[PLUG] Knoppix good, Xandros (sigh) after attack

[Keith Lofstrom]

Various distros have been suggested after Bill Thoen's rootkitting.
A week ago, I would have suggested Xandros as a nice supported 
Debian variant for casual users.  Not anymore, their automated
download is all older Debian stable, and does not have the latest
more-secure graphics libs and Mozilla and such.   While most apps
can be upgraded when they are stable and well understood, I expect
up-to-the-minute upgrades for critical security stuff. Worse, after
the most recent upgrade, KDE no longer comes up!  That isn't stability,
that is just sloppy.

One good alternative is Knoppix install-from-CD, followed by apt-get
to upgrade everything.  The Knoppix apt-get configuration seems to
pick and choose among the various versions of Debian.  It did upgrade
the critical Debian security libraries and apps to the latest secure
versions (at least after an apt-get dist-upgrade).  300MB of downloads!

Apparently, though, the install-from-CD version does bring up some
unneeded servers, like Apache and Squid and Tftpd.  I am taking out
some of the features not needed by the casual user, and learning how
to master a safer version.  Perhaps I will have some disks ready by
Plug Thursday.  Suggestions welcomed.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs