brentashley

I’ve spent some time lately playing with Knoppix, the bootable CDROM image that fires you up into a full featured Linux setup, complete with X-windows, Open Office, Mozilla, and a raft of utilities including nmap, Nessus, airsnort… the list goes on.

Wnen you boot up, it automatically detects your hardware, including screen and networking (well, I have to type fb1024x768 at the boot prompt on my Toshiba Satellite laptop to force it to use a 1024×768 framebuffer because it uses 640×480 otherwise). Once booted up, you’re logged in as the knoppix user and there on your desktop are shortcuts to your hard disk partitions – including NTFS and FAT as well as Linux partitions. Fabulous rescue tool.

Here’s a hint for you – rather than prefixing “sudo” to everything you want to run at superuser level, just type “sudo su” in a shell to give yourself a root prompt.

Terry Frazier points out that Senator Orrin Hatch is looking to remove the sunset clauses from the Patriot Act.

This is without doubt the scariest news I have seen come out of the US. If this comes to pass, I truly believe that the seeds of America’s decline and fall will have been well and truly sown. I’m really not overreacting here. This reeks of lessons that should have been learned from late 1930s German history.

Sunset clauses are absolutely necessary for any legislation that falls in the “notwithstanding” category – legislation that overrides constitutional freedoms – to ensure ongoing review of “temporary” legislation made to deal with special circumstances.

Mark my words – if this stinker proposal passes, it’s time to corner the market on handbaskets.

Via Matt Mower, we witness the first visible signs of America’s self-destruction.

Not that it hasn’t been happening already, but that we’re now starting to actually see the concrete consequences of the Patriot Acts I and II.

Is America’s descent yet inevitable? What group will be gutsy enough to stand up and tell it like it is? Certainly not the media I’ve seen covering the war in Iraq.

I talked about this before. I’m still convinced that it’s a pretty slippery slope and that America is losing its grip.

If I had any spare time at all, I know for sure I’d be spending it playing with the Onyx RSS object-oriented PHP RSS extension.

Rick Klaus reports on a speech by Judge Richard Posner about intellectual property and technology. All very interesting stuff.

John Ferriby points me to a discussion on the North American Network Operators (NANOG) list that underlines two things:

1) This is far-reaching stuff

2) Law enforcement agencies have certainly in the past exhibited a tendency to disregard reason when enforcing ill-considered legislation. We should expect no less this time.

Via Slashdot and Freedom to Tinker, I learn about a new Michigan law> that comes into effect tomorrow.

This law defines as a felony the following (among other things):

Sec. 540c.

(1) A person shall not assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise an unlawful telecommunications access device or assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise a telecommunications device intending to use those devices or to allow the devices to be used to do any of the following or knowing or having reason to know that the devices are intended to be used to do any of the following:

(a) Obtain or attempt to obtain a telecommunications service with the intent to avoid or aid or abet or cause another person to avoid any lawful charge for the telecommunications service in violation of section 219a.

(b) Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service.

For example, as of tomorrow, the following are illegal in Michigan, and anyone who does any of these things is guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 4 years or a fine of not more than $2,000.00, or both. Also, the offending hardware is to be forfeited.

• simple possession of any device that does NAT routing
• advertising routers for sale
• using your company’s VPN
• possessing a computer capable of Internet Connection Sharing
• running a web proxy server
• redirecting your email to another address
• running a firewall
• blocking your telephone number from being displayed on caller ID
• offering a long distance service that uses an access number that obscures the caller’s origin

Need I go on? Musta been a sleepy day in the Michigan lgistlature when this turkey passed.

Every single router in Michigan is now subject to forfeiture. Every single computer installed with Windows98 or later is an illegal internet connection sharing machine.

As I mentioned a month ago or so, I’ve retired my old 366Mhz Celeron Windows 2000 workstation to the background to run Radio, Groove and my accounting package, and have turned my primary focus to Linux.

My “new” main workstation is a used IBM 300PL p2-400 with 320MRam, 6GigHD. No great shakes in the windows world, but runs quite nicely with Mandrake 9.0 and KDE3.

I’m quite impressed with the features and programs I’ve been using. Here are some of the highlights.

• Internet:
  • Mozilla 1.3 – I can’t say that I’ve missed IE at all. Tabbed interface is great.
  • Konqueror – great web and file browser. easily browses SMB shares and SSH connections with smb:// and sftp:// protocols. Very well integrated with embedded viewers and editors.
  • knewsticker – rss news ticker and aggregator – drag and drop orange-xml-image rss feeds, specify history length per feed. fantastic
  • KMail – good enough, well integrated.
• Multimedia:
  • XMMS – just like WinAmp
  • the Gimp – fantastic image editing
  • Kuickshow – great default viewer with scroll-mouse slideshows, balance adjustment, rotation, zoom, flip, print
• Sharing, communications
  • VNC – including console desktop sharing
  • SSH, including port forwarding and X forwarding
  • Samba – connect to and from Windows machines
  • CUPS – recognized my USB Epson printer right away. I use Adobe’s Postscript print drivers from my Win machine connecting to the Linux box via Samba
  • Yahoo IM native Linux client
  • Licq ICQ client
  • Synergy – I have three machines in a semicircle and one keyboard and mouse. Mouse out of the right of my Linux box screen and mouse and keyboard control moves to my laptop (whether booted into Linux or Win2000), mouse out of there to the right and I’m at my old Win2000 machine. Right again and back to the Linux box. Left takes be back the other way. Cut and paste between machines on different platforms. WAAAAY cool.
  • when I loaded Mandrake on my laptop where there’s already an NTFS and a FAT partition, when I went to the /mnt dir, I found them both already mounted for me!!
• utilities, editors
  • Joe – great text-mode editor
  • Midnight Commander – indispensable text-mode file manager, fully mouseable
  • Links – fantastic text-mode browser with full mouseability
  • kate – KDE Advanced Text Editor – color syntax hiliting, block selection, open via sftp. Not a replacement for UltraEdit, but quite useful
  • perl TK debugger – great for full feature remote debugging via X forwarding.
• Mandrake, X
  • Mandrake Control Panel
  • Mandrake Package Manager
  • Multiple X Desktops
  • Mandrake Installation – found all my hardware no problem. On my laptop, found my network card and then found my wireless card without adding any special drivers!
  • Packages – CDs came with a million of ’em
• programming
  • Apache
  • PHP
  • Perl
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL

I highly recommend that you try Mandrake 9.1, just released. You’ve got nothing to lose and EVERYTHING to gain.