AntiX 13.2 - More Modern But Still Some Quirks

Blimey, it's been a long time since I reviewed antiX already and it's about time to give it a second look. The overall judgement may have been a bit harsh last time around and I'm going to see whether we can write a more positive piece this time. Some of the issues raised seems were valid though as the distribution has changed a bit since then. Enough of that, let's hop right in.
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How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus - By John McAfee

This vid is not fit for work due to strong language and more. Offensive and extremely funny. We all remember our first Antivirus, don't we?

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Circumventing Censorship with BitTorrent and Anonymizer Proxies

After P2P clients like Limewire using the Gnutella network among others have been shut down the emphasis seems increasingly on BitTorrent and the sites hosting torrents. Where sites are not shut down like Isohunt recently they get blocked from access by the major ISP's. A futile exercise as sites are simply resurrected, renamed or proxied using a different domain extension and it proves impossible to shut them all down. Go to http://torrentproxies.com/.
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NSA Calls iPhone Users 'Zombies': Richard Stallman Was Right Again

According to a recent article on VentureBeat NSA calls iPhone users ‘zombies’ and Steve Jobs ‘Big Brother’. This one just reminds me so much of Mr Stallman's slightly controversial blog post "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone". Seems like he was right again. Summary: Stallman: "Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died." Support the Free Software Foundation now if you can. Because the state of affairs is worse than you think.

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Encrypted Email and Communications with CryptoHeaven

The case for encrypted communications has been in the news quite a bit lately. Many ways to encrypt your email exist, with the use of PGP in the client and the ability for digital signing of messages to prove their authenticity and that they have not been tampered with being the most popular and probably oldest one. But there are a few more custom, and at a higher service level commercial, services on the market. Most of them are also using PGP but absolve the end user from the task of setting this up themselves.
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Slackware 14.1 Released

Just a quickie - after three Release Candidates and well over a year since the previous version Slackware 14.1 is out. You can read the full release announcement here. Some of the highlights include Xfce 4.10.1, KDE SC 4.10.5 and a recent Linux 3.10.17 long term supported kernel, with configuration files to compile 3.12 also provided.
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Upcoming Slackware 14.1 is Looking Good

The Slackware "Current" development branch is leading up to a new release, and of course I've been running it since early this year to check out the progress. I am happy and impressed, as always. "Current" has updated this partition in a rolling fashion ever since, sometimes with a hefty amount of packages after going two months without.
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Whatever Happened to Zenwalk Linux?

In the world of Linux distributions new ones are springing up all the time. Some wither away and go stale or disappear completely. Fuduntu and Kongoni are examples of distributions that have either officially folded or in the case of the latter have not had a release for over two years and is pretty much abandoned, at least for now. Many of these are mainly one man shows. Zenwalk seems to be on the way to abandonment as well, slowly fading into glorious history.
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Slackware 14.1, RC1 Announced

The first release candidate for Slackware 14.1 has been announced. As usual, the changelog can be viewed to get an impression of recent updates, version of the kernel etc., and to read the full announcement. The Slackware "Current" tree is now considered frozen until the new stable release is out the door.
Good stuff, it's already been more than a year again since 14.0!

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Review: Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition [eBook], Packt Publishing

A couple of days ago I received an invitation to take a look at the Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition [eBook] and this sounded like an interesting way to spend some time, so here we are. Be aware this is just a quick overview and a more detailed one may come later.
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Slackware Current and Stable Upgrade to gnutls-3.0.31

I'm not planning to provide a running mirror of all updates to the Slackware changelog, but this one is pretty important. GnuTLS is a secure communications library implementing the SSL, TLS and DTLS protocols and technologies around them. It provides a programming interface to access secure protocols as well as APIs to parse and write X.509, PKCS #12, OpenPGP (are you encrypting your emails yet?) and other required structures. In other words, it's crucial for communicating privately and securely.

Here's the announcement from the changelog:

This update prevents a side-channel attack which may allow remote attackers
to conduct distinguishing attacks and plaintext recovery attacks using
statistical analysis of timing data for crafted packets.
  For more information, see:
    http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2013-1619
  (* Security fix *)

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A Couple of Rebuilds and Upgrades in Slack-Current

As we're all waiting for Slackware 14.1 you might as well just run Current, it's that good. It's stable and up-to-date and today a new round of updates was released, among them llvm, gtk+3 and an upgrade of the mesa library to 9.1.5. A picture says it best.

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Kernel 3.9.10 Now in Slackware-Current

The title says it all, already yesterday Linux 3.9.10 entered the Slackware-Current branch which is at some point to become Slackware 14.1. Can't wait, this will be another great and extremely up-to-date release if it goes on like this. Of course you can run the latest also with stable, so far all kernel updates from Current have been working well in my 14.0 system.

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Fedora 19 - Of Schroedingers Cat and Mixed Blessings

Fedora is one of those distributions I try from time to time but that ultimately fail to stay around, usually when it comes to the upgrade process. I last used Fedora 14, after brushes with 12 and 10, the KDE spin of which got slower with every point update to the desktop but whose LXDE spin actually got used for quite a few months. So let's see how Fedora 19 pans out, featuring GNOME Shell 3.8.2, and how/if that has improved since I last tried the Shell when it was freshly released on the unsuspecting public.
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Installing Fedora 19

For the release of Fedora 18 the installation tool was completely overhauled, which also resulted in a different layout to the former Anaconda installer.  As with every subsequent release more bugs are  squashed it may eventually mature, in the meantime unintuitive and inconsistent layout prevails, coupled with the odd crash. Here I walk you through the installation of Fedora 19 from Live image. You may also want to look at the official installation guide but it's missing the section on encrypting drives.

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Today Google-Chrome Overtook Firefox

For anecdotal evidence, after Firefox staying above 42% for a long time and Chrome/ium in the 20s, over the recent two weeks this gap has narrowed and today for the first time Chrome is at 38% with 1135 page views and Firefox on 37% with 1094. Read into that what you will, this blog may not be representative.  It's a shame though, Firefox 22 has shaped up to a really nice browser with some great functionality added and memory leaks fixed. At the same time, Chrome belongs to Google and they may be spying on you every step of the way and passing it on. I'll be interested in Opera 15 when it comes out for Linux. Hope it isn't another Flock 'social' browser.

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More Updates to Slack-Current

Well guys, here we are again, another round of updates to the current branch already, barely three days after the last major batch.
Among them updates to alsa-lib to 1.0.27.2 and dbus. " This update fixes a security issue where misuse of va_list could be used to cause a denial of service for system services." Most are in the base a and in the network section. Better than a thousand words, here's a screenshot.

Slackware-current update 10/07/2013

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SalixOS - The Miracle of Upgrading When It Actually Works

Following on from my previous post on Slackware I have to root for SalixOS here which has almost slipped out of sight over the last two years or so after a spectacular start. It handled everything I've thrown at it which is more than I can say for any other distribution. The story goes like this:
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KDE 4.10.5 and Linux 3.9.9 Now in Slackware-Current

No sooner had I updated my Current partition to the recent 3.9.7 kernel and already last night KDE 4.10.5 and Linux 3.9.9 landed. Here's a link to the changelog for your convenience. What a massive piece of work. That not being enough, and with a freshly remastered iso from Eric Hameleers' script, today there are several more updates for kde-workspace (Rebuilt) and upgrades for ModemManager and NetworkManager among others.
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FVWM-Crystal Theme Pack Update

FVWM-Crystal is a great looking mod and theme pack that is unintrusive and can co-exist with FVWM without altering its settings. There haven't been any updates for a few years but it can still be compiled from source code and is available in the Debian repositories since Etch (4.0). Here's the old home page. Now, it's good to hear it's actually not dead and you can get the latest release on box-look.org (direct link). It seems development has really picked up again and another one is in the pipeline. You can check the changelog on Sourceforge. Updates include new themes and bug fixes. FVWM is extremely light on resources.
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Running Slackware-Current

Slackware 14 was released 17 months after the previous release and in theory there should have been a massive bump. While a lot happened under the hood, for example the introduction of kmod and gtk+ 3, it just felt like more of the same on the desktop and not really worth the upgrade from 13.37, in particular if you'd already updated your stock kernel before. With a Linux kernel 3.2.29 and KDE 4.8.5 the new release seemed quite modest and middle of the road at the time.
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LXpup – More Than Just Puppy Linux With LXDE

In case it wasn’t evident from the name, LXpup is a custom distribution spin made from Puppy Linux with the LXDE user interface. I should say by default, because the developer also distributes modules of several other popular desktop environments, but more about that later. Just remember that the user can substantially change the look and functionality of the desktop, so even if LXDE is not your thing this spin might still be for you. Read the full story over at Muktware.com.

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Slax 7.0 - Slax Is Back

December 2012 saw the final release of Slax 7.0 after more than three years without an update, quickly followed by several bug-fix point releases. In 7.0.3 the ability to act as PXE server was re-introduced, which had been present in earlier versions but was missing from the early 7.0 branch. I tried it in VMware Player, VirtualBox, from Live CD as intended and installed to external USB connected to an Acer 5551 laptop with ATI graphics, 4 GB Ram and a Phenom II X3 processor.
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Jibbed - NetBSD Based Live CD (Updated 19/01/13)

There aren't exactly many live CD's based on one of the BSD's around, and unfortunately over the years several more have gone the way of the Dodo. One such project was TrueBSD which is now described as dormant, not having seen a release in 4 1/2 years, and no Final for even longer. It seemed promising and I had high hopes for it, but C'est la vie. The developers and a few hardcore users still keep an IRC channel active and refuse to admit that it's dead, but don't hold your breath.
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