Long distance help & Linux

I had an interesting call with my brother last week. He kept his virus scanner up-to-date, but, viruses and spyware still got through his system. I won't name the company that he uses for protection, but, my brother is a bit more than pissed off how easily his system was taken over. He paid for protection and hundreds of the little nasties still got through (yes, hundreds!). He is a bit more computer literate than the average person as he used to work on Unix systems and knows a bit more than the average person about safe computing and locking down a system. I had previously given him links to AVG and CLAMAV and he used those to start to clean his system.

I burned three Linux distros for him and I will be mailing them to him to play with.

1. PCLINUXOS V0.93 - Really good and we use this on our desktops at home. This is a good live CD for him to play with. The only thing is that CLAMAV is not part of the CD.
2. Helix 1.8 - Comes with CLAMAV. It also has a good selection of other tools that you can use for intrusion detection.
3. Insert 1.3.8 - Comes with CLAMAV. It also comes with a good selection of tools.

I have to write up a short cheat sheet for each so he can quickly use them. The upside is that he will also have a usable machine for browsing the net especially if he uses PCLINUXOS. I know the ISP he uses and they offer web based email so he can configure the PPP dialer and use Firefox to access his email.

With his latest experience on how little protection you get in Windows he may be more open to suggestions on Linux. If you are still using Windows are are interested in Linux there are a good number of 'live' distros that you can start with that don't need installing on your computer. You just pop the CD in your drive and boot up the machine. As long as you have the CD drive as a bootable device before the hard drive you are good. If you want to see more Linux distros you can try distrowatch.

Spam milestone

It has been a while since I wrote about spam. I keep track of all my Yahoo mail as it is the worst. As of today I received 1,600 legit emails. The only problem is that I received 5,628 spams in that same period of time. For every legit email I get in excess of four spams. This is constant for every month, the only exception was in May when 92% of the email was spam.

My GMail account gets about 30+ spams per week and my personal email account gets one or two per month. One suggestion to those who are trying to 'regulate' spam. Why go after just the spammers? Why don't you go after those who buy the services at the same time? If you make it almost impossible for the ones who buy the service to make a profit then the volume will probably drop to a level that is not as annoying for all.

The upside is that Yahoo is very good at recognizing spam. Over 95% is correctly labelled. Only recently has spam gotten into my inbox. The only thing I did was to click on 'spam' to help them recognize future mails that are similar. If your ISP has spam filters I highly recommend that you make use of the facility. You still have to check your spam folder, but, most of the time you can delete them without reading and save yourself a lot of clicking on the delete key. If your ISP does not offer this then use the junk mail tools that your mail package has to make your life easier.

Upgrade to PCLinux V0.93a - Part 2

Today I upgraded my wife's machine from Mandriva to PCLinuxOS 0.93a in less than one hour. I learned from all of my problems when I installed to my machine. I spent another 45 minutes applying the patches and adding the various packages my wife wanted on her machine. So far she is quite happy with the machine and it feels more reponsive when running her applications.

Since she does not need SANE I removed all of the packages and disabled the PCMCIA options. I tweaked the system so that only services she needs runs. The major bonus is that her Canon IP3000 worked smoothly this time around. I used the BJC7000 driver. Profile one is in 300x300 dpi mode and profile two is in 600x600 dpi mode. The last time I configured it in Mandriva it took me almost one hour to get the configuration down, PCLinuxOS did it in less than five minutes.

My daughter is also quite pleased with the upgrade. She plays online games on my machine, but, has a friend over and it was a real pain for them to share the machine. Now both machines can play the same game networked together.

My last task is now to take the CD and run it on my daughter's machine and let her play with it there. Her machine is not connected to the Net and I want to make sure that the packages that are on the CD is all that she needs. We don't allow her direct access, she must use either my machine or my wife's machine while we are present.