The message 548741004101003555846b378@mail.gmail.com from Tim Green timothy.j.green@gmail.com contains these words:
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 09:25:14 +0100, Anthony Anson tony.anson@zetnet.co.uk wrote:
The message 20041009220731.GR7254@earth.li from Jonathan McDowell noodles@earth.li contains these words:
<disconnecting the box from ADSL>
Oh, sure, lots of people do (we have a customer who seems to connect up on their ADSL to pick up email and then disconnect within less than 5 minutes and do this regularly throughout the day),
As would I - though if I did have ADSL I might spend longer periods connected!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
With the number of port scans you get while online I'd be loath to leave a box sitting there as a target for the newest cleverest device to ooze in. On Friday I began loading Win 2000 (sorry!) on a pre-loved HDD at around midday.
At 02.00-ish on Saturday, the installation hung at the last lap while removing temp files. This on my fastest machine - a 450 MHz monster. I would not want to have regularly - or even again - to do that (even successfully) because I was one of the first to be hacked by some useless w***** with a twisted aim in life.
The half life of a virgin Windows PC on the Internet is under 30 minutes now. Your ADSL modem does have a built-in NAT firewall to at least protect you from port scanning, doesn't it?
I refer the honourable gentleman to my statement /\ up there.
(Bearing in mind that I have no intention of *EVER* loading XP),
Shame - with SP2 it's not too bad now. You can turn the theme back to that classic Win2000 style too if the primary colours hurt your eyes.
Applying SP2 seems to be the genesis of a lot of people's prombles, if the pleas for help in Zetnet's support groups is anything to go by. XP is too big (well, what Windows version isn't?) - my first PC did most of what I want to do now (but not so fast), and that ran at 25 MHz, had a 40 MB HDD (and that was a big drive for the time), 4 MB RAM and a 5Œ" floppy drive. That's what drew me to Linux. (Oh, I forgot to mention my ancient distro of Linux FT)
I'm only loading Win 2000 as a testbed for ZIMACS. Everything I need to do in Windows ATM I can do in Win 98.
Is there any point in having a different Linux distro, when one has Debian (and Knoppix) available?
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.