and why do all links to www.nabble.com come up access forbidden?

Some kind of government harvester?

For the longest time, we in the Linux community have bitched and moaned that the Linux Desktop has been 'not ready for prime time', meaning, I think, that you wouldn't give it to dear old Grandma for fear of making the poor woman frustrated with things. She's got enough things to deal with, and Gnu/Linux was still in geeks' realm to make it sing.

Ubuntu has changed a lot of that. Ubuntu has made the Linux Desktop 'ready for prime time'. Now I'm seeing on the mailing lists a lot of bitching and moaning about clueless noobs, harkening back to the early days of the AOL floodgates opening up, and it's usually some poor schlub of an Ubuntu user that's at the center of the discussion.

That's cool.

I just got home from travels a week ago, to find the main family desktop wheezing and mumbling about retirement. So, scurried down to the local hardware vendor, spec'ed a machine and brought it home, muttering to myself about the trials and tribulations I was about to undergo to get everything to work under Debian. Intel Core 2 duo with GeForce 8400 GS.

Used an Etch Net install disc, carved up the drive to my satisfaction, installed base system, installed shorewall and syslog-ng, ripped out exim and replaced with postfix, hit the tasksel desktop install (lazy), upgraded to Sid, stuck the Sid kernel in, used the off the shelf Sid (non-free) Nvidia driver, and rebooted to the new kernel.

I think I'll post a new tutorial on full disk encryption soon. Debian install and encryption algorithms have changed significantly since the last one...

http://pressesc.com/01182668252_espionage_indicators

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.