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Re: [ALUG] Why Do You Use Linux?
by Simon Royal 22 Dec '10

22 Dec '10

James Great email and yes I did read it all. Linux is just about ready to jump in as a realistic competitor against Windows/Mac for the average user. I like Ubuntu 9 and 10 much better than 8. Im not a KDE fan, but I do like Lxde and some of the lighter ones like openbox. CrunchBang, Mint, Mint LXDE, WattOS, Xubuntu even Puppy are great for older machines. But I find in general Linux requires less heavy hardware than Windows so even a modest P3/P4 can run the latest gnome or kde based offerings. Each OS has its place and it is down to what you do on your machine, the environment you are in and the apps you require that defines your OS of choice, but with more and more things being done online and with developers writing more mainstream apps for Linux your OS is slowly becoming irrelevant. I for one am glad to be going down the steep learning curve of Linux and joining such a welcoming and helpful group again. Simon ----- Original Message ----- From:James Freer To:main@lists.alug.org.uk Subject:Re: [ALUG] Why Do You Use Linux? Good idea this post... be interesting to see where folk are coming from! as they say. 2007 i only had an old machine that could still just about run win98. I was given a couple of P3 1ghz. I was going to put win2k on one of them but after a browse in PC world in Ipswich i thought i'd give Ubuntu (ver 6.10 CD enclosed) a go. I had read about Red hat back in about 2000 but didn't get round to trying it. My father had just died and i found myself coping with my mother who was then diagnosed with Alzheimer's. While i was coping with her (a rather stressful disease to cope with to say the least) i tinkered with linux and read as much as i could. I could run all the applications i wanted to in linux apart from a mind mapping app, autocad, turbocad and a scanner. Most of the applications better than a doze equivalent although i'd used OO, Thunderbird and other common ones. But i also wanted to know more about linux. It seemed to me that unix in late 80s and early 90s didn't see the potential of the mini or home PC - microsoft jumped in there. What i liked was the cli - made almost redundant by microsoft and yet very much at the heart of the earlier windows. I have a liking for the simple but effective things in life - like my seven classic cars... there's nothing i can't do on them - can't do a lot on modern vehicles. On linux i enjoy the mix of graphical and cli. To me it's not either or - each have their place e.g. i like llgal (cli) for photo albums [http://jessejazza.110mb.com/photos/dogs/best-09/index.html] but i'll stay with graphical text editors. I got a better machine later and ran ubuntu 8.04 (tried the 9's and 10's and weren't to my liking), and have just bought my first new machine. I'm tinkering at present with what distro to use for a while as i've decided to move on from ubuntu. I'm also GOING TO do a Gentoo, slackware or LFS installation in the New Year - i've been promising to do this ever since i started using linux and still haven't got round to it. The linux 'MUST DO' they say 'then you'll know linux' - yet i've failed to get round to it so far. Perhaps it's worth a mention: what's the future of linux? Linux has certainly come into it's own for websites due to the security. Windows holds it's place in the market for office use and at home. Too many distros i feel give linux a bad name and a fair number produce more than the main three desktops. Yes; linux is about choice but i also wonder about the long term of too much choice. Ubuntu is produced in so many forms now and yet the project is still in the red... and that can't continue for much longer. Do i donate; yes to releases that don't have problems. The three distros i've tried where i feel they have gone the extra mile are Pclos, Mint and Mepis yet these are one-man-bands. But each distro i've tried i find there are things i like and then things i don't. Mepis (kde) ran nicely and faster than ubuntu on the P3 - Mepis gets first place for kde imo. Pclos have taken a step that i feel is significant for the future - 'mini' releases. [This Texstar fellow intrigues me... seems full of new ideas - e.g. in pclos before you can use synaptic (i think there the only rpm distro using APT) one runs a speed test and thus select the fastest download server (don't think anyone else does that)]. The basics are on the CD and you add your selection. With ubuntu i'd remove evolution and a lot of stuff i didn't like and put on Thunderbird and so on. So why don't distros save themselves development time and use mini versions for releases? Another development taking place it seems is the replacement for gnome. Gnome is hard to package (apparently) - slackware have dropped it and as other distros seem to be developing xfce maybe we'll be left with xfce and kde. xfce i gather sits on gnome partly and there's also standalone xfce on some distros. But then again certain distros seem to be keen to develop enlightenment, openbox, lxde - lighter versions for older machines! The majority of users probably have a dual core machine - perhaps the next generation of machines are going to be much more expensive! Currently computers are very cheap compared with what they were a decade ago. Quality certainly down - the motherboard on my old compaq P3 is vastly superior in my view. Bit like a landrover compared with a car - all rugged and reliable. Anyway rant over - got to ice the Christmas cake. james On 22 December 2010 14:59, Mark Rogers <mark(a)quarella.co.uk> wrote: > On 22/12/10 14:24, mick wrote: >> >> Don't get me wrong, I'm not naive enough to think that "linux is >> inherently more secure than windows", nor am I blind to the problems of >> application level exploits running in that universal firewall bypass we >> all love (i.e the browser, which to make things even worse may run >> flash). But I do like the fact that Linux in all its variants is a >> very, very, small and specialist target so malware developers leave it >> alone. > > I disagree with this. I agree that Linux isn't absolutely bullet proof, but > there are a number of reasons why Linux is better prepared for the threat > than Windows. The fact that anyone can audit the code really is a strength, > but also the fact (that you alluded to) that with Linux, most of the > software you want is an apt-get away, rather than downloaded from PirateBay > or similar. The package management also makes it a lot easier to keep things > up to date; Windows does a reasonable job these days of installing system > updates but you're very much on your own when it comes to application > updates, and the myriad of "update available, click here to install" > messages you get on Windows is a gift to trojan writers. > > Windows has improved from a position of real weakness (eg the Windows > equivalent of sudo), but it still suffers from things like driver > validation, which (because most aren't) requires that users get used to > clicking past the warnings. > > And the worst browser is still IE (at least with all the legacy versions out > there - and a lot of systems that cannot update past IE6), which although it > is way better now than it used to be has again started weak then got better, > rather than starting strong where most Linux applications have taken > security seriously for longer. Of-course it "helps" that the cost of a > Windows licence is substantially offset on most PCs by kickbacks from > security software trials, so the incentive isn't fully there to fix the > problem. Whilst the business model includes selling updates, it's "useful" > that old versions have problems that you have to pay to upgrade, and > upgrading between distro releases is way easier than between Windows > versions in any case. > > Linux distros would be wise not to be complacent (but I don't think they > generally are). Being a smaller target is part of why Linux is currently > safer but it really is not the whole story. A bigger concern would be a > major shift to closed-source drivers and applications on Linux (it's no > coincidence that Flash is one of the biggest problems right now). > > -- > Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 > Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG > > > _______________________________________________ > main(a)lists.alug.org.uk > http://www.alug.org.uk/ > http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main > Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! > _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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Mint 10
by Simon Royal 22 Dec '10

22 Dec '10

Hi Has anyone tried the new 'Julia' version of Linux Mint. Its version 10. I used Linux Mint 9 LXDE a few months ago and it was amazing. Stable, gorgeous and very fast even on a P3 500mhz. Im thinking of putting 10 on my ThinkPad when it arrives. Simon

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Xmas Dinner
by seansurfcentre＠aol.com 20 Dec '10

20 Dec '10

Hi all, wife has gone down with the sickness bug today so I cannot come tonight after all. My apologies and hope to see you in 2011. Best wishes Sean Myles

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[ALUG Announce] Christmas! 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 19 Dec '10

19 Dec '10

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back next week, Monday 20th December, at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://www.pjmcgintys.co.uk/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. We're usually to be found in the lowest section of the bar, near the library entrance to the pub. This month, being Christmas and all, we're going to see if we can get together enough ppl to go for a Christmas meal. There hasn't really been enough demand to warrant a pre-booking, so please turn up promptly at eight and we'll head off at about quarter past, to whereever we feel like it on the night. There should be four or five of us, at least, I hope. If you're going to be late, you're welcome to email me for my mobile number so that you can catch up with us when you arrive (or the hardcore few may return to McGinty's after the meal). All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. Hopefully, see some of you there! Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Alternatives to SMTP when the network fails
by Mark Rogers 19 Dec '10

19 Dec '10

Can't think of a good subject for this, sorry! I have a customer with an ADSL line and direct delivery of email via SMTP to their external IP (into Exchange). The MX record for the domain points to one of my servers running Postfix, which basically forwards mail to their IP if it is up. So far so good.... However, they've just suffered a BT-inflicted ADSL outage that's lasted several days and they want to have a backup for the future. They're going down the 3G backup route (using a router which falls over from ADSL to 3G), but this will give them a dynamic IP when on 3G and, more importantly, we've found out the hard way that in general 3G providers do not allow us to make incoming connections (whether on port 25 or any other). So, my question is: what is the best solution to this? I have come up with several options: - Move the email to POP3 delivery, ie mail ends up in a POP3 mailbox on my server, they collect periodically from that box. From experience this causes problems with Exchange, although I don't recall what exactly. - Provide some kind of POP3/IMAP access to the Postfix mailqueue, so in normal use mail comes via SMTP, but when they switch to 3G they can access the mailqueue (using POP3 or IMAP, and then by extension via webmail) as a temporary measure, with the mail coming in via SMTP as normal once the connection is restored. However, I have no idea if this is even possible? - Drop everything to a POP3 mailbox on the server, but configure fetchmail to deliver it to them via SMTP if the connection is up. Sort of half-way between the two above options. - Setup a VPN between the mail server and the exchange server, and deliver to the VPN address. This seems like the "best" option although I have no idea whether it is practical having never tried it. I'd assume OpenVPN as the best VPN solution? I also don't know how well it would scale if I want to then do this with lots of other sites? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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SQL question - how to find the 'nearest match', a sort of 'FUZZY LIKE' select?
by Chris G 16 Dec '10

16 Dec '10

This is a wierd sort of question I know but I can't find any other way around the problem at the moment. I'm writing some code (in PHP, in a Dokuwiki plugin) which retrieves data from a database when a link is clicked. The link one clicks is a town name but, because it's a link, Dokuwiki massages the name to make it not have any 'difficult' characters in it - i.e. it switches to all lower case, accented characters are un-accented and non-letters are changed to underscores. E.g. :- Deûlémont becomes deulemont Halluin/Menin becomes halluin_menin In my plugin I get the massaged town names and I want a way to run a select on the database to get the data for those towns. Can anyone suggest a way that one might be able to do this? I guess I can change all underscores to wildcards, that gets over that issue, but I can't see how to handle the accented characters, i.e. :- deulemont won't match Deûlémont even using LIKE I'm using the default Sqlite3 at the moment, does anyone know if any of the more 'heavyweight' databases have a way to fuzzy match accented characters with their non-accented equivalents? I can quite easily switch to mySql or postgresql. -- Chris Green

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"Warning: we recommend you do not upgrade to ubuntu 10.04"
by James Freer 16 Dec '10

16 Dec '10

performance / high load average problems - mint 9 too? I read this last evening about ubuntu 10.04 - any of you developer folk tested it by any chance? http://linuxforums.org.uk/ubuntu/warning-we-recommend-you-do-not-upgrade-to… I found ubuntu 10.10 unusable and yet these folk say it's ok. I was wondering if it was solved for xfce Mint 9? Or is this why Mepis decided on debian distros? yours james

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How to make ssh reverse tunnel as secure as possible?
by Chris G 15 Dec '10

15 Dec '10

As per previous discussions I'm going to set up an ssh reverse tunnel from my eeePC on the boat to my server at home. I will use autossh to run the ssh command on the eeepC so that it will get restarted if it dies for any reason. The ssh command run on the eeePC on the boat will be something like:- ssh -R 54321:localhost:22 user(a)my.home.server this then allows me to do the following to make an ssh connection from the home server to the eeePC on the boat:- ssh -p 54321 localhost So far, so good, that works fine (I've checked it out with a netbook at home). However I'd like to make it as secure as possible, the 'hole' I would like to plug is that I have generated an ssh key without a passphrase on the boat eeePC (which is copied to the 'user' login on the home server) so that the 'ssh -R ....' command runs without requiring any passphrase or password. (I can't use an agent really, it needs to be able to work completely unattended from power up) The 'user' login is dedicated to the ssh connection so doesn't belong to a real person and doesn't own any files, it would allow passwordless access to a shell though at the moment. Is there any way of allowing ssh to connect still but to prevent it from actually doing anything at all? There's no need for 'user' to be able to do anything and if it can be set up so there's no shell or anything the passwordless login doesn't offer an intruder anything useful really. -- Chris Green

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Best virtualisation tool to run Linux on Windows
by Mark Rogers 15 Dec '10

15 Dec '10

I need to create a small VM to run a Linux server on a Windows PC. The server will be headless and provide a web interface so its own memory requirements should be fairly low, so I'm looking for something to run the virtual server with the least resources I can get away with. Ideally I need the host PC (Win7 32-bit 1GB RAM) to still be functional as a PC with the virtual machine running.... -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Isn't the default way that 'locate' works rather useless?
by Chris G 14 Dec '10

14 Dec '10

I like the *idea* of the locate command but find that the way it works by default is pretty useless. When I say 'locate filexyz' I want to find a file (or maybe a directory) called filexyz, I don't want to see every file which has filexyz as part of its name, nor do I want to see every file in the hierarchy below a directory called filexyz. Surely it would be more useful if the default was to do something similar to 'find' which will only find exact matches unless you specify otherwise. It would also be useful to be able to limit the search to a specified directory hierarchy but I don't think locate can do that at all (whereas find does it by default). As locate works by default one almost inevitably gets about ten thousand lines of useless 'hits' which completely hide anything useful. It's only if you happen to want to find a really oddly named file (or directory) that you get a sane number of hits. I know that one *can* make locate more selective but it's hardly intuitive to say:- locate -b `\filexyz' to get an exact match. Sorry, this is just a rant really after having my screen once again filled up with thousands of unwanted/useless hits. If anyone can offer a way of getting the same result as:- find . -name filexyz but with the speed of using locate's database then I'd live to hear of it. (OK, the find syntax is hardly user friendly but I'm more used to it) -- Chris Green

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