iNode: Nota Bene

Everyone says that's there's no Silver Bullet for security issues …

Luckily, that's no longer true … Gary McGraw's new security-related podcast has (OK, only two issues so far) extremely valuable guest speakers … Avi Rubin for the first issue, for example. Go listen!

http://www.cigital.com/silverbullet/

I spent a fair while with the latest Ubuntu, 6.06, on my iMac over the weekend. I really wanted Ubuntu to be “better” than OS X for my purposes, but ultimately it wasn't.

What I got was a system that would give me 6 text-mode consoles (yay!), Xorg with GNOME (took a while to get 1440×900 resolution though) on VT7, and Mac on Linux on the next screen, VT8. Wonderful!

However, I'm hamstrung by my hardware – there does not appear to be any 3D driver for the nVIDIA GeForce4 video card in the machine (Intel machines have the choice of using a binary-only driver), and the MoL console wouldn't get over 256 colours. OS X isn't useable in this state.

So for the time being I'll stick to OS X to keep the other user of my computer happy :-)

Although I use grep a lot (preferring grep|cut to awk, for example), but hadn't really noticed that it's still being developed :-)

I've always liked GNU grep for the -A and -B flags specifically (made even more poignant because I have to work with Solaris grep a lot), but there's a whole lot more in the world now …

• Output only the matching pattern, not the whole line.
• Colour-highlighted output … interesting
• Use PCRE patterns … cool

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06⁄05/19⁄1920231 Find more about this on Linux.com's article …

At the end of June, security support for Debian 3.0 Woody will be terminated. http://www.debian.org/News/2006⁄20060601

Debian 3.1 Sarge has been out for a year, people should have upgraded by now!

But upgraded to what? How about Ubuntu? Version 6.06 LTS "Long Term Support" has just been released. http://www.ubuntu.com/news/606released

This version will be security supported on the server for the next five years, regardless of the number of releases that come out in the meantime. As Ubuntu have a 6-monthly release cycle at the moment, that looks like it could be up to 10 more versions coming out, with 6.06 still being security supported.

Ubuntu is available for i386, amd64, PowerPC and Sun UltraSPARC T1 platforms. The base OS comes with the GNOME desktop – the associated Kbuntu uses KDE, Xubuntu uses XFCE for a lightweight experience, and Edubuntu comes loaded with tools for “young human beings” and school environments.