Re: Anyone tried basiclinux?
From: Day Brown (daybrown_at_hypertech.net)
Date: 10/05/03
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Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2003 23:26:57 -0500 To: Walter Mautner <new.10.eatallspam@spamgourmet.com>
Walter Mautner wrote:
>>IF someone gets to my keyboard and messes up my system, I dont have a
>>software problem, I have a family problem. This is not a system in a
>>business where I need that kind of password protection.
>>
>
> Well, it might be a all-too-curious family member, or a cat running
> across your keyboard ... or your head taking a rest on it at midnight
> pressing the wrong keys. All of these can easily trash your heavily
> customized install, when you are logged on as root.
>
> ... always root ... again ...
There are a number of options. *some* distros offer a logon screen that
defaults to the last user, and dont require me to enter a password, just
hit the [enter] key. Why the other distros have not figured out that
most home users would want this simplicity escapes me. Most distros
still seem to assume that I am at a network terminal.
One of the reasons that I enjoyed using DOS's ARACHNE browser was that
it was too stupid for a remote terminal on the internet to mess with my
logon, much less implant sabotage software. JAVA is not needed to do
email, and it is fundamentally software which runs on your desktop which
follows commands from a remote terminal or server. No wonder sabotage
software causes problems. You and I communicate in ASCII; we could just
as well be using an APPLE II or the 8088 pc with dos 2 if all we are
doing is reading and writing text.
The danger from sabotage software, empowered by all the undocumented
services in JAVA and the network interface, is several orders of
magnitude greater than anything the cat can do on the keyboard. I see
that this power does not exist because I want it, but that it is there
so that the software houses can sell the eye candy to advertisers who
want to use my desktop for glitzy spam.
As a practical matter, since so few are still using dos, I dont worry
about some saboteur trying to figure out how to nail my dos drive from
my Linux internet logon. If that does become a significant risk, there
are other steps I can take. For starters, I routinely leave a dos boot
disk in the floppy drive. when I want to boot linux, I pop the floppy
out a little. The CMOS is set to look for a bootable CDrom, then a FD,
then the hard drive. Linux is on the IDE, but dos is on a scsi HD.
If I dont provide the driver for the scsi card, Linux cant find it. It
dont matter what sabotage software comes in the internet session if it
cant do the insmod for the scsi card. If I want to transfer something
from the dos to the Linux drive, I put it on a floppy. A 400 page book
in plain ASCII will compress with pkzip or rar to only 500k.
> You can access your dos drive from linux, isn't it?
So, no, but I can use a dos tool to read the Linux drive. But since I
dont need graphic images in dos, what I usually get are text files like
the classic works of literature from the internet public library,
http://www.ipl.org
or some similar source of text.
> Now, guess, will a
> intruder be able to access it, or will you be protected by magic
> wizards? And, since root or uid 0 is a well known login, once you tell
> on the newsgroups you are running root without a password ... well I
> guess it's already too late.
> ....
But no, perhaps I was not clear. I was hoping to use Basic linux as a
tool to install the new kernel 2.4, and build a custom distro, rather
than trying to burn a CD to install it. I've already got a dozen CDs
from various Linux distros, everything I'd ever want should already be
on one or the other, if I can figure out how to find and install them.
>>I remember liking Mandrake, but when I moved and changed to a new isp,
>>it would no longer logon, even thought the ppp driver would dial out
>>and go thru the handshake. Something to do with the isp using win xp on
>
>
> You should have gone through the ppp setup tool again, or modify the
> chatscripts by hand, telling mandrake the new logon name and password
> ... and probably authentication changed from pap to chap or something.
Believe me, I have fooled with pap, chap, mschap, for months. The clincher
was having a friend come in to install win 98 on this system in the
front room. Nothing we could do to the windows dailer would logon until
I got the install CD from the ISP office in town.
> There is no windows-only authentication to connect to a isp ... except
> maybe AOL :).
It may have something to do with the gullibility of the entrepeneurs who
setup the local ISP. I remember calling them early on, trying to tell
them what my problem was, and they say:"Linux? what's Linux?"
>
>
>>>>So often I have seen an entire install trashed because of some problem
>>>>which could have been dealt with later. I was just appalled when the
>>>>first distro I looked at, Redhat 5, crashed trying to make the backup
>>>>boot disk, and wiped out the entire install.
>>
>>>Probably you messed up your config files running as root when you
>>>shouldn't do that.
>>>man su
>>>man sudo
Well, it aint your fault, but Suse 7.3 tells me it cant see CD #1, even
tho I can even read it just fine from dos or another distro. Suse 6.4
wouldnt work with a drive bigger than 8gig. I've got a Slack CD that
tells me it cant /usr/bin/lpr no such file or directory. [crash]
the last thing the Mandrake 9 said was mkinitrd fail. REDHAT 8 didnt
have the tekram scsi driver [but then that gave me an idea, as above]
Says it has the driver for the PCTEL winmodem, but only later on do I
discover that this driver uses a certain sound card, and if you dont got
it, you are wasting your time. Gentus 3 installed, and even with a dos
modem, would not connect with the local ISP. Debian 2.2.r3 installs just
fine, but then when you reboot, it wont recognize the password.
Corel, kernel 2.2.16 has the simplest install of any that I've seen, but
it cant connect with the isp either, although it did fine before I moved
here with another ISP. Windows newbies would love it, it dont ask any
questions about the video, mouse, or kyboard, just asks if it can have
the drive and does all the partitioning automatically.
>>>There are a lot of mini-linux distributions. But I suggest you try out
>>>a knoppix cd first:
Been hearing good things about it, havta see what I can find.
>>>it will boot from almost any 586+ pc, without even
>>>touching the harddrive. Later when you got familiar with it, you can
>>>install it on the hd and update with debian apt-get.
...
> Memtest86 is a well-known tool for a long time. Even a better test is
> compiling a kernel & modules. It will stress the cpu for quite a long
> time, with non-regular patterns in memory. Now since my good old athlon
> freaked out a few times (got random segfaults compiling kernel) I have
> "underclocked" it a little bit and it runs stable now.
>
> .....
>
>>Well, yeah, I downloaded the Kernel 2.4 to try, but then find that it
>>needs gcc 2.95 or better, but I aint found a way to get that installed
>>yet. The rational thing to do, of course, would be that if something
>>has a dependancy, to have a link to it. Granted that Linux apps are
>
>
> Updating the gcc and the c libraries would in fact require a complete
> distribution update. There are also other major changes from 2.2 to 2.4
> which will render most of your utilities useless, so you have to update
> or recompile them also.
>
>
>>much more powerful, but this is a continual problem in my experience,
>>that when I download an app or whatever, I so routinely find out I have
>>the wrong distro, the wrong archive tool, the wrong gcc, or it cant
>>find some 'dependancy' or other. This is not intrinsic to the design of
>>Linux, any more than it would be of dos.
>>
>
> Compare the "dependency hell" in linux with the "dll hell" in windoze.
I've heard, but like I say, I dont do windows. 'dll' one reason why.
> Where the former one is documented and - with some effort - resolvable,
> the escape from the latter depends upon luck or most often a fresh
> (re)install.
> Hmm, dos applications mostly rely on the BIOS routines whenever possible,
> so they find consistent but restricted environment for basic tasks.
> However, when it comes to things like usb, big drives or setting up a
> network under dos, you are either lost or dependent on proprietary
> solutions. Plain old DOS is outdated and obsoleted by the hardware.
If I wanted a network server, of course I'd use Linux. But on my own
desktop,
'mostly' I avoid the klunky dos software. Its been around so long that
the stuff that works well is all that's still being offered for
download. there is a lot of crummy software for dos, windows, & linux.
But the fastest possible software is written in assembly, something that
is not done for linux apps. Of course, as the platform speed increases,
this is less of a problem, but as the complexity also increases, the
evolution of bugs also increases.
As for big drives, I work in text, not graphics. dont need my pc to be a
multi-user, multi-tasking, multi-media platform, and get somewhat
annoyed when problems in these other functions trash a system I am
trying to type at. But off hand, I bet one 100gig HD would be able to
store every dos program that was ever written. My own work, over the
past 20 years would total perhaps 10 meg. I lost a library in a house
fire, but find I can replace most of it nowadays in ascii files. Edw
Gibbons, the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, was an 8 vol set that
he worked on for 20 years. but you can download it all in about 10 megs.
> .....
>
>>I dont need open office. I aint running a business. I dont mind using
>>Linux to get online with, and using dos for my own research & writing.
>
>
> You never have to open word or excel docs from windows users, and/or be
> able to exchange your own docs with them?
No. I have *never* used windows or any other Microsoft Software on my
own desktop.
I find further that windows tools assume office documents, which rarely
run more than a few pages. When I load a 50,000 line novel with a
windows or Linux text editor, I can often type faster than the gui
interface can insert the letters. In dos, the text mode has no such
problem. a dos DEXTER.EXE, a programming tool can work with documents as
large as will fit on my drive. Only one font, but we only have one font
here. I dont mind.
>
>>I had rather hoped that BL would let me install the new 2.4 kernel on
>>another drive, and that I could use the new kernel to mount the CDrom,
>>which will not boot, and then let me install the Mandrake apps that I
>>want on the Linux drive.
>
>
> Try find the floppy boot images on that cdrom, use rawrite to create a
> boot floppy with the 2.4 kernel (chose after reading the readme) and
> then try to install after booting from the floppy.
> Good Luck!
I'll need it. the kernel 2.4 is 33 megs.
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