Linux wars!

I have been an avid Ubuntu user since 8.04. I still like it, but I use it less because I want to understand my systems better. While it is a nice distribution, it does so much for you that when it comes time to do something for yourself, you're lost!

At the moment, I'm using Arch with full disk encryption--LVM on top of LUKS. To give you an idea of how much of a newbie I am, it took me seven tries to get a bootable system. Then it took me about another three days or so to get X and LXDE working on top of that.

I now have Firefox on there and some codecs. Tested YouTube with Gnash--working, although the position bar disappears sometimes... Not sure why.

Right now, I'm working on hardening my setup, and I'm trying to decide between AppArmor and SELinux, neither of which I have ever set up manually. I'm really worried about bricking my machine and having to reinstall everything, since you have to install all that crap in kernel space and redo all of your low level tools like coreutils, pam and glibc.

Do you have any thoughts on hardening methodology for a home system?

 

Favorite Distros are Ubuntu (since 9.10) and Fedora (since 14) and Linux Mint. But, I download and install a new one whenever I have a ton of free time. I love open source.

 

I use it in VMs. Either Debian or Ubuntu server.

 

Will i'm going to translate the question to *nix systems:

I love Fedora I think I'm running FC17 and have been an avid fedora user for desktop systems since F6(DNA)

For server systems I use FreeBSD, just because I love how stable it is.

I find that *nix systems are the best for back end because with very little work I can make systems that work across Windows, mac and *nix clients. Reproducing everything from SAMBA a/d servers to Print sharing and automation.

 

I had done a Linux PC years ago (don't remember for sure which distro, but mighta been slackware )
I'd like to eventually try it again...have no idea which one I'd go with

 

For the systems I use BSD is just fine and I love the ability to utilize the root jail systems. I'm extremely familiar with BSD, CentOS(which I honestly won't trust any further than i can throw it) and Fedora and I do a lot of IT consulting at the small business level, but I'm not going any higher than that with it. I don't wanna stare at a screen for the rest of my life (not that it is not a bad thing, just not for me).

What about BSD such a pain for you? I had 3 BSD servers running samba(Shared folders, user profile, home drives and printer support), mail(inter-office and system reporting only) and RADIUS(for Cisco VLAN switch support only) support for ~150 users in tandem with a Microsoft a/d environment for almost 4 years without issue(company has since closed). I've never had the joy of playing on a red-hat system, but from what I've been told it's nearly identical to CentOS which i've already given my opinion on.

Hey I don't know if you know what Alteris is(by Symantec), but I've been looking for a Unix equivalent of that, haven't found much on my own.

 

I use VMs on my MacBook Pro (with Retina Display) to run Ubuntu. I like it because e latest iteration of GNOME is, well, awesome

 

I currently use Mint 12 on my main system, because that's all that would boot with dmraid. On my other systems, I use Ubuntu 12.10; however, because of my displeasure with the direction of mainstream DEs (looking at you GNOME 3), I perform a minimal install and then apt-get everything I need from the command line. The environment I use is Openbox with Tint2 (taskbar), Guake (drop-down terminal), and Conky (desktop status monitor)...it's very lightweight and I can get around things much faster than in other DEs. Takes a day or so to set up from scratch but once I get it the way I want it, it works perfectly. If I can figure out how to get Ubuntu 12.10 booting on this RAID 0 setup, I'll consider bumping up to that setup on my main system.

 

That's what I use the jail system for! to break up services. Plus, the one single file made it easy for us, because we used diff and a VCS (it's been too long since i used it to remember exactly how we did it) that traced the default /etc and every servers modification from that.

 

I started out at like 12 years old running Mandrake... maybe younger.

I then switched to Redhat... back when it was free.

Now I'm a Fedora / OpenSUSE fan.

 

Let's just say I remember the 1.0 kernel.

I started out with Slackware back in the day and switched to RedHat about 6 years ago or so.

I've had a few OpenBSD systems over the years. The init system is a little different but I got used to it.

 

I remember installing Slackware from floppy.

Back then I had a 386 SX 20 with 4MB of RAM. I remember it taking forever to compile the kernel. It would take several hours. I recently built a kernel in a VM on my laptop, took just a few minutes.

I remember summer in oh I don't know 95 may be 96. I saved up a bunch of money from mowing lawns. I upgraded to a 386 DX 40 with 16 MB RAM, and a 2MB Video card. OMG having 16MB of RAM was so awesome.

Also sometime around then I got ahold of an old 8 bit ISA sound card. It was a Roland of some sort. I had a huge collection of MIDI files. Huge being a relative term. My entire collection was just a few MB.

Did you do the BBS think back in the day? I miss that.

 

Yeah that is true a few MB was a lot back then. I used to store them on AOL floppies to save the hard drive space.

Oh I've got a few machines now. My main machine is a 13" MacBook Pro. It's got 16GB of Ram and a 256GB SSD. It is amazing that 16GB now is like the 16MB I used to have in that 'ol 386.

I can't believe how inexpensive big LCDs have gotten. Back in 2008 I bought a used Dell 24" UltraSharp and I paid $250 for it. It was a killer deal at the time.

I'm wanting to upgrade my desktop. It is a AMD Phenom II X2 555 with 16GB RAM and 2x 1TB Hard drives. I'm thinking with the current price of memory bumping it up to 32GB and adding an SSD. The CPU is plenty fast for what I use it for, though I would like to get something more power efficient.