...who are on the lookout for a new fs to entrust with keeping their precious data: make sure to check out btrfs ( http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/ ). It's a really neatly spec'd filesystem (with all the zfsish stuff like data checksumming and so on), developed by Oracle employees under GPLv2, which will feature a converter application for ext3's on-disk-format - so you can migrate from ext3 to the much more feature-packed and modern btrfs without having to mkfs anew.
On a related sidenode: I'm very happy with SGI's xfs right now. ext\d isn't the only player in the field, so please, go out and boldly evaluate available alternatives. You won't be disappointed, I promise.
Having implemented RSA public key encryption/decryption on my malleus, incus and stepdius, I listen to digitally archived music by dd'ing the GnuPG-encrypted files directly into/dev/dsp, deciphering the tunes on the fly, in-ear, using my memorized private key.
NOW HOW DOES YOUR FILTER WORK FOR THAT SETUP, SUCKERS???!11
Sounds like a neat hack indeed - however, I doubt its practical feasibility.
I manage quite a bunch of remote systems, each one equipped with OpenSSH for adminning and OpenNTP for syncing system clocks, yet their local clocks still drift a little over time; sometimes easily up to quarter a minute or more. So if the interval of changing ports is too narrow, one would eventually lock himself out of the remote system because of unsynced clocks and a wrongly computed destination port. Sucks big time.
... rubbing the crytsal ball even more, I can forsee that if VMWare doesn't fix its abhorrent clockskew problems on Linux guests, and the hype^Wtrend towards virtualization continues, it's going to be a real mess for anyone who's willing to try such a setup in said virtualized environments - though I'll save that rant for a more fitting time, I guess;)
At the end of the day, choosing some non-standard port in the 30000+-range for sshd (mostly to save logrotate some work by keeping futile scriptkiddie-login-attempts out, but anyway) and turning off password-authentification in favour of pubkeys still provides enough security for just about anybody. Services that don't allow for such measures may be tunnelled over SSH (or e. g. OpenVPN, for more demanding protocols/apps) with ease, again rendering the project's idea somewhat moot to me.
Unhappy with *[Uu]buntu's way of installing, not leaving many choices for the "IT professional"? Use the alternative LiveCD. Note you don't need to "secure the system", since the default install does not bind any sockets listening. I actually consider it one of Ubuntu's strongest feats that you are not facing any choice of package selection whatsoever, so you can be sure you will end up with a sanely organized system you can build upon, if you want, or just walk on with the preset choices.
Next hilarious thing on his list is the boot menu - if you're actually an advanced-enough user to know about the possibility of testing your memory at bootup, I figure you also know about how to hit Escape to have GRUB's full menu appear.
He's got one point on fonts, as there can never be enough fonts included in an install. I personally do like Gentium though, and consider freetype's font rendering as Ubuntu sports it very pleasing to the eye.
On page two, where he's going to whine about "Proliferating package managers", the author imho show severe lack of understanding concerning Debian-ish package management. Well, let there be a lightweight update-checking-utility that does not come up with the whole bunch of X11-windows that is synaptic. It's a good thing it's there - it uses the same backends as apt-get, aptitude, synpatic, dpkg, adept, whatthefuckever use, and it saves you from manually checking for updates every so often. So would you please stop being anal about it? Thanks.
Also on page 2: "At any rate, the only way to judge how useful a package might be is to use it yourself." Oh wow, movie at eleven. I won't even comment on this, Cpt. Obvious to the rescue.
Page 3 is about security, and once again tha author seems clueless to me. An "intruder" on a default Ubuntu system can pretty much by definition (due to the lack of running network-interfacing daemons) only be a local attacker with physical access to your machine. Well, in case of physical access you're hosed anyway. The point in criticizing default group memberships for the "desktop"-class of users is also beyond me. Well, that is how UNIX tends to work, and if it weren't for the desktop user to be able to, e. g., adjust the sound system's mixer levels or burn a CD, what's left for "desktop" usage to be done? No access via `sudo` means no (write-)access to other account's files and data. Besides, if you let people you don't trust gain local access to a machine via their very own personal account, you should probably check for your very own mental sanity/security first.
My point is, if Ubuntu actually behaved like he now states he'd like it to in his article, it'd be a flamefest of a different kind: namely criticizing how Ubuntu lacked in "usability", and how it would shy away "novice users".
Ubuntu is a very fine choice for someone starting out with GNU/Linux or computers all together. It's also a fine choice for someone more knowledgeable, since it's perfectly possible to stray away from the sane defaults the Ubuntu devs chose for the distro. If you happen to find your demands outstrip Ubuntu's capabilities, you're probably better off by creating a distribution of your own.
Whilst skimming over the About-Section of the page, this tool's description reminded me of heise's "offline update" ( http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/80682 ). It's an alternative tool, allowing the download of selected Microsoft Windows update packs for later, offline (re-)use. Nice to have - if you're still on Windows, that is. Wonder if/when it's gonna be shot down as well.
I'm very interested in everything Free Software, and have been following developments around GPLv3 and its adoption rather closely. Apart from some flaimbaits proclaiming how $CORP was going to abandon GCC (or anything else) after going for v3 of GPL, there is no evidence whatsoever supporting that this might actually be considered by anyone important - or in case there is, it wasn't visible enough for me to spot it.
So, user number 561269, would you please elaborate on the subject and cite any credible source supporting your view that a major contributor to GCC is considering to fork and "have it their way"? Your posting thoroughly lacks that kind of information right now, and therefore I think it deserves being tagged bogus or useless.
Thanks in advance for clearing this up.
- c0l0 (who's growing tired of all this anti-GPLv3-FUD swellig so much recently fast)
In the article, there's a Vista technology referred to as "Rights Management Services (RMS) Client" - I guess I'm not the only one who's midldy amused about the acronym used for that service;-) What's especially delicate about it is that the service's name uses the term "Rights", where many who are in favour of digital freedom would probably deem "Restrictions" a much better fit.
I bet if Richard Stallman were dead by now (please note that I'm glad and happy that he's alive and kickin'!), there'd be a chance he'd be rotating in his grave at high speeds because of this.
Not quite correct. Still nice.
on
Fedora 7 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's not Xorg 7.3 that's packaged with Fedora, but Xorg 7.2 with the xorg-server 1.3.0 release. It still features very interesting software, like, for example, noveau, a free reimplementation of NVIDIA's hardware-accelerated 3D-drivers (still work in progress, of course), as well as a kernel patched with the all-new and highly anticipated mac802.11-subsystem that whould yield much better compatibility and performance for all things WLAN. I also like this idea of "Revisor", an application easily allowing for building customized bootable (install-)media with specific packages only.
...it would be possible to have commented disassemblies of everything that a computer can run openly available. That would be a lot better than the situation we have right now in SOME cases (by far not all of course - but please note you could still publish sourcecode in a more high-level language if you felt like it;)) when there are only legally encumbered BLOBs available for crucial components of a system like, for example, graphics or network drivers, which you may execute, but not touch in any other way (in the US at least, that is).
Summa summarum, I think it's better to live in a world with copyright in place. I just - like many other fellow advocates of Free Software - would wish for more people to publish their works under more permissive and freedom-granting licenses: to have art, culture, knowledge and wisdom spread for the greater good, and not just immediate, monetary profit in the first place.
Bottom line is: supporting Free Software and/or the GNU GPL does not automagically make you speak out against copyright per se at all.
To license (creative) work under a Creative Commons license does NOT mean to have that stuff "uncopyrighted" - not even outside of Europe, where copyright is mandatory and cannot be renounced at all (except for by the death of the work's author having passed for some 70 years or so). "Uncopyrighted" would probably mean to have the work put into the public domain - that's, however, not true for the CC-licenses, nor is it for any other "free" license (like GNU GPL, GNU FDL, BSDL, MITL and Co.) I know. All these licenses cleverly make use of copyright to guarantee certain freedoms and/or restrictions.
Alternativ approaches to implementing subsystems of the Linux kernel are often developed concurrently, in parallel, and there's a system you can compare to darwinistic evolution that decides (in most cases) which one of a given set of workalikes makes it into the mainline tree in the end. That's why the Linux kernel itself incorporates, or tries to adhere to, a UNIX-like philosophy - make a large system consist of small interchangeable parts that work well together and do one task as close to perfect as possible. That's why there are so many generic solutions to crucial things - like "md", a subsystem providing RAID-levels for any given blockdevice, or lvm, providing volume management for any given blockdevice. Once those parts are in place, you can easily mingle their functions together - md works very nice on top of lvm, and even so vice versa, since all block devices you "treat" with one of lvm's or md's functions/features, again, result in a block device. You can format one of these blockdevices with a filesystem of choice (even ZFS would be perfectly possible, I suppose), and then incorporate this filesystem by mounting to whereever you happen to feel like it. There are other concepts deep down in there in the kernel's inner workings that closely resemble this pattern of adaptability, like, for example, the vfs-layer, which defines a set of reuqirements every file-system has to adhere and comply to. This ensures a minimal set of viable functionality for any given filesystem, makes sure those crucial parts of the code are well-tested and optimized (since everyone _has_ to use them), and also makes it easier to implement new ideas (or filesystems, in this sepcific case).
Now, zfs provides at least two of those already existing and very well working facilites, namely md and lvm, completely on its own. That's what's called "code-duplication" (or rather "feature-duplication" - I suppose that's more appropriate here), and it's generally known as a bad thing. I do notice that zfs happens to be very well-engineered, but this somewhat monolithic architecture still bears the probability of failure: suppose there's a crucial flaw found somewhere deep down in this complex system zfs inevitably is - chances are you've got to overhaul all of its interconnecting parts massivley.
Suppose there's a filesystem developed in the future that's even better than zfs, or at least better suited to given tasks or workloads - wouldn't it be a shame if it had to implement mirroring, striping and volume-management again on its own?
Take an approach like md and lvm, and that's not even worth wasting a single thought on. The systems are already there, and they're working fantastically (I'm an avid user of md and lvm for years by now, and I frankly cannot imagine anything doing these jobs noticeably better). I'd say that this system of interchangeable functional equivalents, and the philosophy of "one tool doing one job" is absolutely ideal for a distributed development model like Linux'.
It seems to be working since the early nineties. There must be something right about it, I suppose.
and surprising to me at the same time - HP always seemed to be "one of the good guys", fostering and supporting GNU/Linux and free software on many occassions (for instance, HP provides the quite powerful infrastructure for kernel.org).
I was going to go buy a HP notebook some time later this year, but as things turn out this way, I'll stick to Lenovo/IBM once more again...
This should also help keep cleaning personnel out of the inner sanctums of the datacenter, and therefore prevent downtimes due to accidentally plugged-out cables and stuff. And even in case it fails to keep them _out_, it might keep them _inside_ for a loooong time. Relativley well-preserved.
But still not impossible. And those who rely on such dubious activities will still have the opportunity to fake their identities, which leads the whole endeavor ad absurdum, and leaves Joe Average stripped off of a great deal of the little privacy people (especially in the UK, spycams everywhere) still have left in our oh-so-great digital age. So let's just implement it anyways, despite 28K people publicly speaking out against it, because it's such a great idea... not.
The virus scanner installed at the secretary's machine at the company I worked for fell for a false positive in december last year (that glitch even received some coverage by meainstream media in Europe, as Trend Micro - or whatever, personally I don't know any anti virus software package good enough to tell them apart from each other;) - identified some Windows-specific and viable system file as a malicious stub of bits), and our CTO immediately erased the installation. If I had come to work a few hours earlier, I probably would already have propagated the info about the false alarm I got from colleagues on irc, and we'd be running Windows XP on her box, still.
This way though, it's running Ubuntu 6.10, and everyone's happy with that. So I find i hard to say that this false positive actually hurt us. Somehow, I'm glad it happened - another system that's easy to admin and use added to our network, one of the few giving me headaches removed. Win-win.
...obviously don't know what they're talking about all too well.
Other Linux-based projects targeting firewall and network server include ClarkConnect, IPCop, m0n0wall, and Smoothwall. Unless m0n0wall hasn't switched kernels, they're still using FreeBSD as their basis.
The Cisco VPN Client sucks arse. There is, however, a much more comfortable and less-sucky free as in speech userspace-implementation for that kind of VPN available at http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/
I use it to connect to customer's not having set up OpenVPN every day, and it never failed on me yet. Give it a try, you won't regret it.:-)
Madwifi drivers are not free, as they require a binary-only, proprietary Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL, not to be confused with freedesktop.org HAL/hald) running, which is in fact even worse than platform-agnostic firmware which is just shoved over the bus to the device and running on an ASIC there. The HAL needs to be present and compiled for every Platform you're going to run the Atheros-powered card on.
The OpenBSD-folks have developed a free as in speech replacement for the binary-only HAL provided by Atheros, but madwifi did not care to adopt it at all - which leaves their true intentions somewhat dubious to me (and a few concerned others).
Bottom line is: I would not buy Atheros-based cards, and rather go for RaLink or ZyDas. Though watch out, as the latter company recently has been bought by Atheros, therefore suggesting that either their future devices will come with equally dumb restrictions/dependencies applied on their drivers, or their excellent product line vanish completely.
Basically everything powered by ZyDas and RaLink-Chipsets works flawlessly with GNU/Linux and the Free/OpenBSD. You can grab those off of EBay dirt cheap in large quantities, mostly from Power Sellers/commercial shops. Big-brand vendors with "the good stuff" on their boards I've personally seen yet were GigaByte (for MiniPCI), ASUS (PCI), and a crapload of others with ZyDas and Prism (for USB - including, for instance, NetGear). There's also an emerging (well, maybe they exist for ages, but I've not known the company up until recently) manufacturer for networking gear called "TP-LINK" which sells virtually everything from RaLink. I happen to have a "TP-LINK TL-WN321G" (usb2 full speed) adapter which features a RaLink chip supported by the rt73-usb driver just perfectly. Cost me 9 Euro in germany.
...plenty of ignorant MSFT-aplogists' bitching about how the "zealots" are going "mad" about "Windows being teh suxx" and all after this campaign has been announced, but, please, care to tell me where the FSF fails to tell the truth with such nifty things as "signed drivers only", "protected audio path" an the like coming after consumers, which are being promised an overall richer and safer experience in casual computing, but are being entirely stripped of their fair use rights by these "added features" instead?
Vista - it's a trap thing, really. Break out as long as you can.
I upgraded about 10 boxes or so from Dapper to Edgy - mostly Kubuntu, though, but in various stages of progress for Edgy's release cycle sind Knot 1 - (Edgy is a really nice distro at last, Dapper held many more small annoyances for me, personally) via apt (`sed -i "s/dapper/edgy/"/etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade`) and had no problems whatsoever. In fact, everything worked out a lot smoother than I had expected. So it may have been "a nightmare" _for some_ (how can upgrading a BROWSER turn out a nightmare? At least when there's a working functional equivalent still left on the box...), but upgrading to Edgy is not a nightmare _in general._
Slashdot Mirror
...who are on the lookout for a new fs to entrust with keeping their precious data: make sure to check out btrfs ( http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/ ). It's a really neatly spec'd filesystem (with all the zfsish stuff like data checksumming and so on), developed by Oracle employees under GPLv2, which will feature a converter application for ext3's on-disk-format - so you can migrate from ext3 to the much more feature-packed and modern btrfs without having to mkfs anew.
On a related sidenode: I'm very happy with SGI's xfs right now. ext\d isn't the only player in the field, so please, go out and boldly evaluate available alternatives. You won't be disappointed, I promise.
Having implemented RSA public key encryption/decryption on my malleus, incus and stepdius, I listen to digitally archived music by dd'ing the GnuPG-encrypted files directly into /dev/dsp, deciphering the tunes on the fly, in-ear, using my memorized private key.
NOW HOW DOES YOUR FILTER WORK FOR THAT SETUP, SUCKERS???!11
Sounds like a neat hack indeed - however, I doubt its practical feasibility.
... rubbing the crytsal ball even more, I can forsee that if VMWare doesn't fix its abhorrent clockskew problems on Linux guests, and the hype^Wtrend towards virtualization continues, it's going to be a real mess for anyone who's willing to try such a setup in said virtualized environments - though I'll save that rant for a more fitting time, I guess ;)
I manage quite a bunch of remote systems, each one equipped with OpenSSH for adminning and OpenNTP for syncing system clocks, yet their local clocks still drift a little over time; sometimes easily up to quarter a minute or more. So if the interval of changing ports is too narrow, one would eventually lock himself out of the remote system because of unsynced clocks and a wrongly computed destination port. Sucks big time.
At the end of the day, choosing some non-standard port in the 30000+-range for sshd (mostly to save logrotate some work by keeping futile scriptkiddie-login-attempts out, but anyway) and turning off password-authentification in favour of pubkeys still provides enough security for just about anybody. Services that don't allow for such measures may be tunnelled over SSH (or e. g. OpenVPN, for more demanding protocols/apps) with ease, again rendering the project's idea somewhat moot to me.
Unhappy with *[Uu]buntu's way of installing, not leaving many choices for the "IT professional"?
Use the alternative LiveCD. Note you don't need to "secure the system", since the default install does not bind any sockets listening. I actually consider it one of Ubuntu's strongest feats that you are not facing any choice of package selection whatsoever, so you can be sure you will end up with a sanely organized system you can build upon, if you want, or just walk on with the preset choices.
Next hilarious thing on his list is the boot menu - if you're actually an advanced-enough user to know about the possibility of testing your memory at bootup, I figure you also know about how to hit Escape to have GRUB's full menu appear.
He's got one point on fonts, as there can never be enough fonts included in an install. I personally do like Gentium though, and consider freetype's font rendering as Ubuntu sports it very pleasing to the eye.
On page two, where he's going to whine about "Proliferating package managers", the author imho show severe lack of understanding concerning Debian-ish package management. Well, let there be a lightweight update-checking-utility that does not come up with the whole bunch of X11-windows that is synaptic. It's a good thing it's there - it uses the same backends as apt-get, aptitude, synpatic, dpkg, adept, whatthefuckever use, and it saves you from manually checking for updates every so often. So would you please stop being anal about it? Thanks.
Also on page 2: "At any rate, the only way to judge how useful a package might be is to use it yourself." Oh wow, movie at eleven. I won't even comment on this, Cpt. Obvious to the rescue.
Page 3 is about security, and once again tha author seems clueless to me. An "intruder" on a default Ubuntu system can pretty much by definition (due to the lack of running network-interfacing daemons) only be a local attacker with physical access to your machine. Well, in case of physical access you're hosed anyway.
The point in criticizing default group memberships for the "desktop"-class of users is also beyond me. Well, that is how UNIX tends to work, and if it weren't for the desktop user to be able to, e. g., adjust the sound system's mixer levels or burn a CD, what's left for "desktop" usage to be done? No access via `sudo` means no (write-)access to other account's files and data. Besides, if you let people you don't trust gain local access to a machine via their very own personal account, you should probably check for your very own mental sanity/security first.
My point is, if Ubuntu actually behaved like he now states he'd like it to in his article, it'd be a flamefest of a different kind: namely criticizing how Ubuntu lacked in "usability", and how it would shy away "novice users".
Ubuntu is a very fine choice for someone starting out with GNU/Linux or computers all together. It's also a fine choice for someone more knowledgeable, since it's perfectly possible to stray away from the sane defaults the Ubuntu devs chose for the distro. If you happen to find your demands outstrip Ubuntu's capabilities, you're probably better off by creating a distribution of your own.
My 2 cent.
Now that one's easy! `ed`. It's the standard editor for a reason, after all.
Whilst skimming over the About-Section of the page, this tool's description reminded me of heise's "offline update" ( http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/80682 ). It's an alternative tool, allowing the download of selected Microsoft Windows update packs for later, offline (re-)use. Nice to have - if you're still on Windows, that is. Wonder if/when it's gonna be shot down as well.
I'm very interested in everything Free Software, and have been following developments around GPLv3 and its adoption rather closely. Apart from some flaimbaits proclaiming how $CORP was going to abandon GCC (or anything else) after going for v3 of GPL, there is no evidence whatsoever supporting that this might actually be considered by anyone important - or in case there is, it wasn't visible enough for me to spot it.
So, user number 561269, would you please elaborate on the subject and cite any credible source supporting your view that a major contributor to GCC is considering to fork and "have it their way"? Your posting thoroughly lacks that kind of information right now, and therefore I think it deserves being tagged bogus or useless.
Thanks in advance for clearing this up.
- c0l0
(who's growing tired of all this anti-GPLv3-FUD swellig so much recently fast)
In the article, there's a Vista technology referred to as "Rights Management Services (RMS) Client" - I guess I'm not the only one who's midldy amused about the acronym used for that service ;-)
What's especially delicate about it is that the service's name uses the term "Rights", where many who are in favour of digital freedom would probably deem "Restrictions" a much better fit.
I bet if Richard Stallman were dead by now (please note that I'm glad and happy that he's alive and kickin'!), there'd be a chance he'd be rotating in his grave at high speeds because of this.
It's not Xorg 7.3 that's packaged with Fedora, but Xorg 7.2 with the xorg-server 1.3.0 release. It still features very interesting software, like, for example, noveau, a free reimplementation of NVIDIA's hardware-accelerated 3D-drivers (still work in progress, of course), as well as a kernel patched with the all-new and highly anticipated mac802.11-subsystem that whould yield much better compatibility and performance for all things WLAN. I also like this idea of "Revisor", an application easily allowing for building customized bootable (install-)media with specific packages only.
...it would be possible to have commented disassemblies of everything that a computer can run openly available. That would be a lot better than the situation we have right now in SOME cases (by far not all of course - but please note you could still publish sourcecode in a more high-level language if you felt like it ;)) when there are only legally encumbered BLOBs available for crucial components of a system like, for example, graphics or network drivers, which you may execute, but not touch in any other way (in the US at least, that is).
Summa summarum, I think it's better to live in a world with copyright in place.
I just - like many other fellow advocates of Free Software - would wish for more people to publish their works under more permissive and freedom-granting licenses: to have art, culture, knowledge and wisdom spread for the greater good, and not just immediate, monetary profit in the first place.
Bottom line is: supporting Free Software and/or the GNU GPL does not automagically make you speak out against copyright per se at all.
To license (creative) work under a Creative Commons license does NOT mean to have that stuff "uncopyrighted" - not even outside of Europe, where copyright is mandatory and cannot be renounced at all (except for by the death of the work's author having passed for some 70 years or so).
"Uncopyrighted" would probably mean to have the work put into the public domain - that's, however, not true for the CC-licenses, nor is it for any other "free" license (like GNU GPL, GNU FDL, BSDL, MITL and Co.) I know. All these licenses cleverly make use of copyright to guarantee certain freedoms and/or restrictions.
Alternativ approaches to implementing subsystems of the Linux kernel are often developed concurrently, in parallel, and there's a system you can compare to darwinistic evolution that decides (in most cases) which one of a given set of workalikes makes it into the mainline tree in the end. That's why the Linux kernel itself incorporates, or tries to adhere to, a UNIX-like philosophy - make a large system consist of small interchangeable parts that work well together and do one task as close to perfect as possible.
That's why there are so many generic solutions to crucial things - like "md", a subsystem providing RAID-levels for any given blockdevice, or lvm, providing volume management for any given blockdevice. Once those parts are in place, you can easily mingle their functions together - md works very nice on top of lvm, and even so vice versa, since all block devices you "treat" with one of lvm's or md's functions/features, again, result in a block device. You can format one of these blockdevices with a filesystem of choice (even ZFS would be perfectly possible, I suppose), and then incorporate this filesystem by mounting to whereever you happen to feel like it.
There are other concepts deep down in there in the kernel's inner workings that closely resemble this pattern of adaptability, like, for example, the vfs-layer, which defines a set of reuqirements every file-system has to adhere and comply to. This ensures a minimal set of viable functionality for any given filesystem, makes sure those crucial parts of the code are well-tested and optimized (since everyone _has_ to use them), and also makes it easier to implement new ideas (or filesystems, in this sepcific case).
Now, zfs provides at least two of those already existing and very well working facilites, namely md and lvm, completely on its own. That's what's called "code-duplication" (or rather "feature-duplication" - I suppose that's more appropriate here), and it's generally known as a bad thing.
I do notice that zfs happens to be very well-engineered, but this somewhat monolithic architecture still bears the probability of failure: suppose there's a crucial flaw found somewhere deep down in this complex system zfs inevitably is - chances are you've got to overhaul all of its interconnecting parts massivley.
Suppose there's a filesystem developed in the future that's even better than zfs, or at least better suited to given tasks or workloads - wouldn't it be a shame if it had to implement mirroring, striping and volume-management again on its own?
Take an approach like md and lvm, and that's not even worth wasting a single thought on. The systems are already there, and they're working fantastically (I'm an avid user of md and lvm for years by now, and I frankly cannot imagine anything doing these jobs noticeably better). I'd say that this system of interchangeable functional equivalents, and the philosophy of "one tool doing one job" is absolutely ideal for a distributed development model like Linux'.
It seems to be working since the early nineties. There must be something right about it, I suppose.
Bzzzt, wrong. Linux is an operatings system kernel. No more, no less.
and surprising to me at the same time - HP always seemed to be "one of the good guys", fostering and supporting GNU/Linux and free software on many occassions (for instance, HP provides the quite powerful infrastructure for kernel.org).
I was going to go buy a HP notebook some time later this year, but as things turn out this way, I'll stick to Lenovo/IBM once more again...
This should also help keep cleaning personnel out of the inner sanctums of the datacenter, and therefore prevent downtimes due to accidentally plugged-out cables and stuff. And even in case it fails to keep them _out_, it might keep them _inside_ for a loooong time. Relativley well-preserved.
:/
I'm such a morbid bastard at times
But still not impossible. And those who rely on such dubious activities will still have the opportunity to fake their identities, which leads the whole endeavor ad absurdum, and leaves Joe Average stripped off of a great deal of the little privacy people (especially in the UK, spycams everywhere) still have left in our oh-so-great digital age. So let's just implement it anyways, despite 28K people publicly speaking out against it, because it's such a great idea... not.
"Hi, welcome to the Department of Redundancy Dept. and hello!"
The virus scanner installed at the secretary's machine at the company I worked for fell for a false positive in december last year (that glitch even received some coverage by meainstream media in Europe, as Trend Micro - or whatever, personally I don't know any anti virus software package good enough to tell them apart from each other ;) - identified some Windows-specific and viable system file as a malicious stub of bits), and our CTO immediately erased the installation.
If I had come to work a few hours earlier, I probably would already have propagated the info about the false alarm I got from colleagues on irc, and we'd be running Windows XP on her box, still.
This way though, it's running Ubuntu 6.10, and everyone's happy with that. So I find i hard to say that this false positive actually hurt us. Somehow, I'm glad it happened - another system that's easy to admin and use added to our network, one of the few giving me headaches removed. Win-win.
The Cisco VPN Client sucks arse. There is, however, a much more comfortable and less-sucky free as in speech userspace-implementation for that kind of VPN available at http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/
:-)
I use it to connect to customer's not having set up OpenVPN every day, and it never failed on me yet. Give it a try, you won't regret it.
Madwifi drivers are not free, as they require a binary-only, proprietary Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL, not to be confused with freedesktop.org HAL/hald) running, which is in fact even worse than platform-agnostic firmware which is just shoved over the bus to the device and running on an ASIC there. The HAL needs to be present and compiled for every Platform you're going to run the Atheros-powered card on.
The OpenBSD-folks have developed a free as in speech replacement for the binary-only HAL provided by Atheros, but madwifi did not care to adopt it at all - which leaves their true intentions somewhat dubious to me (and a few concerned others).
Bottom line is: I would not buy Atheros-based cards, and rather go for RaLink or ZyDas. Though watch out, as the latter company recently has been bought by Atheros, therefore suggesting that either their future devices will come with equally dumb restrictions/dependencies applied on their drivers, or their excellent product line vanish completely.
Basically everything powered by ZyDas and RaLink-Chipsets works flawlessly with GNU/Linux and the Free/OpenBSD. You can grab those off of EBay dirt cheap in large quantities, mostly from Power Sellers/commercial shops. Big-brand vendors with "the good stuff" on their boards I've personally seen yet were GigaByte (for MiniPCI), ASUS (PCI), and a crapload of others with ZyDas and Prism (for USB - including, for instance, NetGear).
There's also an emerging (well, maybe they exist for ages, but I've not known the company up until recently) manufacturer for networking gear called "TP-LINK" which sells virtually everything from RaLink. I happen to have a "TP-LINK TL-WN321G" (usb2 full speed) adapter which features a RaLink chip supported by the rt73-usb driver just perfectly. Cost me 9 Euro in germany.
Hth.
...plenty of ignorant MSFT-aplogists' bitching about how the "zealots" are going "mad" about "Windows being teh suxx" and all after this campaign has been announced, but, please, care to tell me where the FSF fails to tell the truth with such nifty things as "signed drivers only", "protected audio path" an the like coming after consumers, which are being promised an overall richer and safer experience in casual computing, but are being entirely stripped of their fair use rights by these "added features" instead?
Vista - it's a trap thing, really. Break out as long as you can.
I, for one, suggest "AlienatingWare".
I upgraded about 10 boxes or so from Dapper to Edgy - mostly Kubuntu, though, but in various stages of progress for Edgy's release cycle sind Knot 1 - (Edgy is a really nice distro at last, Dapper held many more small annoyances for me, personally) via apt (`sed -i "s/dapper/edgy/" /etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade`) and had no problems whatsoever. In fact, everything worked out a lot smoother than I had expected. So it may have been "a nightmare" _for some_ (how can upgrading a BROWSER turn out a nightmare? At least when there's a working functional equivalent still left on the box...), but upgrading to Edgy is not a nightmare _in general._
Give it a try, I say. You won't be dissappointed.