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Bitland.Net Security Notes
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| Archives: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000 |
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| Switching | (2007/06/17 16:45) |
So I've made the switch, though not the one that most people in the security industry have made. Instead of going to Apple, I've gone to Ubuntu. I used to use FreeBSD way back in the day, but switched to OpenBSD as my preferred Unix sometime in late 1996 or early 1997. I always had a PC running some version of Windows as well since there was always something I needed or (post vmware) that didn't quite work in a VM. I made a couple of forays into the Linux world, but various things just didn't work properly. RedHat *almost* got it right, just before they abandoned desktop Linux and spun off the Fedora project. Mandrake got my hopes up for a little while and I had a file server using Loop AES that was a major improvement over my prior OpenBSD/cfs setup. But there was always some major issue with desktop Linux that made it unbearable for me. And while OpenBSD and FreeBSD were OK, they just didn't keep up with the apps I wanted. (For instance, OpenBSD gave up on VMWare ages ago and VMWare 3 is the latest they seem to support.) I looked seriously at the Mac laptops, but the screen resolution and weight factors just didn't compare to PC laptops. The latest screens have some promise, but I've gotten pretty offended by Apple's treatment of the security community (Maynor et al) and their relationship with the RIAA/MPAA and their stance on DRM. (BTW, if you can get a DRM fix out in hours, you can do the same with security fixes...). But I digress ... I've been running Ubuntu on my laptop (a Thinkpad X60 Tablet) and I can't say how much I like it. No major problems. VMWare 6 works beautifully. Disk crypto (in the form of Loop AES and TrueCrypt) are both happy. Video is solid. Drivers, including the one for my pre-N wireless card, work. The only thing that doesn't work is the pressure sensitivity for the pen interface in virtual machines, and that *does* work if I plug in a USB tablet instead of using the built in tablet, which isn't as good as the external Wacom tablet I use anyway... Given my experience, I'm probably days away from killing my last physical Windows box and moving to Windows in VM's only.
OpenBSD will continue to be my server OS and run my mail/web servers, but
I have to say that desktop wise, Ubuntu is my favorite. |
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