoil hat like the rest of us.
Have you noticed that you can never get through on the local rate number?
Where I live the number went from 631321 to 0845 6060247, and with the new number you get a computer.
Those computers are as bad here as they are over there. Press 1 for more time wasting, press 2 for a long hold, press 3 for the wrong person, press 4 for a loop that will bring you back to this menu, press 5 if you misheard and thought this was what you wanted, but we have a non-intuitive name for it, press 6 for the thing you want, but the computers are down, press 7 to get to a real person, but wait, they are in a call centre so do you really think that your very complicated problem is going to be understood by them, press 8 on the offchance that after pressing all the others you can actually get through to a person. WAIT! No matter what you pressed you will have to enter some fricken account number that you don't have to hand and the security digits that you set up over 2 years ago to actually get to any of these options. Thanks you for holding, your call is important to us, but not that important that we will have someone talk to you when you ring.
Is there any wonder that people are using the 999 number rather than that crap?
In my job I have to call the cops a few times a year, and out of hours. I have phoned both numbers a few times and been unable to get a crime reported on either number due to nobody answering the call. More cash and less restrictions on the cops, that's what I say. Make the youth of today respect that nice police person in dark blue because they can hit you as hard as they like if you are cheeky and disrespectful to them.
What, even if the new version has "must have" features, and the old version just serves as a taster for those wanting a step onto the ladder for that particular area of software?
Take for example the millions of bored American housewives out there that want to get into making pretty pictures for the bottom of their forum posts.
They see something made with Photoshop by someone who has enough knowledge to use the package and come up with a wonderous image.
Said housewife comes to me and asks... I want to make pretty pictures like that, should I use Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop?
I'm honest, and tell them that Photoshop has loads of features that are fairly complicated, but it is worth the effort; Paintshop is easier to learn but you will soon outgrow it; all the knowledge that you have of Paintshop will be worth nothing when you outgrow it and move up to Photoshop.
You know what? They choose Paintshop. Then they unlearn that mid-range package and have to start the learning curve again, wasting months of their lives.
There is a lot to be said for the "hook" that gets someone into a market, illegal Windows got a lot of us (/. geeks) into computers, now we're sitting here talking about the whole industry. If we had to pay for everything, would we even know how to use Photoshop (at £400 a copy)? And then be able to advertise it to someone who has higher morals than us and would actually go out and buy it?
Freeing up WFW3.11 wouldn't take market share away from WinXP, 2K, Win7 or Linux. It would just mean that those companies that still use Sage 2 can have an OS to run on an old computer (or a very modern one like a GumStix) that can run their favourite package that 50 year old Mum trained on when she was "in accounts".
This is going to lead to the same security nightmare that Windows is.
You CANNOT keep an EEE up to date without getting into the very geeky side of Linux.
I'm not talking adding an apt repo here, this is finding the asus-wifi and asus-acpi patches, patching a kernel source and recompiling.
Asus don't have any recent software available (OpenOffice.Org = 2.0.4), the default install has a gaping security hole in it, the advice from the EEE community is "don't update unless you have to" and WiFi is on by default.
This is going to be a mess.
I love the hardware, the distro needs a LOT of work. The UnionFS idea is cool, but how about a much more recent factory image to burn to CD/DVD?
The fun of the EEE is adding an SDHC Class 6 and putting whatever you want on it, whilst still retaining that awful Xandros on the SSD.
Once I've come back from the US I'll be taking it apart and adding internal drives and making it a decent computer with multiple distros, I just hope that I can make openSUSE boot as fast as asus-Xandros does.
It's like calling the cops to say your car has been stolen and every time it is driven the DVLA (or DMV for the colonials out there) gets an update of the address where it was parked. Tell the cops that you need them to call the DVLA/DMV to get that address so they can go and arrest the person driving it.
My EEE 4G has 4GB SSD, 512MB RAM.
I'd like to think that it isn't suffering from reduced memory, it has the default Xandros distro on it which seems to be a fully fledged Linux system once you get it out of "easy mode".
My other laptop (a tired old IBM T22) has 256MB in and runs openSUSE 11 quite happily.
Is this "reduced memory" a Windows user term? I got Puppy Linux running on a Libretto that has 16MB RAM, and that I could probably say is a little on the small side.
I'm being forced to go to North America for a family wedding. I have no choice but to endure this ridiculous charade.
I'm buying a new EEE PC to take with me, on credit card so that it is insured by them, with nothing but Linux, my SSH keys and NX on it.
I have read quite a few stories about TSA taking and not returning laptops, clothes, pictures and assorted other stuff (on the internet, so it must be true!). I'm intending to take one small bag with me, my laptop for the flight, one t-shirt, one underwear, and the rest I can buy in the US.
Screw TSA, CBP, and the whole DHS WVP biometric 10 fingerprinting GSR testing mess. I don't want to go, but if I do have to, then I'm not taking baggage.
I'd rather change my GBP to Euros and go to somewhere like Amsterdam where the police don't even look at you and I've never been more than pocket searched (on the way back into England), despite being a long-haired leather jacket wearing obviously stoned drunken tourist.
A lot of the time you can hit "CTRL-ALT-backspace" to restart your GUI.
If you take a look in/etc/init.d you will find a list of services. Google them (or read the documen... wait, this is Slashdot <grin>) and not only will you gain confidence, but you can maximise your uptime to show off with.
Not to get into the same thing as another poster, but when using some Factory stuff I do sometimes get them.
My point is that even after a SEGFAULT I can continue working under Linux unlike Windows where a GPF or BSOD would destabilise the whole system to the point where I would be concerned about my data integrity.
It is possible to restart services under Windows, but I consider it a less robust system than the one Linux uses.
su
/usr/NX/nxserver --keygen
cat/usr/NX/share/keys/default.id_dsa.key >/home/NX.key
Now take that key with you along with your SSH key (you are using key-only authorisation, right?) and get it into the NX client (Configure... / Key... / [Import or paste] / Save) and you're done.
Yes. I have done that.
And when I say immeasurably, I mean that encrypted SSH is a lot more secure than VNC that goes in plain text over the network a lot of the time for speed. NX only sends compressed screen update data, not the whole screen/window in jpg like VNC.
Don't get me wrong, I used to use VNC, and I don't work for NoMachine or anything like that. I use the free edition and TightVNC was my flavour of choice.
Why doesn't everyone lock their doors? I live in a fairly nice part of my City in England, but the door remains locked at all times. Like the car. Use a door, lock it behind you as a sign to people that might want access without permission, even accidentally. The permission is either given in the form of a key, or by asking someone who is already in the property if they can gain access.
What, you let your postman open your door and drop letters on the mat? No, you make a slot for them to use so they don't need to enter your property to deliver your mail.
Same with WiFi. If you leave your router locked down, the default situation is "you don't have permission" but if you have a second router that advertises itself and has no encryption, you are definitely giving it away as so many people do.
These days more and more routers are factory set up to default to some kind of encryption (usually WEP, but it is a start) so that this problem can be a thing of the past. If you break the encryption you knew you were doing something wrong, just like breaking that big piece of glass at the front of the house and making entrance that way.
My T22 (P3 900, 256, WiFi) runs openSUSE 10.3 with either KDE 3 or Joe's Window Manager that I discovered by trying out DamnSmallLinux.
Basically all I use my laptop for is running NX to my home machine, so a light fast small desktop is the best solution.
On the compatibility side, I do have to run ndiswrapper to make my Linksys PCMCIA WiFi work, but once it is in, KNetworkManager takes care of all the complicated stuff.
There is an argument to be made for the way most of the people on the dev team use the software though. Integration is sometimes easier when the functionality has been designed into the distro by the people who created it.
When I was a SuSE user they always had KDE as their default desktop, and to shoehorn Gnome in just never felt as smooth as RedHat with default Gnome. This is my own experience, negated now by openSUSE having both options available.
When I changed over (full time) from XP to openSUSE 10.2 I could happily leave my PC on for days, use suspend (RAM and disk) many more times than under XP without a reboot to "freshen up" and I haven't yet seen a SEGFAULT that couldn't be fixed with a rc<service> restart.
In short, my experience is not the same as yours. Have you got odd hardware or an overclocked system?
Full speed BIOS settings, AMD/VIA, ATI GFX (8xAGP, 256M), ATA133 (x6) and everything runs peachy. Under XP having the AMD/VIA combo would cause the OS to crap itself regularly no matter which drivers I used, and I have tried a lot of them.
Now I have a copy of Win2K in VirtualBox running seamless mode for when I need Photoshop. With the recent v1.0 release of WINE I may even lose that...
And to top it all, Linux has the free edition of NX that is far quicker and immeasurably more secure than VNC.
I personally find YaST package management easier to use than Synaptic.
Other than that, as has been said, all features are available on all distros, so it is just down to personal choice, and what you are used to working with. RPMs and DEBs are very similar once you get them on your machine, you can even use alien to install them.
Been with (open)SuSE since v8.0 so I know my way around this particular distro better than the *buntu boxen that I admin.
Slashdot Mirror
See my comment above.
I used NX over the net to do all my work from my computer at home.
Found a net connection, any open one was good, didn't matter about security. Logged into my computer at home by using WOL, then NX. Did my surfing and email from my own desktop with all the convenience of stored cookies and passwords, downloaded stuff to that machine. Uploaded journals and photos via SSH (yes, of course it was with 4096 bit RSA) and the laptop was then returned to a clean state ready to pass through CBP/TSA.
NX and WOL made sure that the laptop was worth at maximum the price of the hardware, no personal information on it except my SSH keys which have already been changed.
I just visited the US, went to Vegas for two weeks and in the middle of that had 4 days in San Fran via domestic flight.
Took two brand new Asus EEEPCs, one for me, one for my partner. All they had on them were my SSH keys and a copy of NX so that we could log in to my computer back home and transfer our journals and pictures there rather than risk losing them to this kind of "appropriation".
We went through security at Manchester without a hitch. When we went through Mccarran to go to San Fran we got put in the TSA lane and got the explosives sniffer machine done to us:
TSA: Lift your arms and stand still.
(Air jets attempt to dislodge particles from our hair and clothes, then vacuum them into the sensors)
TSA: Put your boots, belts, hand luggage in here, laptops in this tray.
My laptops went through and the agent doing the security actually said "oh, those small Asus's"
To which I replied, "yeah, very handy for travel, got them specially for the trip over here".
Got them back, didn't even have to turn them on, my USB keys weren't searched, my SD cards likewise. My camera wasn't opened, the memory card wasn't inspected.
I went to America with the expectation of having my goods and chattels molested by TSA, but aside from my GF's surgical implant setting the metal detectors off three times, we sailed through TSA three times.
I'm not saying that TSA shouldn't have these powers, but even when you tell them that you're carrying spent pistol/rifle casings, they don't always give you a hard time. My clothes were covered in GSR, I had spent casings, two laptops, numerous memory cards, cellphones and a big knife (in checked luggage), nothing was out of the ordinary. My checked luggage wasn't even opened, I had a UV reactive cable tie on it, so it would have been cut had they searched the bags with the knife and casings in.
Given these powers exist, and as an alien travelling through the TSA "interested" lane, I can say that they don't always use them. I would imagine that they are like any other police officer: Give them a hard time and they will make your life hard, because they can. Treat them like they are doing a necessary job and help them if at all possible and they will appreciate your "cooperation" and not waste your time and theirs.
YMMV.
You're so nearly there, you just didn't connect the dots.
"They" want us to breed (3) so that we can do more consuming (2) and won't know any better if we stay indoors and don't fraternise with each other (1).
Take this framework and apply every new law you hear to it and sooner or later you will have a tinfoil hat like the rest of us.
Have you noticed that you can never get through on the local rate number?
Where I live the number went from 631321 to 0845 6060247, and with the new number you get a computer.
Those computers are as bad here as they are over there. Press 1 for more time wasting, press 2 for a long hold, press 3 for the wrong person, press 4 for a loop that will bring you back to this menu, press 5 if you misheard and thought this was what you wanted, but we have a non-intuitive name for it, press 6 for the thing you want, but the computers are down, press 7 to get to a real person, but wait, they are in a call centre so do you really think that your very complicated problem is going to be understood by them, press 8 on the offchance that after pressing all the others you can actually get through to a person. WAIT! No matter what you pressed you will have to enter some fricken account number that you don't have to hand and the security digits that you set up over 2 years ago to actually get to any of these options. Thanks you for holding, your call is important to us, but not that important that we will have someone talk to you when you ring.
Is there any wonder that people are using the 999 number rather than that crap?
In my job I have to call the cops a few times a year, and out of hours. I have phoned both numbers a few times and been unable to get a crime reported on either number due to nobody answering the call. More cash and less restrictions on the cops, that's what I say. Make the youth of today respect that nice police person in dark blue because they can hit you as hard as they like if you are cheeky and disrespectful to them.
i find@yourideas.intriguing.com and would like to subscribe@toyour.newsletter.com.
What, even if the new version has "must have" features, and the old version just serves as a taster for those wanting a step onto the ladder for that particular area of software?
... I want to make pretty pictures like that, should I use Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop?
Take for example the millions of bored American housewives out there that want to get into making pretty pictures for the bottom of their forum posts.
They see something made with Photoshop by someone who has enough knowledge to use the package and come up with a wonderous image.
Said housewife comes to me and asks
I'm honest, and tell them that Photoshop has loads of features that are fairly complicated, but it is worth the effort; Paintshop is easier to learn but you will soon outgrow it; all the knowledge that you have of Paintshop will be worth nothing when you outgrow it and move up to Photoshop.
You know what? They choose Paintshop. Then they unlearn that mid-range package and have to start the learning curve again, wasting months of their lives.
There is a lot to be said for the "hook" that gets someone into a market, illegal Windows got a lot of us (/. geeks) into computers, now we're sitting here talking about the whole industry. If we had to pay for everything, would we even know how to use Photoshop (at £400 a copy)? And then be able to advertise it to someone who has higher morals than us and would actually go out and buy it?
Freeing up WFW3.11 wouldn't take market share away from WinXP, 2K, Win7 or Linux. It would just mean that those companies that still use Sage 2 can have an OS to run on an old computer (or a very modern one like a GumStix) that can run their favourite package that 50 year old Mum trained on when she was "in accounts".
Yeah, when preinstalled.
This is going to lead to the same security nightmare that Windows is.
You CANNOT keep an EEE up to date without getting into the very geeky side of Linux.
I'm not talking adding an apt repo here, this is finding the asus-wifi and asus-acpi patches, patching a kernel source and recompiling.
Asus don't have any recent software available (OpenOffice.Org = 2.0.4), the default install has a gaping security hole in it, the advice from the EEE community is "don't update unless you have to" and WiFi is on by default.
This is going to be a mess.
I love the hardware, the distro needs a LOT of work. The UnionFS idea is cool, but how about a much more recent factory image to burn to CD/DVD?
The fun of the EEE is adding an SDHC Class 6 and putting whatever you want on it, whilst still retaining that awful Xandros on the SSD.
Once I've come back from the US I'll be taking it apart and adding internal drives and making it a decent computer with multiple distros, I just hope that I can make openSUSE boot as fast as asus-Xandros does.
http://www.networkmirror.com/56Q9GcghVE6z63_5/future-design.freehostia.com/future-design/meet-the-laptop-youll-use-in-2015/index.html
You're welcome.
It's like calling the cops to say your car has been stolen and every time it is driven the DVLA (or DMV for the colonials out there) gets an update of the address where it was parked. Tell the cops that you need them to call the DVLA/DMV to get that address so they can go and arrest the person driving it.
Close?
My EEE 4G has 4GB SSD, 512MB RAM.
I'd like to think that it isn't suffering from reduced memory, it has the default Xandros distro on it which seems to be a fully fledged Linux system once you get it out of "easy mode".
My other laptop (a tired old IBM T22) has 256MB in and runs openSUSE 11 quite happily.
Is this "reduced memory" a Windows user term? I got Puppy Linux running on a Libretto that has 16MB RAM, and that I could probably say is a little on the small side.
You make a good point.
/me has a rethink.
Hear Hear!
I'm being forced to go to North America for a family wedding. I have no choice but to endure this ridiculous charade.
I'm buying a new EEE PC to take with me, on credit card so that it is insured by them, with nothing but Linux, my SSH keys and NX on it.
I have read quite a few stories about TSA taking and not returning laptops, clothes, pictures and assorted other stuff (on the internet, so it must be true!). I'm intending to take one small bag with me, my laptop for the flight, one t-shirt, one underwear, and the rest I can buy in the US.
Screw TSA, CBP, and the whole DHS WVP biometric 10 fingerprinting GSR testing mess. I don't want to go, but if I do have to, then I'm not taking baggage.
I'd rather change my GBP to Euros and go to somewhere like Amsterdam where the police don't even look at you and I've never been more than pocket searched (on the way back into England), despite being a long-haired leather jacket wearing obviously stoned drunken tourist.
No, it is more like having a 300hp car, using it to go to the shops and back but when you try and go over 70mph the cops ...
Wait, this car analogy is far too good, I can't use it on Slashdot =)
Waste of time posting to AC, but for the record:
/home
SDA
MBR Grub - Installed by openSUSE 10.3
1 ntfs - XP (bootable)
2 Reiser - openSUSE 10.3 -> 11 /
3 Reiser -
SDB
1 ntfs - Vista (bootable)
HDA
1 ntfs
2 fat32
3 Linux Swap
HDB
1 ntfs
HDC
1 fat32
HDD
1 fat32
Grub on boot gives me Linux (default), XP (usually a resume from hibernate), Vista.
HDA-D are on onboard Highpoint RAID chip, all devices are ATA133.
A lot of the time you can hit "CTRL-ALT-backspace" to restart your GUI.
/etc/init.d you will find a list of services. Google them (or read the documen ... wait, this is Slashdot <grin>) and not only will you gain confidence, but you can maximise your uptime to show off with.
If you take a look in
Not to get into the same thing as another poster, but when using some Factory stuff I do sometimes get them.
My point is that even after a SEGFAULT I can continue working under Linux unlike Windows where a GPF or BSOD would destabilise the whole system to the point where I would be concerned about my data integrity.
It is possible to restart services under Windows, but I consider it a less robust system than the one Linux uses.
YMMV.
su /usr/NX/share/keys/default.id_dsa.key > /home/NX.key
... / Key ... / [Import or paste] / Save) and you're done.
/usr/NX/nxserver --keygen
cat
Now take that key with you along with your SSH key (you are using key-only authorisation, right?) and get it into the NX client (Configure
Yes. I have done that.
And when I say immeasurably, I mean that encrypted SSH is a lot more secure than VNC that goes in plain text over the network a lot of the time for speed. NX only sends compressed screen update data, not the whole screen/window in jpg like VNC.
Don't get me wrong, I used to use VNC, and I don't work for NoMachine or anything like that. I use the free edition and TightVNC was my flavour of choice.
Funny that, a lot of people don't.
Why doesn't everyone lock their doors? I live in a fairly nice part of my City in England, but the door remains locked at all times. Like the car. Use a door, lock it behind you as a sign to people that might want access without permission, even accidentally. The permission is either given in the form of a key, or by asking someone who is already in the property if they can gain access.
What, you let your postman open your door and drop letters on the mat? No, you make a slot for them to use so they don't need to enter your property to deliver your mail.
Same with WiFi. If you leave your router locked down, the default situation is "you don't have permission" but if you have a second router that advertises itself and has no encryption, you are definitely giving it away as so many people do.
These days more and more routers are factory set up to default to some kind of encryption (usually WEP, but it is a start) so that this problem can be a thing of the past. If you break the encryption you knew you were doing something wrong, just like breaking that big piece of glass at the front of the house and making entrance that way.
preditor@<mybox>:~> uname -a
Linux <mybox> 2.6.25.7-PReDiToR #1 Thu Jun 19 04:44:46 BST 2008 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
Don't like the openSUSE kernel? Don't use it.
Just like that.
My T22 (P3 900, 256, WiFi) runs openSUSE 10.3 with either KDE 3 or Joe's Window Manager that I discovered by trying out DamnSmallLinux.
Basically all I use my laptop for is running NX to my home machine, so a light fast small desktop is the best solution.
On the compatibility side, I do have to run ndiswrapper to make my Linksys PCMCIA WiFi work, but once it is in, KNetworkManager takes care of all the complicated stuff.
Absolutely right.
There is an argument to be made for the way most of the people on the dev team use the software though. Integration is sometimes easier when the functionality has been designed into the distro by the people who created it.
When I was a SuSE user they always had KDE as their default desktop, and to shoehorn Gnome in just never felt as smooth as RedHat with default Gnome. This is my own experience, negated now by openSUSE having both options available.
In a lot of opinions, it is.
...
When I changed over (full time) from XP to openSUSE 10.2 I could happily leave my PC on for days, use suspend (RAM and disk) many more times than under XP without a reboot to "freshen up" and I haven't yet seen a SEGFAULT that couldn't be fixed with a rc<service> restart.
In short, my experience is not the same as yours. Have you got odd hardware or an overclocked system?
Full speed BIOS settings, AMD/VIA, ATI GFX (8xAGP, 256M), ATA133 (x6) and everything runs peachy. Under XP having the AMD/VIA combo would cause the OS to crap itself regularly no matter which drivers I used, and I have tried a lot of them.
Now I have a copy of Win2K in VirtualBox running seamless mode for when I need Photoshop. With the recent v1.0 release of WINE I may even lose that
And to top it all, Linux has the free edition of NX that is far quicker and immeasurably more secure than VNC.
I personally find YaST package management easier to use than Synaptic.
Other than that, as has been said, all features are available on all distros, so it is just down to personal choice, and what you are used to working with. RPMs and DEBs are very similar once you get them on your machine, you can even use alien to install them.
Been with (open)SuSE since v8.0 so I know my way around this particular distro better than the *buntu boxen that I admin.
Epic fail.
Duct Tape is like the force, it has a light side, a dark side and binds the universe together.