linux newbie: random thoughts 6677

On Tuesday 06 December 2005 05:41, Tim stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

I just mentioned it because I seem to recall that you're putting quite a powerful machine together, and it would be a shame in my opinion not to put that horsepower to use. ;-)

Well, I'm not sure, actually. $15 seems like it's got to be the freely downloadable version that someone has fried to a DVD for you, as the retail packs are surely more expensive than that - I don't know the exact prices on SuSE's offerings but I would expect them to be around $60 or so.

My guess is that you are just paying for the "overhead", as you put it, i.e. downloading the.isoand burning the DVD, possibly also shipping costs and just maybe a small percentage of profit for the guys at "the DVD mill", to use your words again. ;-)

Recommended reading is of course the GPL itself, and it might also be of interest to you to peruse the status of the native GNU operating system, i.e. GNU-Hurd.

It's just like GNU-Linux except that it uses the GNU Mach microkernel and the GNU Hurd userspace serverset instead of the Linux kernel.

Gentoo has recently also decided to use stage-3 installations as the default method in the Gentoo Documentation Project. Thatshouldmake it easier for newcomers to GNU-Linux.

Stages 1 and 2 are still supported though. You just have to look harder for the documentation on those methods now, as Gentoo sort of "strongly suggests" and recommends stage-3.

The "driver issue" as you name it is mainly a thing of installing a Windows driver via thendiswrapperproject. There are somewinmodemsthat are supported natively by the Linux kernel, but not all that much.

The best course of action would be to just buy an external modem which doesn't require any specific driver. They are known to work everytime.

Security issue? Please keep in mind that GNU-Linux is not Windows. First of all, there aren't that many GNU-Linux viruses around, and most of them are not even typical viruses but simple security hole exploits.

Because of the open availability of the source code, most of those are fixed before the "virus" can strike, and those that aren't will be fixed within a matter of hours, days or possibly weeks.

In regards to firewalling, the same applies. Windows may require you to install a firewall because it defaults to listening on all ports, but in GNU-Linux the machine only listens on ports you explicitly open. For instance: if you don't have anftpserver running, you won't need to protect port 21, because nothing will be listening on that port.

Firewalling in GNU-Linux is mainly done to protect other (Windows) machines on the same network. Of course, if you're in a corporate set-up, it's a different ballgame, because a registered domain name is bound to attract more crackers.

Same to you! ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)