Linux Misfits

Have you ever heard of migratory penguins? Not one migrating from Windows to Linux but from one distribution or “flavor” to another.  That is what I have been for the past few months.  It becomes my honor to tell you the current state of Linux distributions (with a few notable exceptions) is great!  Freedom is out there and it comes in a flavor that is right for you! This will begin a series of reviews of the various flavors I have tried, and my very subjective opinion of them.

Let me begin with a brief introduction of myself and the test platform, Anduril, my laptop. I am a 50 year old medically retired Linux fan of intermediate experience.  Not a newcomer to Linux, my sojourn began with Xandros 3.0 deluxe edition and progressed to Ubuntu, where I remained for some time. I prefer command line applications to gui for the most part, and use bash scripts to help with some common tasks.  My preferred window manager is Fluxbox.  Anduril is a Dell 1210 xps in plain vanilla mode.  It is a competent, but not exciting, machine.

In this article, I will mention first the flavors that weren’t: the distros that for whatever reason I won’t be reviewing. First up is Gentoo.

Gentoo has fascinated me from the start. Complete freedom. Completely compiled from source using the BSD ports style Portage package manager. This flavor is built from the ground up on your machine, tailored or ported to it. The concept was breathtaking. The reason I will not be reviewing it is, frankly, it is beyond me. This is a flavor for the advanced not the intermediate. I could get no farther than compiling a stable kernel. The fault was not Gentoo’s, but mine.

Sabayon did not make the cut. It was a breeze to install and had a sexy looking desktop… until you tried to do anything with it. On the first install it informed me that an update was due. I did the natural Ubuntu-Geek thing and updated. Borked! Yes the update turned my sexy desktop into a kernel panicking mess. After a quick re-install I learned the addition of any other software had the same effect. If you want Gentoo, don’t think Sabayon is your ticket to the cheap seats.

Kahel, Frugalware and Firefly will not be reviewed, as they could not be installed onto the test platform; their fault, not mine.

There you have it, post number one, from the migratory penguin.

Montetwoshots

What does your list look like? Open Source is a large and growing phenomenon. Many things and people have been at the forefront of this movement. Here we have a list of what Pingdom thinks are the nine most important. I would have to agree.

1980 – Usenet arrives
1983 – Richard Stallman starts the GNU Project
1989 – Work begins on 386BSD
1991 – Linus Torvalds creates Linux
1993 – The founding of Red Hat
1994 – Development starts on MySQL
1996 – Apache takes over the Web
1998 – Netscape open sources its web browser
2004 – Canonical releases Ubuntu

For the full story and a short description of these nine, see this article at royal.pingdom.com

usr

HandBrake at work.

HandBrake is a very useful, and powerful application for ripping DVDs to your hard drive. It has a very easy to use interface that virtually anyone can use, it is the ultimate in being user-friendly. HandBrake is written in C and is cross-platform capable. It is intended to backup DVDs that you have for your own security.

The user interface of HandBrake to say the least is simple, it’s not all drawn out to be configurable, though you can tweak don’t get me wrong. It is just very simple to insert a DVD cue it up and let it do its own job. Though I do have one tip for using HandBrake, when you have your DVD inserted and cued, change the output file name to the movie and .avi. I.E.- movie.avi

To conclude my review i would like to say that I have really, and truly become a fan of this program. It is just easy to use and very useful, in many ways. So do yourselves a favor and install HandBrake on your machine and get to backing up your DVDs now.

On Tuesday, December 8, 2009 the Sourcefire® VRT released an updated Snort® Rule pack providing detection for the vulnerabilities disclosed in Microsoft Security Advisories MS09-070 – MS09-074. These vulnerabilities affect multiple services in Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Project.

The complete VRT Advisory is available here/.

A complete list of new and updated rules is available here

Sourcefire VRT Certified Rules updates are available immediately to subscribers. Registered users of www.snort.org can access VRT rules updates 30-days after their initial release..

For more information on the Sourcefire VRT or information on a subscription please visit here.

I was troubled by a few failed installs of Linux Distros, so I thought since I’m used to using Ubuntu, I would try out one of the many Ubuntu-based Distros coming out these days. I chose Linux Mint, more in depth Linux Mint 8 Helena. It’s the newest release of Mint and is based on the newest release of Ubuntu, 9.10 Karmic. It has some really nice features and is just as responsive and stable as Ubuntu. Mint comes out-of-the-box with allot of the missing codecs and DVD support that Ubuntu doesn’t. It also comes with a few compilers that Ubuntu leaves out of its initial install. The package managers are different in the GUIs, but thats it, Ubuntu and Mint both still use apt to handle the packages. While Ubuntu only has the .deb files for automated installs – Mint handles both .deb files and its own type of file the .mint file.

There are alot of nice features that are included in Mint, like the fact you do not have to install flashplayer-It is already installed. The desktop design and feel is nice. It uses the tried and trued Gnome desktop. The difference in the menus are nice; I like the all-in-one menu integration.  I think after this review I will stick with Mint. I like it, it does what i need it too and I really like the annotations when you open a terminal. So out of it all Mint is awesome, try it out and I would like to think you would like it too.

The Department of Defense ordered 2,200 PS3 consoles. This isn’t the first time that the DoD is using PS3 consoles for supercomputing. In fact, these 2,200 units are going to be added to an existing Linux cluster of 336 PS3s used by the United States Air Force. According to Justification Review Documents, the purchase is all about getting the best value out the DoD’s budget.

The part of this writing that I like to see the most is, “added to an existing “Linux” cluster. The DoD will be installing Linux on these babies!

Thanks to Gizmo.com for the image and the article.

Linux Mint 8

We are hoping that skinnymg1 will be writing a review of Linux Mint in the near future. Keep an eye out for it here and follow @skinnymg1

Penguins Picks

• Process Hacker v1.7 Released – darknet.org.uk
• FreeBSD bug grants root access to unprivileged users – net-security.org
• Securuty review: Good riddance to 2009 – Network World
• Clientless SSL VPN products break web browser domain-based security models – isc.sans.org

As the holidays bring an increase in online shopping, charitable giving and social interaction, consumers and businesses should be on guard against some common scams that occur frequently at this time of year.

View the rest of this post and their Top 10 Holiday threats at net-security.org

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release.

The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5. You can download the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent.

Please consider making a donation and spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release.

More information and the source of this post can be found here