Security - Linux style

Maybe it's because I have been left scarred by my use of Windows or maybe it's simply good sense but I am adding a firewall and virus checker to my Fedora install.

• Firestarter (firewall)
• clamAV (virus checker)

Life in the Old Dog yet?

Seems I could have been a bit premature on the future of the Palm Pre. HP are certainly talking up entry into the smartphone market with the Palm and webOs leading the way.

The OS (in my opinion) is at least the equal of the iPhone OS in most regards and better in others (true multitasking from the word go on webOS).

Now lets see how HP takes on Apple in the coming months!

The big advantage for HP/Palm is the community of developers out there who love to develop on the webOS platform.

Palm Pre

I am very much enjoying using the Palm Pre. Unfortunately it looks like the days of the Palm are numbered. Little or nothing has been heard of potential onoing developments for webOS devices since the takeover by HP.

If anyone has heard of anything from HP in terms of a roadmap for webOS and future smartphones from Palm/HP I would be very much interested in hearing about it....along with every other Palm Pre owner!

Linux kernel and Linksys USB wireless adapter

I had problems with my Linksys WUSB54GS wireless adapter when I tried to use it with Ubuntu (v9.10 Karmic Koala and v10.04 Lucid Lynx) and Fedora (Fedora Core 2 and Fedora 12).

Sometimes it would work and find my network. Other times it would not. This seemed to be related to issues with its driver (rndis).

I purchased a new TP-Link wireless adapter from e-bay. This worked straight out of the box with Ubuntu 10.04. This uses the rt73 driver (I think).

Anyway, the up-shot is I am finally certain that I have a wireless adapter I can reply on and I can recommend it - for Ubuntu 10.04 at least. I am going to re-install Fedora 12 and see what happens there.

Ubuntu/YouTube/Firefox - "an error occurred, please try again later"

I upgraded my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu (10.04). I noticed straight away that embedded Youtube videos where not working in Firefox. After much messing around I found the following worked.

1) Remove swfdec - a free open source replacement for Adobe Flash Player
2) Remove gnash - the GNU SWF movie player

This was on the back of advice from this post.

This resolved the issue - But i am left wondering what the impacts of removing the above packages may be?

Disabling Broadcast SSID does not work on Fedora with LinkSys WUSB54GS

I normally disable the broadcast of the SSID of my wireless betwork as set up on my LinksysWAG54GS router. Turns out that this behaviour is not supported by the driver used by my USB modem (a Linksys WUSB54GS) on Fedora.

Interestingly, some people think that using what I thought was a fairly obvious security feature is pretty pointless.

Have a look here for the fact that WUSB54GS and disabling SSID does not work on Fedora/Linux. It's in black and white under the 'What does not' work section.

As a result, consider upping your WPA password to greater than 20 characters to make it useful!

Windows Free

I am now Microsoft Windows free for the first time since University.
CentOS at work, Ubuntu on my laptop, Fedora at home and of course webOS on my Palm Pre.

Feels good :-)