The message 548741004101007104e837c55@mail.gmail.com from Tim Green timothy.j.green@gmail.com contains these words:
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 12:27:55 +0100, Anthony Anson tony.anson@zetnet.co.uk wrote:
As would I - though if I did have ADSL I might spend longer periods connected!
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I refer the honourable gentleman to my statement /\ up there.
I used the phrase "half life" because, like radioactive decay, this is a calculated statistic. Even disconnecting after 5 minutes might be 299 seconds too late after a nasty has wormed its way into your computer.
I would say a NATing router is essential for the home user, and most offices too. While Stelios Bounanos misses the free, easy and open days of the Internet, unfortunately the rise of Windows over the past 14 years has left gapping security holes in users' Internet connections that ne'er-do-wells have been taking advantage.
But-but-but - - - I haven't *GOT* ADSL...
Of course just having a NATing routing shouldn't make one complacent, and nor has the Unix arena has been completely clean - anyone remember first hand the first Sendmail worm, or the Lovebug email worm?
I shall dispense with complacency if I get ADSL - presently the option isn't there. I've been on the net now for eight years and never <touch wood> contracted a virus, worm or trojan. Nor have I a firewall or AV program.
How do I know? I have had a trial of F-prot and done scans, and run Spybot S&D, and Adaware. Mind you, I don't often visit websites unless I know it's safe to do so, and the mail and newsreading software I use makes it virtually impossible for the sensible person to acquire an infection. Indeed, I can open and read any mail item with impunity, however many nasties it may contain.
Yes, it is worth trying different distributions because they all install different things by default. Hopefully the matter of configuration will have lots of common elements between them!
But-but-but-but - can't you run most of those different things from (say) Debian? (Maybe with a bit of tweaking.)
And, what sort of 'things' have you in mind? My Debian release (with apps) came on seven CDs: is there anything else I really *NEED*, bearing in mind that I never play games on PC, and all I use it for is the internet (including web-page molishing), as a sooper-dooper word-processor and DTP tool, for graphics, and, and, and, and, well, that's just about it.
Many (all?) distributions make changes to the basic programs included. These might be bug fixes or configurations, or back ported features from newer versions. Which leads on to asking which versions of distributions and packages do you want to maintain?
Well, erm, <shuffle-shuffle> Knoppix 3.1 and Debian 3.0 r.1 ATM, but there's not much I can do about Knoppix ATM unless I install it.
The installation of Mandrake fell over, twice, and several years ago I tried to install SuSE and I just couldn't understand any of the instructions - well, not many of them, anyway. Mini-Linux just didn't work, though the installation seemed to go OK.