Pardus 2013 Is Here!

Finally, the big Turkish cat woke up from its sleep and now it arrives in four flavors:  KDE and GNOME, both for 32 and 64 bit computers.

The problem is that the distro is only available in Turkish for the time being.

Still, I am downloading it to check it out.  Hopefully, I can get to test it in spite of my nonexistent Turkish skills.

If you want to give it a try, you may visit this page.

¡Felicitaciones Hispalinux!

Hoy leí con mucho agrado que la agrupación Hispalinux formuló una queja ante la Comisión Europea (por medio de su oficina en Madrid) por la forma en que Microsoft forzó el uso de UEFI y Restricted Boot con Windows 8.

Aunque Microsoft insista en que todo es legal y que es por el bien de los usuarios, ya está más que visto que el Restricted Boot (al que les gusta llamar "Secure" sin razones de peso) solamente le aporta seguridad a la empresa de Redmond...le aporta la seguridad de que va a ser mucho más difícil instalar otro sistema operativo en esos equipos.

Agradezco a Hispalinux por su valor.  Espero que les vaya bien en esta batalla legal y que la Comisión Europea analice seriamente la cuestión.  ¡Felicitaciones Hispalinux!



 

Waiting for MEPIS, AntiX 13, and PiSi 1.0!

It seems that a new testing release of Mepis is pretty close.  The community is eagerly waiting for it.

Also, I'm waiting for antiX 13.  The beta release pleased me a lot. If you want to try it out, please remember that it is not a finished product (although it ran flawlessly on my laptop).

Of course, I cannot forget PiSi LinuX 1.0.  This little cat seems capable of great accomplishments!

So Long, Pardus-Anka! Welcome, PiSi LinuX!

Yesterday, Mechatotoro gave me a very surprising news:  Pardus-Anka, the fork of the Turkish distro named Pardus, is gone.

That news was shocking!  How come the Phoenix Pardus ("anka" means "phoenix") died?  And so soon?

Well, actually, what happened (as explained in Spanish here) was that Anka community decided to drop the name "Pardus" altogether to follow a totally independent path.  Since they kept PiSi, the packaging system that made Pardus unique, they adopted PiSi as their distro's new name (and identity).  in other words, Pardus-anka died to give birth to PiSi LinuX!

Now, "pisi" means "kitten"...thus, the logo of this renamed distro will be (I think) the logo of the very packaging system: the little cat.

I celebrate this change.  With Pardus-Anka, I felt a bit of confusion and perceived a lack of consistency, visually speaking, among its name, its logo, and its identity (the packaging system).  For the old Pardus, everything made sense: "Pardus" means "leopard/panther", its logo was a leopard, and its packaging system, PiSi, was a little cat.  For Anka, things were not quite as consistent: its logo was a phoenix, its name meant "phoenix panther", but its packaging system (and the marker of its true identity) was a little cat????

Now, the change to PiSi Linux solves everything: The name, the logo, the packaging system, and the distro's very identity work as one.  This may be trivial to some, but it actually speaks volumes in terms of forging a distro's identity from its very start.

I'll be waiting for PiSi LinuX then!

Browsers, Operating Systems, and Pwn2Own

This is bad news.

Apparently, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox fell prey at the famous hacking contest Pwn2Own .


The worst part is that they were beaten on the very first day of the contest.

No, that is not the worst part.

Actually, the worst part is this:

Bekrar’s IE10 hack bypassed all of the protections built into Windows 8 and IE and allowed code to be executed without crashing the browser.

So, it is not even 6 months after the launching of Windows 8 with its powerful "secure boot" and it was hacked on the first day?  Let's remember: "secure boot" was so necessary that it was mandatory for Windows 8 to run.

And what about Linux?  It is not present in this contest since 2008.  The reason given in 2011? "Because it is not a widespread system."  I guess the fact that it wasn't hacked in 2008 had nothing to do with that. 

Now...there are some points to ponder about Windows 8.

1.  If it took hackers one day to bypass all of Windows 8's security features, was it true then that "secure" (let's call it "restricted" until it actually becomes secure) boot was so secure as they told us? It had been hacked previously, too.

2.  What's going to happen now?  Will Microsoft actually patch Windows 8 or they will simply keep that information secret?