Oh, No! My System Is Infected!!

I was just browsing the web a while ago, when suddenly I got a popup window in the middle of my Firefox browser. It was a standard Vista popup, with the default colors and buttons and stuff, and a very authentic-looking MS Windows security icon, and it was churning through my filesystem doing a security check.

“Checking C:\WINNT\System\….”

The files were whizzing by so fast I couldn’t follow them.  After a minute, it gave me the bad news:  I had 19 viruses infecting my file system and over a hundred malicious entries in my Registry!  What to do? What to do !?

Wait!  I have no Registry.  I have no “C:” drive.  I’m running Linux, KDE4 desktop, with Ozone windows decorations.  If it looks like a Vista window, it can’t possibly be really on my system.  I was actually chuckling from the moment it popped up on my screen.  When it finished, and told me to click ->Here<- to download an updated “anti-virus” product, I just clicked the little X in the corner.  Bye-bye little malware.  I hope you had fun trying to infect a totally alien system!

Why All The ‘How To Install…’ Articles?

As I’ve perused the various Linux news sites and blogs, one thing I notice is all the “How to Install <program X> in Ubuntu” – type articles.  Each time I see one, my first thought is, “don’t people know how to use Synaptic?  Or ‘Add/Remove Programs’ ?”

PCLinuxOS + KDE4.3

I’ve been playing with KDE4 under Kubuntu, and generally liking what I have seen.  But Kubuntu itself has always felt … foreign … to me.  Maybe I’m just getting old and my brain cells are ossifying, but while KDE4 seemed decent, I found myself booting into PCLOS more often, because there, everything “just works”.

Recently, Tex released his current 4.3 implementation to the world.  This weekend, I took the plunge.

Kubuntu – A First Look

Okay, you all probably know I love PCLinuxOS. It has been, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, my primary OS.  But I’ve been looking at KDE4 for a while, and with KDE4.2.3, it looks about ready to use.  So I cast about for a good KDE4-based distro to play with.

Generally, I haven’t had much use for the *buntu family.  Every time I have tried one of them, it has left me feeling, “Ho, hum. Another average distro.”  I haven’t bothered actually installing one for years.  But Kubuntu 9.04 was highly recommended by an online friend, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

What’s Happening to PCLinuxOS?

The last few months have been … interesting.   Beginning about ten months  ago, Texstar “disappeared”.  He turned over the development of PCLOS 2008/2009 to the Ripper Gang, and didn’t say anything to the community.  A couple months ago, with 2009 almost ready to hit the streets, he popped back up, and delayed the release until he pronounced himself satisfied.

What happened?

How To Upgrade PCLinuxOS 2007 or Minime 2008

I have put together this list of (nearly) fail-proof steps from doing my own updates, as well as the experiences of others on the PCLinuxOS forums. (Especially maddogf16: thanks, guy!)  These steps have not failed yet on a clean 2007/2008 install.  If you are working from a remaster, and/or have done a lot of system tweaking, including adding/removing packages, it might screw you.  I don’t really think it will, but you need to be aware of the possibility.

… then they fight you …

I got involved in a “Happy Birthday, Linux” thread over at Civfanatics.  I had to stop myself before I got too long-winded and argumentative.  All because one of the posters asked a simple question, “why should I switch to Linux?”  I guess that made me a little extra sensitive to the subject, because I have noticed today a couple of items about switching to Linux, and MS “fighting back”.

PCLinuxOS 2009 Is Out!

PCLinux2009.1 hit the mirrors today.  (The .1 because there was a wifi bug that Tex fixed last night.) There has not yet been an official announcement.

Update: The announcement has been made!

The Ripper Gang is pleased to announce the final public ISO release of PCLinuxOS 2009.1.

This release features kernel 2.6.26.8.tex3, KDE 3.5.10, Open Office 3.0, Firefox 3.0.7, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, Ktorrent, Frostwire, Amarok, Flash, Java JRE, Compiz-Fusion 3D and much more. We decided to use kde3-5-10 as our default desktop as the we could not achieve a similar functionality from kde4. We will however offer kde4 as an alternative desktop environment available from the repo once we stabilize it.

PCLinuxOS 2009: My Experience

Okay, technically, the 2009 iso isn’t out yet.  But the repositories have been unfrozen, and the “Big Update” was pushed to all the mirrors.  I updated a couple of weeks ago.  So how is it going?

To begin with, my first try at updating was a no-go.  It was all my fault, I admit.  I had been multi-booting, playing with other distros while I waited for 2009.  I knew I had screwed up my grub.  I had tweaked it enough to let me boot PCLOS.   I knew I had to go in and fix it before I did the update and reboot.  I knew I had to….

<sigh>

To make a long story short, I ended up reformatting my root partition, and reinstalling PCLOS-2008 MiniMe.  But from there, I re-did the Big Update, and everything was beautiful.

The “Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome”

I ran across an article this morning, Linux Versus the Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome.  I thought it made some very good points.

The problem is that people who have lived, worked, and played in a homogeneous Microsoft computing paradigm are lost and confused when they encounter a different paradigm. These people have only seen the flawed Microsoft ideology for how computing systems should work and so have a difficult time with more elegant systems based on Unix. They see the Linux system with its’ own paradigm and ideology and try to force it into the only paradigm they know, which is Microsoft’s. This will always cause the user problems.