A few things are coming up in the future, like the Linux telephony subject and the rep-from-the-wonderful Linux Journal BUT FIRST let's look at this Saturday's 2pm show at Hal-PC: remember about a year ago when I did the show about Linux security distros? The stars of that show were STD and Hakin9 Magazine's yearly-or-so live CD. Well, there's two others that deserve a look - and not H-9's latest one, either. Although the version I showed last time (3.0, I think) was a crowd pleaser due to offering the KDE desktop with all its goodies, the latest version (3.1.2) is too heavy to run on my antique Louis XIV laptop. And STD offers many tools not updated in some years, plus is a bit scruffy in appearance. And we can't have that. So we'll move on to two other examples.
And I won't tell you which ones they are until you see them. Nyah nyah nyah. It'll be hard to guess since there are so many of these things, and as is often the case with OSS (open source software) security projects, many of these distros are out of date and reside in a Sargasso Sea of broken links. But here's a little help.
Clue: the first one will be one that claims to be the most popular security package going (and there may be more than several that make this claim).
Clue: the second one will be heavy on tools of a... suspicious nature, so I'll demonstrate it without using it online. It apparently is written by a couple of white hat penetration testers, but just in case that's a cover story I'll airgap the thing. To use it online (risking a few auto-updates) would only rile up Allan at the other end of the hall. Besides, due to the date and time of the event (plus location) he'd immediately know it was me. All told, this second specimen is the slickest thing I've seen so far, has a compact desktop option AND the tools are pretty current.
A possible extra will be two attempts at using a particular tool (often included in security distros) to do some data recovery, one attempt of which is guaranteed to fail. I can't resist putting you through this since failure is often instructive. BE THEREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
