I wouldn't try to "crack" the root password exactly. I'd pull the drive out and mount it externally in a USB chassis to another system running Linux, and access the contents of that drive from there.
This will work as long as he didn't use whole-disk encryption...which is unlikely.
If he kept his EMail archives locally in Evolution, Thunderbird or similar, getting to it will be fairly simple.
You'll get this done faster if you have a Linux geek help you out. Try his school's Linux club, or a comp sci professor.
As to data held in something like GMail or other online accounts, you might need to have somebody declared executor of his estate and then apply for access in writing to the data from the providers...suing if necessary I guess.
That said, I do understand the appeal of the littler guys. My main reason for writing was to note that the amount of CPU power the new low-end ultralights are offering makes for a very workable machine even with a modern Linux variant and full-tilt desktop (Gnome/Compiz).
About a year ago I needed a lappie and was low on cash. I found an Acer 3680 "Best Buy special" for $400. This is a standard 15.4" screen-size laptop BUT they put a 14.1" in to save a bit of money. It's still 1280x800 and very readable. Other specs:
* About 6lbs.
* Celeron 1.6 single-core with a 533 memory bus.
* 512megs RAM, 80gig SATA, DVD-read, CD-R/RW.
* Intel 945 video.
* PCMCIA slot.
* Atheros WiFi.
This is about the same horsepower as the recent crop of "ultra-lights", with more disk space of course.
I dropped an extra gig in it for cheap and nuked Vista Home Basic immediately for Ubuntu. I'm typing this on it now, with Ubuntu Gutsy. I have full Compiz support although the limited graphics speed seems to limit the "cube" to a two-sided plane (two desktops) with full speed. I also have VirtualBox and Windows XP running perfectly.
I even run whole-disk encryption with TrueCrypt with no noticeable speed penalty.
It's been dropped twice and survived a water-glass spill that nuked the WiFi card but that was a $20 fix. It's been carried *daily*, used hard and runs like a champ still.
This low-budget critter is enough to make anybody re-think the need for anything more potent, if you're running Linux.
I mention all this to establish what performance baseline is really needed today.
I wouldn't trade this critter for anything physically smaller, but then again I'm a big guy and am not bothered by running a sizeable "messenger bag" style laptop case.
Finally, thumbs up to Acer for offering a cheap, tough and useful as hell little critter.
Thumbs down to Micro$loth for fostering a crapware OS on them...
Correct. Diebold bought Global Election Systems in 2002, which in turn had eaten Spectrum Print and Mail in 2000. Between Spectrum and Global there were five serious convicted felons in management. It's unclear whether or not Diebold understood what a pack of pirates they were getting in bed with.
To this day the elections division often appears to be a rogue group within Diebold.
The reason Diebold bought the struggling Global was the $3.5billion in Federal funding pumped into buying new voting machines via the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA). $3.5bil is a lot of chum in the water and attracted sharks, of which Global/Diebold was only one.
All of the UTI (potential buyer) remarks suggest that they want Diebold's old-line business - ATMs, bank security, etc. No word on election stuff.
Odds are they'll roll the banking business under the UTI brand, dumping the elections biz and the now-badly-damaged Diebold brand name with it.
It's about the best thing that could happen to the core company, and the worst thing that could happen to the rogue election division.
But there's a problem.
There's now too much dirt to be found by new owners, both in the rogue elections division and in the core company related to the SEC filings. While selling out to UTI would be the best move for the stockholders, it might lead to the current management ending up in jail.
A year ago a friend and I bought near-identical low-end laptops: Celeron single-core 1.6 CPUs, Intel 945 graphics, etc - one Acer (mine) and one Toshiba. These were $400 Best-Buy-sale-o-the-week critters. Both shipped originally with Vista Home Basic. We set them up with 1gig memory each (533) - they had shipped with 512 and Vista was utterly unusable.
At 1gig we tested both with MS-Office 2003. He still had Vista. I had Ubuntu Feisty 7.04, Innotek Virtualbox 1.52 I believe it was, and Windows XP running as a virtual machine with 512megs of it's own RAM leaving 512 for Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu/XP mutant combo spanked the Vista box - severely - in everything but boot time as my rig had to boot two OSes in succession.
At that time getting Office '03 to work in Wine was a no-go. It's at least possible now I've heard, and that might be even faster. But regardless, Vista with one gig should have been able to keep up with virtualized XP running in 512...it wasn't even close.
Need I mention that I rapidly converted my bud to Ubuntu/XP?
That's pretty much true - but it still underscores the idea that these turkeys aren't just being seen way out at sea, they're hitting shore often enough to around half a dozen people a year. Not that many, granted, but it's enough to bring 'em out of the "fable" category.
As an aside: I meant to say that Sail Rock is just south of Pacifica, at the north end of the section of Highway One known as "Devil's Slide".
Jim
More people get killed along the Pacific NorthWest coast by rogue waves than by sharks.
I was 12, picking mussels along the coast about 20 miles south of San Francisco - "Sail Rock" just south of San Francisco. It was a very low tide and a smaller rock just off the main one was accessible when the water flowed out between major waves. This smaller rock was about 2ft wide, 10ft long and about 10ft high, and the top 4ft was bone dry, higher than even the spray patterns let alone wave action.
My dad and kid brother (age 8) were on the main rock. I had made it out to the smaller rock and was filling a bucket with the biggest mussels I'd ever handled. I had my bucket mostly full when I glanced up.
I'd been warned about these things and I knew the 20-ft tall wall of water coming at me was a killer. They pick people up, smash 'em on the rocks behind them then drag them out to sea unconscious...or sometimes grab people right off sandy beaches.
My dad spotted it around the same time and pulled my kid brother further up the main rock (about 70ft tall). I don't know how far up they made it - my dad got seriously wet and had to cling to my brother while assuming I was toast.
My only chance was to straddle the smaller rock like a jockey on a horse and hand on. I remember thinking about options while the whole world slowed down, and then doing the straddle and grab number. When the wave hit it was like being flushed down a giant toilet. The water peaked out around 4ft over my head. As it washed out, my dad said the sight of me doing my best imitation of a big funny-lookin' barnacle was the best sight he'd ever seen.
It dragged the glasses off my face, never saw that bucket or hammer again, hands were cut up but I made it.
That thing was well over 10x the size of the normal waves coming in.
My dad wasn't upset with me. He knew I'd thought I was going to die and knew I'd always, always keep an eyeball on that ocean when near it.
Heh. It was my mom that freaked out worse when we got home but she too understood I'd had enough problems.
Let's take my situation. I boot Linux, fire up a virtual machine manager (VirtualBox), start WinXP to run just those Win apps I have to have - which don't need Internet access, so I disable that most of the time in XP. My internet stuff is all done in Linux.
Question: am I now running XP in a more secure fashion versus using it for everything? HELL YES. And I would argue this is more secure for Linux itself, because I don't need to run Wine with it's own set of security issues.
A key belief and practice of the Church involved "auditing" via the "E-Meter". The "E-Meter" is a bargain-basement lie detector. It works on galvanic skin response; it can measure (crudely) fluctuations in your emotional state. It can't measure much past that. So one person holds these two "tin cans" while somebody else tries to make them respond enough to flinch the needle.
The person being "audited" is practicing how to be emotionally non-responsive to whatever is thrown at them - and that can involve verbal abuse, shouting, whatever.
This isn't controversial or something the "church" denies.
What most people don't think about is the flip side: what is being learned by the person NOT holding the tin cans? The one trying to trigger a response in the other?
Yup. You guessed it. They become masters (eventually) at "pressing people's buttons".
So anybody not used to this sort of thing or who isn't expecting it can be made to "blow up", sometimes spectacularly. And I'd bet good money that's exactly what they did to Sweeney and for exactly the reason they've used this incident: to portray any opponent as an out of control loose cannon, nutcase, etc.
Don't go up against these guys unless your self control is rock solid AND you understand this technique. Be ready to say something like "much as you might prefer otherwise, I'm not being "audited", I'm not standing here with tin cans in my hand looking like an idiot, you're not going to get me to blow up". Turn it back on 'em, they'll start foaming at the mouth. If a Rondroid is trying to get you pissed, ASSUME there's a camera pointing your way.
Document exchange with Word 2003 and below...
on
OpenOffice 2.2 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
I'm running the Ubuntu Feisty Beta with OO2.2 and I exchange fairly complex Word docs with others, including legal pleadings and other hairy stuff, and I'm having no problems whatsoever.
But, I would run into a problem: *I* might be able to support such a "personally modified distro", but what if I need to go do something else for a while? Do my users have support alternatives?
With a stock (or nearly so) Ubuntu install, they sure would. They could buy a support contract from Canonical, or pretty much any Linux geek can cope with Ubuntu.
Do I have a right to set up newbie users in a situation where they would have an unusually hard time if I wasn't available? I don't see that as ethical, y'know?
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The other reason I don't trust Fedora as a newbie solution is, Fedora for newbies doesn't fit Red Hat's business model. Their commercial distro is what they're aiming for newbies. Fedora Core 6 right now is meant as a geek-centric permanent beta-test program for the commercial side. While it's clear Fedora 7 will be improved, I don't see any reason for Red Hat to try and turn it into a stable newbie-friendly setup in competition with what they *sell*.
And I can say exactly the same about OpenSuse and Freespire, for the same reasons.
With Ubuntu, it may be flawed but...I know the users I help convert are getting a free distro that DOES have a corporation behind it and has support contracts available if they need it. One that is clearly improving, and along lines that I respect: newer apps, a newer kernel, improved WiFi and much more.
That's what *I* see for my small batch of prospective users and I don't see Dell's choices being much different, 'cept for scale.
Say Dell picks three or four systems total across their product line to do Linux - a couple desktops, a couple of laptops.
There are all sorts of things they can do to "maximize the experience" or whatever:).
Hand-tuning the xorg.conf file for starters. I recently came across an xorg.conf for my oddball video card that doubled my frame rate in glxgears...admittedly not a perfect test but it's not half bad either. This after eight months of running this laptop on half a dozen distros. Why did it take that long for me to find this? Hellifiknow but that's reality for a lot of people.
Dell can tune things up to the max for a limited number of systems at least...not just video but WiFi, disk subsystems, etc.
So far I've had one Feisty auto-update do something slightly stupid on me. It turned "on" autoroaming on my WiFi when I had it locked to my WiFi router and password. Resetting the network tool fixed it post-haste.
Some auto-updates are breaking things for some people. That's a given, it's beta, we really shouldn't be running it in production although I'll admit right now that I am:).
Well you're right about how long it took them to adopt Firefox 2.x and OpenOffice 2.1x. Their thinking is, with a 6-month release cycle they can go with more stability by freezing the code.
They also don't really have the staff to do the next release AND patch major bugs in the previous.
That said, I'm still convinced they have the most stable "free for the download" distro out there. And trust me, I tried a buttload before coming to that conclusion. My progression was:
* Ubuntu Dapper installed early August. Worked great.
* Ubuntu Edgy a day after official release. I didn't quite yet know what I was doing, screwed things up, did a fresh reinstall, something else blew, decided to move on...
* OpenSuse 10.2. More difficult to set up, but once running was solid as a rock. Wonky repository access and limited games:). Out of boredom, moved after a month or so to...
* Fedora Core 6. Damn fine distro. Loved it. But...it just glitched once in a while. An auto-update would sometimes break things...like USB flash drive mounting died after a kernel update. Browsing their (excellent) forums generally provided answers/fixes fast enough but by this time I wanted to convert friends/co-workers to Linux who are being pounded by Malware and FC6 clearly wasn't for them. Ran it about three months, wiped it off almost tearfully:).
* Mandriva '07. Bleah. A bit buggy, not very up-to-date, gone in a week...
* Sabayon 3.26. A cutting-edge Gentoo fork. Probably rocks with newer hardware...on my older ATI-based laptop (Radeon 7500 Mobility 32Meg) was about as explosively unstable as Hillary Clinton at a Chinese fundraiser. Two days and goooodbye!
* Zenwalk 4.4.1. A surprisingly good distro. FAST AS HELL, basic code is stable (Slackware fork), repositories somewhat limited but work OK. Glitches installing sound support and a few other minor bugs says it's not quite ready for the masses yet but it's one to watch and could eventually give Ubuntu a run for their money. XFCE default desktop but the "ZenGnome" project works well.
* Shrugged and tried Edgy again. This time NO mixing of both Automatix and "Easy Ubuntu" thank you very much. The patches in the intervening time had rendered Edgy more stable. The glitch that made me part company months earlier was fixed - if you throw away something on a USB flash drive, it's GONE right now (no trashcan). In it's older form I properly ejected a USB drive I had trashcanned stuff on, and the file system for my main drive had come completely unglued - as in 3,000 system and data files moved automatically into the trash and the OS itself started to crumble. Well they've fixed that in late Edgy and now Feisty - throw something away on a USB or other removable drive, it's gone "right now". Tried Feisty Herd5 and am now on Feisty Beta. This is the answer. No more stupidities caused by Automatix or Easy Ubuntu because those are no longer needed.
In part because I'm not trying for a 3D desktop on my creaky old video card, and I'm not doing RAID, Feisty is now the most stable and functional distro I've tried out of ALL of the above, at least on my system.
See my other comments. Novell isn't supporting OpenSuse repositories, only Suse. Canonical supports Ubuntu repos. So repo access is much more reliable in Ubuntu than OpenSuse.
I may have used the term "instability" too broadly.
Basically...the default repositories as selected "out of the box" were often down. Which lead to auto-update processes giving "file not accessible" reports.
To a geek, the solution is either "wait a bit and try again" or "go find other repositories and connect to them" but to "Grandma Millie", the answer they come up with is "it's broke!"
To "Grandma Millie", the basic stability of the OS gets called into question. Is it really unstable code? Of course not. OpenSuse 10.2 is among the most stable code sets I've ever seen. Has scads of potential. But if the default repositories go down, and I'm supporting this among a user base so I switch to unofficial repositories, MY support volumes are now dependent on somebody else's repos?
That's not a situation I would be comfortable with supporting a dozen or so non-geek friends/relatives, and it's for damnsure NOT a situation Dell should be comfortable with.
Now yeah, they could go with real Suse and use Novell repos. But now costs go up.
* I've played with a LOT of distros looking for one that can be supported among low-tech-level end users. Feisty, even in Beta, is the best I've seen. It has a hell of a lot of potential.
* What are the alternatives? They could go with a commercial distro like Red Hat, Linspire or Suse, but that means more OS costs than a base Vista install. If they do one of the free variants of those (Fedora or OpenSuse) there are stability issues - trust me, I *loved* Fedora Core 6 and if it was just for my personal use, I'd have stuck with it, but the autoinstaller sometimes loads stupid stuff. OpenSuse 10.2 was more stable but the European repositories were often down. I haven't tried Freespire but those magic numbers "1.0" for a version don't inspire confidence. That leaves what, Mepis as a low-end commercial distro? How much support is there for Mepis as opposed to Ubuntu?
Pretty much every Linux geek out there has at least some experience with Ubuntu at this point. That alone is reason to consider Ubuntu. Canonical is going to want this deal to go down, bad. Ubuntu is almost unique as being a free-to-download distro that still has a corporate development base.
My personal favorite distro is actually Zenwalk. Fast as hell Slackware fork with basically all the hard stuff already done. Awesome distro, but...just a few too many minor glitches to load it on "Grandma Millie's" P4 box and expect not to get panic phone calls once a week or so.
It's not us geeks that are the acid test for Linux, it's "Grandma Millie". Like a lot of my fellow political activists who are being hammered by Windows malware. I'm sick of doing bughunts for these folk when they get infested or zombified, flat fed up, and I can't see any better Linux alternative than Ubuntu.
Raid and Feisty aren't getting along well yet. That's a given as of two days ago last I checked the Ubuntu Feisty forum. I know they're working on it:).
I've been playing with the late alpha (Herd5) Feisty and now beta and lemme tell you, saying it's got "potential" is an understatement. WiFi support is worlds better, hardware autodetection is improved and the new auto-installer for codecs as they're needed flat-out rocks.
As long as you're not doing RAID and you're cautious about 3D desktop stuff, Feisty Beta is really ready to now for semi-experienced Linux users and has strong potential as "The Chosen One" of distros. It should eat significant market share as people with older Win98 boxes are forced to upgrade to *something* due to lack of ongoing security support. And it'll tempt a lot of XP folk disgusted with malware issues.
This has to be Dell's top choice and it's due for production release late April '07.
Let's see...I live in a motorhome, use a Verizon EVDO card plugged into a Kyocera KR1 router, the PCMCIA card is attached to dual antennas and a signal booster, I've got 100gal of freshwater storage, 120gal of waste, 660w of solar panels driving a 650lb battery and 2800w inverter, got a 4kw fuel-efficient genset for backup that can drive air conditioning all day on a gallon of gas...
Basically I can go a week at a time with zero hookups, and that's with daily showers. And I was able to get a decent Internet signal deep in the AZ desert about 50 miles east of Phoenix, about as remote as I've tried. In urban areas, more like low-grade DLS speeds. Separate cellphone o' course.
The back eight feet of the 36ft. motorhome is a garage with drop-down ramp door and Harley in the back. Onboard shuttlecraft baybee:).
Total nomad:).
OpenOffice 2.0.4 had a bunch of minor issues eating MS-Word files '97 through '03 variants. No real "showstoppers" but enough to throw newbies off.
OO2.1 is loads better, at least with Word files and to the lesser extent I've checked, Excel.
If M$ tries to play wacky games with their proprietary file formats, I think the OO community can come up with translators good enough to keep up.
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Aside from the corporate world, if you start doing a bit of support for home users you soon realize how many are jumping to OO just for reasons of cost...and are very happy with the jump. As OO penetrates the home market, some of those people will have some management influence and will start talking about the shift without us geeks needing to do squat.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't try to "crack" the root password exactly. I'd pull the drive out and mount it externally in a USB chassis to another system running Linux, and access the contents of that drive from there.
This will work as long as he didn't use whole-disk encryption...which is unlikely.
If he kept his EMail archives locally in Evolution, Thunderbird or similar, getting to it will be fairly simple.
You'll get this done faster if you have a Linux geek help you out. Try his school's Linux club, or a comp sci professor.
As to data held in something like GMail or other online accounts, you might need to have somebody declared executor of his estate and then apply for access in writing to the data from the providers...suing if necessary I guess.
I'm 6'4" and 280lbs.
:).
Trust me. I don't notice 6lbs
That said, I do understand the appeal of the littler guys. My main reason for writing was to note that the amount of CPU power the new low-end ultralights are offering makes for a very workable machine even with a modern Linux variant and full-tilt desktop (Gnome/Compiz).
I think you missed the part about "dropped twice" :). From desktop to floor, once onto concrete, literally not a scratch after.
Yes, that plus daily carry for a $400 cheapo isn't half bad. I had a higher-end Fujitsu for a while that didn't do near as well.
No, right now with a "two pane" setup GLXGEARS reports 830fps. Go to a real four-pane cube and it drops to about 500ish.
:).
I'm not willing to give up that much re-draw speed as some DVDs get wonky
About a year ago I needed a lappie and was low on cash. I found an Acer 3680 "Best Buy special" for $400. This is a standard 15.4" screen-size laptop BUT they put a 14.1" in to save a bit of money. It's still 1280x800 and very readable. Other specs:
* About 6lbs.
* Celeron 1.6 single-core with a 533 memory bus.
* 512megs RAM, 80gig SATA, DVD-read, CD-R/RW.
* Intel 945 video.
* PCMCIA slot.
* Atheros WiFi.
This is about the same horsepower as the recent crop of "ultra-lights", with more disk space of course.
I dropped an extra gig in it for cheap and nuked Vista Home Basic immediately for Ubuntu. I'm typing this on it now, with Ubuntu Gutsy. I have full Compiz support although the limited graphics speed seems to limit the "cube" to a two-sided plane (two desktops) with full speed. I also have VirtualBox and Windows XP running perfectly.
I even run whole-disk encryption with TrueCrypt with no noticeable speed penalty.
It's been dropped twice and survived a water-glass spill that nuked the WiFi card but that was a $20 fix. It's been carried *daily*, used hard and runs like a champ still.
This low-budget critter is enough to make anybody re-think the need for anything more potent, if you're running Linux.
I mention all this to establish what performance baseline is really needed today.
I wouldn't trade this critter for anything physically smaller, but then again I'm a big guy and am not bothered by running a sizeable "messenger bag" style laptop case.
Finally, thumbs up to Acer for offering a cheap, tough and useful as hell little critter.
Thumbs down to Micro$loth for fostering a crapware OS on them...
Correct. Diebold bought Global Election Systems in 2002, which in turn had eaten Spectrum Print and Mail in 2000. Between Spectrum and Global there were five serious convicted felons in management. It's unclear whether or not Diebold understood what a pack of pirates they were getting in bed with.
To this day the elections division often appears to be a rogue group within Diebold.
The reason Diebold bought the struggling Global was the $3.5billion in Federal funding pumped into buying new voting machines via the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA). $3.5bil is a lot of chum in the water and attracted sharks, of which Global/Diebold was only one.
All of the UTI (potential buyer) remarks suggest that they want Diebold's old-line business - ATMs, bank security, etc. No word on election stuff.
Odds are they'll roll the banking business under the UTI brand, dumping the elections biz and the now-badly-damaged Diebold brand name with it.
It's about the best thing that could happen to the core company, and the worst thing that could happen to the rogue election division.
But there's a problem.
There's now too much dirt to be found by new owners, both in the rogue elections division and in the core company related to the SEC filings. While selling out to UTI would be the best move for the stockholders, it might lead to the current management ending up in jail.
Grab some popcorn and watch the show.
http://www.virtualbox.org/
Best VM control software I've used. Sun seems to agree as they just bought them out.
It's even funnier than stated.
A year ago a friend and I bought near-identical low-end laptops: Celeron single-core 1.6 CPUs, Intel 945 graphics, etc - one Acer (mine) and one Toshiba. These were $400 Best-Buy-sale-o-the-week critters. Both shipped originally with Vista Home Basic. We set them up with 1gig memory each (533) - they had shipped with 512 and Vista was utterly unusable.
At 1gig we tested both with MS-Office 2003. He still had Vista. I had Ubuntu Feisty 7.04, Innotek Virtualbox 1.52 I believe it was, and Windows XP running as a virtual machine with 512megs of it's own RAM leaving 512 for Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu/XP mutant combo spanked the Vista box - severely - in everything but boot time as my rig had to boot two OSes in succession.
At that time getting Office '03 to work in Wine was a no-go. It's at least possible now I've heard, and that might be even faster. But regardless, Vista with one gig should have been able to keep up with virtualized XP running in 512...it wasn't even close.
Need I mention that I rapidly converted my bud to Ubuntu/XP?
That's pretty much true - but it still underscores the idea that these turkeys aren't just being seen way out at sea, they're hitting shore often enough to around half a dozen people a year. Not that many, granted, but it's enough to bring 'em out of the "fable" category. As an aside: I meant to say that Sail Rock is just south of Pacifica, at the north end of the section of Highway One known as "Devil's Slide". Jim
More people get killed along the Pacific NorthWest coast by rogue waves than by sharks.
I was 12, picking mussels along the coast about 20 miles south of San Francisco - "Sail Rock" just south of San Francisco. It was a very low tide and a smaller rock just off the main one was accessible when the water flowed out between major waves. This smaller rock was about 2ft wide, 10ft long and about 10ft high, and the top 4ft was bone dry, higher than even the spray patterns let alone wave action.
My dad and kid brother (age 8) were on the main rock. I had made it out to the smaller rock and was filling a bucket with the biggest mussels I'd ever handled. I had my bucket mostly full when I glanced up.
I'd been warned about these things and I knew the 20-ft tall wall of water coming at me was a killer. They pick people up, smash 'em on the rocks behind them then drag them out to sea unconscious...or sometimes grab people right off sandy beaches.
My dad spotted it around the same time and pulled my kid brother further up the main rock (about 70ft tall). I don't know how far up they made it - my dad got seriously wet and had to cling to my brother while assuming I was toast.
My only chance was to straddle the smaller rock like a jockey on a horse and hand on. I remember thinking about options while the whole world slowed down, and then doing the straddle and grab number. When the wave hit it was like being flushed down a giant toilet. The water peaked out around 4ft over my head. As it washed out, my dad said the sight of me doing my best imitation of a big funny-lookin' barnacle was the best sight he'd ever seen.
It dragged the glasses off my face, never saw that bucket or hammer again, hands were cut up but I made it.
That thing was well over 10x the size of the normal waves coming in.
My dad wasn't upset with me. He knew I'd thought I was going to die and knew I'd always, always keep an eyeball on that ocean when near it.
Heh. It was my mom that freaked out worse when we got home but she too understood I'd had enough problems.
Let's take my situation. I boot Linux, fire up a virtual machine manager (VirtualBox), start WinXP to run just those Win apps I have to have - which don't need Internet access, so I disable that most of the time in XP. My internet stuff is all done in Linux.
Question: am I now running XP in a more secure fashion versus using it for everything? HELL YES. And I would argue this is more secure for Linux itself, because I don't need to run Wine with it's own set of security issues.
Jim
Meh. We'll still call it that :).
But what's next?
Ignoble Iguana?
Here's why:
A key belief and practice of the Church involved "auditing" via the "E-Meter". The "E-Meter" is a bargain-basement lie detector. It works on galvanic skin response; it can measure (crudely) fluctuations in your emotional state. It can't measure much past that. So one person holds these two "tin cans" while somebody else tries to make them respond enough to flinch the needle.
The person being "audited" is practicing how to be emotionally non-responsive to whatever is thrown at them - and that can involve verbal abuse, shouting, whatever.
This isn't controversial or something the "church" denies.
What most people don't think about is the flip side: what is being learned by the person NOT holding the tin cans? The one trying to trigger a response in the other?
Yup. You guessed it. They become masters (eventually) at "pressing people's buttons".
So anybody not used to this sort of thing or who isn't expecting it can be made to "blow up", sometimes spectacularly. And I'd bet good money that's exactly what they did to Sweeney and for exactly the reason they've used this incident: to portray any opponent as an out of control loose cannon, nutcase, etc.
Don't go up against these guys unless your self control is rock solid AND you understand this technique. Be ready to say something like "much as you might prefer otherwise, I'm not being "audited", I'm not standing here with tin cans in my hand looking like an idiot, you're not going to get me to blow up". Turn it back on 'em, they'll start foaming at the mouth. If a Rondroid is trying to get you pissed, ASSUME there's a camera pointing your way.
I'm running the Ubuntu Feisty Beta with OO2.2 and I exchange fairly complex Word docs with others, including legal pleadings and other hairy stuff, and I'm having no problems whatsoever.
OK, that's...pretty damned tempting.
But, I would run into a problem: *I* might be able to support such a "personally modified distro", but what if I need to go do something else for a while? Do my users have support alternatives?
With a stock (or nearly so) Ubuntu install, they sure would. They could buy a support contract from Canonical, or pretty much any Linux geek can cope with Ubuntu.
Do I have a right to set up newbie users in a situation where they would have an unusually hard time if I wasn't available? I don't see that as ethical, y'know?
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The other reason I don't trust Fedora as a newbie solution is, Fedora for newbies doesn't fit Red Hat's business model. Their commercial distro is what they're aiming for newbies. Fedora Core 6 right now is meant as a geek-centric permanent beta-test program for the commercial side. While it's clear Fedora 7 will be improved, I don't see any reason for Red Hat to try and turn it into a stable newbie-friendly setup in competition with what they *sell*.
And I can say exactly the same about OpenSuse and Freespire, for the same reasons.
With Ubuntu, it may be flawed but...I know the users I help convert are getting a free distro that DOES have a corporation behind it and has support contracts available if they need it. One that is clearly improving, and along lines that I respect: newer apps, a newer kernel, improved WiFi and much more.
That's what *I* see for my small batch of prospective users and I don't see Dell's choices being much different, 'cept for scale.
Say Dell picks three or four systems total across their product line to do Linux - a couple desktops, a couple of laptops.
:).
There are all sorts of things they can do to "maximize the experience" or whatever
Hand-tuning the xorg.conf file for starters. I recently came across an xorg.conf for my oddball video card that doubled my frame rate in glxgears...admittedly not a perfect test but it's not half bad either. This after eight months of running this laptop on half a dozen distros. Why did it take that long for me to find this? Hellifiknow but that's reality for a lot of people.
Dell can tune things up to the max for a limited number of systems at least...not just video but WiFi, disk subsystems, etc.
And that's worth considering, isn't it?
I assume it was Feisty that updated today?
:).
It's still in beta.
So far I've had one Feisty auto-update do something slightly stupid on me. It turned "on" autoroaming on my WiFi when I had it locked to my WiFi router and password. Resetting the network tool fixed it post-haste.
Some auto-updates are breaking things for some people. That's a given, it's beta, we really shouldn't be running it in production although I'll admit right now that I am
Well you're right about how long it took them to adopt Firefox 2.x and OpenOffice 2.1x. Their thinking is, with a 6-month release cycle they can go with more stability by freezing the code.
:). Out of boredom, moved after a month or so to...
:).
They also don't really have the staff to do the next release AND patch major bugs in the previous.
That said, I'm still convinced they have the most stable "free for the download" distro out there. And trust me, I tried a buttload before coming to that conclusion. My progression was:
* Ubuntu Dapper installed early August. Worked great.
* Ubuntu Edgy a day after official release. I didn't quite yet know what I was doing, screwed things up, did a fresh reinstall, something else blew, decided to move on...
* OpenSuse 10.2. More difficult to set up, but once running was solid as a rock. Wonky repository access and limited games
* Fedora Core 6. Damn fine distro. Loved it. But...it just glitched once in a while. An auto-update would sometimes break things...like USB flash drive mounting died after a kernel update. Browsing their (excellent) forums generally provided answers/fixes fast enough but by this time I wanted to convert friends/co-workers to Linux who are being pounded by Malware and FC6 clearly wasn't for them. Ran it about three months, wiped it off almost tearfully
* Mandriva '07. Bleah. A bit buggy, not very up-to-date, gone in a week...
* Sabayon 3.26. A cutting-edge Gentoo fork. Probably rocks with newer hardware...on my older ATI-based laptop (Radeon 7500 Mobility 32Meg) was about as explosively unstable as Hillary Clinton at a Chinese fundraiser. Two days and goooodbye!
* Zenwalk 4.4.1. A surprisingly good distro. FAST AS HELL, basic code is stable (Slackware fork), repositories somewhat limited but work OK. Glitches installing sound support and a few other minor bugs says it's not quite ready for the masses yet but it's one to watch and could eventually give Ubuntu a run for their money. XFCE default desktop but the "ZenGnome" project works well.
* Shrugged and tried Edgy again. This time NO mixing of both Automatix and "Easy Ubuntu" thank you very much. The patches in the intervening time had rendered Edgy more stable. The glitch that made me part company months earlier was fixed - if you throw away something on a USB flash drive, it's GONE right now (no trashcan). In it's older form I properly ejected a USB drive I had trashcanned stuff on, and the file system for my main drive had come completely unglued - as in 3,000 system and data files moved automatically into the trash and the OS itself started to crumble. Well they've fixed that in late Edgy and now Feisty - throw something away on a USB or other removable drive, it's gone "right now". Tried Feisty Herd5 and am now on Feisty Beta. This is the answer. No more stupidities caused by Automatix or Easy Ubuntu because those are no longer needed.
In part because I'm not trying for a 3D desktop on my creaky old video card, and I'm not doing RAID, Feisty is now the most stable and functional distro I've tried out of ALL of the above, at least on my system.
See my other comments. Novell isn't supporting OpenSuse repositories, only Suse. Canonical supports Ubuntu repos. So repo access is much more reliable in Ubuntu than OpenSuse.
I may have used the term "instability" too broadly.
Basically...the default repositories as selected "out of the box" were often down. Which lead to auto-update processes giving "file not accessible" reports.
To a geek, the solution is either "wait a bit and try again" or "go find other repositories and connect to them" but to "Grandma Millie", the answer they come up with is "it's broke!"
To "Grandma Millie", the basic stability of the OS gets called into question. Is it really unstable code? Of course not. OpenSuse 10.2 is among the most stable code sets I've ever seen. Has scads of potential. But if the default repositories go down, and I'm supporting this among a user base so I switch to unofficial repositories, MY support volumes are now dependent on somebody else's repos?
That's not a situation I would be comfortable with supporting a dozen or so non-geek friends/relatives, and it's for damnsure NOT a situation Dell should be comfortable with.
Now yeah, they could go with real Suse and use Novell repos. But now costs go up.
Two points here:
* I've played with a LOT of distros looking for one that can be supported among low-tech-level end users. Feisty, even in Beta, is the best I've seen. It has a hell of a lot of potential.
* What are the alternatives? They could go with a commercial distro like Red Hat, Linspire or Suse, but that means more OS costs than a base Vista install. If they do one of the free variants of those (Fedora or OpenSuse) there are stability issues - trust me, I *loved* Fedora Core 6 and if it was just for my personal use, I'd have stuck with it, but the autoinstaller sometimes loads stupid stuff. OpenSuse 10.2 was more stable but the European repositories were often down. I haven't tried Freespire but those magic numbers "1.0" for a version don't inspire confidence. That leaves what, Mepis as a low-end commercial distro? How much support is there for Mepis as opposed to Ubuntu?
Pretty much every Linux geek out there has at least some experience with Ubuntu at this point. That alone is reason to consider Ubuntu. Canonical is going to want this deal to go down, bad. Ubuntu is almost unique as being a free-to-download distro that still has a corporate development base.
My personal favorite distro is actually Zenwalk. Fast as hell Slackware fork with basically all the hard stuff already done. Awesome distro, but...just a few too many minor glitches to load it on "Grandma Millie's" P4 box and expect not to get panic phone calls once a week or so.
It's not us geeks that are the acid test for Linux, it's "Grandma Millie". Like a lot of my fellow political activists who are being hammered by Windows malware. I'm sick of doing bughunts for these folk when they get infested or zombified, flat fed up, and I can't see any better Linux alternative than Ubuntu.
Raid and Feisty aren't getting along well yet. That's a given as of two days ago last I checked the Ubuntu Feisty forum. I know they're working on it :).
I've been playing with the late alpha (Herd5) Feisty and now beta and lemme tell you, saying it's got "potential" is an understatement. WiFi support is worlds better, hardware autodetection is improved and the new auto-installer for codecs as they're needed flat-out rocks.
As long as you're not doing RAID and you're cautious about 3D desktop stuff, Feisty Beta is really ready to now for semi-experienced Linux users and has strong potential as "The Chosen One" of distros. It should eat significant market share as people with older Win98 boxes are forced to upgrade to *something* due to lack of ongoing security support. And it'll tempt a lot of XP folk disgusted with malware issues.
This has to be Dell's top choice and it's due for production release late April '07.
Let's see...I live in a motorhome, use a Verizon EVDO card plugged into a Kyocera KR1 router, the PCMCIA card is attached to dual antennas and a signal booster, I've got 100gal of freshwater storage, 120gal of waste, 660w of solar panels driving a 650lb battery and 2800w inverter, got a 4kw fuel-efficient genset for backup that can drive air conditioning all day on a gallon of gas... Basically I can go a week at a time with zero hookups, and that's with daily showers. And I was able to get a decent Internet signal deep in the AZ desert about 50 miles east of Phoenix, about as remote as I've tried. In urban areas, more like low-grade DLS speeds. Separate cellphone o' course. The back eight feet of the 36ft. motorhome is a garage with drop-down ramp door and Harley in the back. Onboard shuttlecraft baybee :).
Total nomad :).
OpenOffice 2.0.4 had a bunch of minor issues eating MS-Word files '97 through '03 variants. No real "showstoppers" but enough to throw newbies off.
OO2.1 is loads better, at least with Word files and to the lesser extent I've checked, Excel.
If M$ tries to play wacky games with their proprietary file formats, I think the OO community can come up with translators good enough to keep up.
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Aside from the corporate world, if you start doing a bit of support for home users you soon realize how many are jumping to OO just for reasons of cost...and are very happy with the jump. As OO penetrates the home market, some of those people will have some management influence and will start talking about the shift without us geeks needing to do squat.