Linux

Over the past year, I've had the opportunity to teach introductory Linux and BSD classes. Since BSD users primarily attended the Linux classes and the Linux users primarily attended the BSD classes, both groups had an interest in finding out more about their open source counterparts.

Students expected to find differences, but they often found the particulars surprising. Some of the commands they customarily used had different switches or were missing entirely, and certain features had totally different implementations.

"Many of the most vocal open-source evangelists have been pinning their hopes on the public sector to gain a foothold against Microsoft.

So the news that government users can now purchase Microsoft licences at an even lower price - thanks to the latest NHS contract invoking a new volume discount level - will be seen as a blow to their hopes.

We have a special edition of Linux.Ars with two contributing authors, Rob Cook and Eric Newport. They bring the knowledge on installing NVIDIA drivers in Debian and booting a Linux distrubution called SLAX from a USB key. Thanks to both of them for their contributions and we can always use more help with Linux.Ars. If you want to contribute, drop me an e-mail me at syndicate@arslinux.com. But that's not all, this time we have a very cool app of the week: filelight. Filelight gives you a graphical breakdown into filesystem usage.

Looking to tap into discontent with Microsoft, Novell is set to deliver this week a package of Linux-based software for the PC that includes Office-like productivity applications, along with e-mail and Web browsing programs.

The company is expected to announce on Monday that Novell Linux Desktop 9 will be available Thursday. The release represents the combination of a number of desktop-related products that Novell gained through its acquisition of SuSE Linux and Ximian in 2003.

There are a couple of ways you can try Linux before installing it on your hard drive. One way is to use a live cd, another way is to run it on Windows. Damn Small Linux has a version designed to run directly from Windows. To run (Damn Small) Linux on Windows follow the steps below:

1. Download the dsl-embedded-0.8.3.zip file from the Damn Small Linux download site.

2. Extract the dsl-embedded-0.8.3.zip file using Winzip to a folder called dsl-embedded-0.8.3.

3. Double click and run the dsl-windows.bat file in the dsl-embedded-0.8.3 folder.

Some Linux experts are questioning a report by British-based mi2g, which calls Linux the "most breached" computing environment worldwide, with Microsoft Windows placing a distant second. The London-based security firm said its study analyzed more than 235,000 successful attacks against "permanently connected -- 24/7 online--computers" worldwide between November 2003 and October 2004.

Today, most linux rootkits are implemented as kernel modules, and for good
reason. The kernel gives a programmer control over every aspect of the OS
and gives him/her control that makes it the logical target while developing
rootkits and backdoors.

In this article, I will briefly introduce some of the basic ideas in this
approach, mainly from the point of view of use in a honeypot.

Apple Computer's OS X and the open-source BSD operating system provide the "world's safest and most secure" computing platforms, according to London-based security firm mi2g. The report also describes Linux as the world's "most breached" online computing environment, followed by Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Jon "Maddog" Hall is the executive director of Linux International, a nonprofit organization based in Amherst, N.H., that is comprised of developers and contributors worldwide.

Hall joined Linux International as a volunteer in 1991 and has been using Linux since 1994. He worked at Compaq Computer Corp. and Bell Laboratories and was a department head of computer science at Hartford State Technical College, where he received the nickname Maddog from his students.

Two of the fundamental aspects of Linux system security and troubleshooting are knowing what services are running, and what connections and services are available. We're all familiar with ps for viewing active services. netstat goes a couple of steps further, and displays all available connections, services, and their status.

It shows one type of service that ps does not: services run from inetd or xinetd, because inetd/xinetd start them up on demand.