Disappointed with Ubuntu Server, could be used by such a wider audience

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Stephan Hermann <sh at sourcecode.de> wrote:
>Serious, for a normal familiy I would advise to by ready made
>appliances..they are tested, and are usable (well not everytime, but

If a security flaw is found in such an appliance it would be much
harder to patch than one found in software.
It does have the advantage that getting root on the appliance doesn't
necessarily give you root on the PC. However we could do something
similar with VM's, chroot jails or Plash.

> And
> the work to stay up2date is much more then you imagine...even on Ubuntu
> and even with apt.
> You know, people with windows, they always get this little icon with
> updates available...how many of them are doing the updates everytime
> this pops up? (same question also comes for ubuntu or any linux distro
> in general).

If a large part of the security model is having a trained monkey wait
for updates to appear and click yes then the security model and UI is
broken and should be fixed. I don't analyze updates to see if they are
"good" or not (how can I? they are binary). I can see only two
advantages to manual updates:  if an update seriously breaks things we
get more warning and we can decide to not update packages that we
intend to remove. These seem easier to work around than being hacked.

> I do like the idea of an entainment home server or a media center
> edition of ubuntu, but it shouldn't be used for webserver or smtp
> server at home (*shiver*)

Having e.g. a simple webserver can be a handy way of copying files
from machine to machine. Ironically it is much easier to get windows
to talk to an http server than samba.

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia