Recent Security vulnerability in Skype

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Scott James Remnant wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 09:44 -0800, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>The majority of stuff in restricted and multiverse.
>>>
>>>which comes back to an old minor pet peeve of mine:  in my mind
>>>restricted should only be enabled for Ubuntu installations that need
>>>it for specific hardware.  (I suspect it is not easy from a technology
>>>point of view; if it was, I guess it would have been done  a long time
>>>ago).
> 
> ... 
> 
>>Also you're then denying the ability for someone to upgrade -- if they
>>later purchase a laptop with an Atheros card, and use the same hard
>>drive/image, then they suddenly can't get on the Internet to download
>>the driver.
> 
> 
> No, if you buy a new laptop you have exactly the same situation that anybody
> installing an OS onto a new system has.  Most people don't move their hard

What about the hardware the installer doesn't see? Examples
	USB DSL modems (I recall an alcatel "stingray" works but you have to 
load its firmeare)
	PC cards one might plug into a laptop
	PCI cards one might plug into a desktop (or server) machine?. Most of 
_my_ PCI cards are later purchases
	USB devices (other than that DSL modem)
	Firewire devices
	Printers

> drives across to a new machine (by the time they upgrade, they usually want
> a bigger drive, anyway), and I wouldn't recommend it - it cuts down on the
> cruft (I dropped 20,000+ files - from the dpkg database, alone - when I
> installed a clean copy of Hoary on this laptop).  If Ubuntu can magically
> detect the hardware and get the right software at install time, then you're
> set.  afaik, Ubuntu _can_ do this, so installing restricted software should
> be optional.  Yes, if you make it an option, the user may be prevented from
> future upgrades _to that machine_, but that's a choice that the user can
> make himself.  

I hat reinstalling. What I have done is copy the old drive to a new one. 
There are several methods that work including the dubious
	dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc
which places contraints on partition layouts, and reqires some fdisking 
after.


> 
> If you _do_ want to use the old drive in a new machine, it's not rocket
> science to install the required packages beforehand.  In any case, the user
> should have the choice to not install restricted software.

I'd probably beyond the non-technical user. Think the people who think 
Windows and OS X the absolute limit.

If you want a distro for geeks, Debian is at your service. Probably, 
Gentoo will suit you well too, and there are the assorted BSDs if you 
want a greater challenge.

If, OTOH, you want a system that "just works," then when you come to 
upgrade to a new system or just add bits, you really dom't want to waste 
time and money hunting up drivers or mucking round copying disk drives.

I'm still coming to terms with SuSE, but it seems there that if you want 
to configure some hardware that requires a driver, then it notices that 
and installs it.

I'm not entirely convinced with SuSE, but it certainly has _some_ things 
to teach Ubuntu fans.