Those of us who are deep in the tech world remember about 6 weeks ago when all our social media and news feeds were talking about the XZ Utils backdoor. ( Here’s a great writeup from my favorite tech site, Ars Technica)

Really quick, bulleted recap:

• XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
• SSH uses XZ Utils
• Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
• Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
• they used that to put some backdoors
• Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
• LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories

I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!

I have not yet tried out Gnome Shell or Ubuntu Unity, but the biggest complaint most people level against them is that our desktops are being tablet-ified.  Sure, there need to be new, innovative interfaces for tablets and phones, but that’s no reason to abandon the desktop.  Sure, perhaps the average Joe (or Jane) will be using tablets more and more, but some of us have real work to get done.  We need to do photo editing, programming, video editing, 3D modeling, and other tasks that require something more than a glorified smart phone.  This is where KDE excels.

A few years ago I started hearing about ppas everywhere.  More and more, I see developers telling people that if they want the latest of program X, they should load the developer’s ppa.  A ppa is a repository of software that is neither maintained by Canonical nor the Ubuntu community.  In some cases the software available via ppa is also available in the official repositories, just at a much slower pace since distros usually only provide major software version upgrades when they do a full system upgrade.  In between they tend to just provide security updates and bug fixes.  As usage of ppas grows, the user starts to have a system that is more like a rolling release than a snapshot of Debian’s testing branch.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, after all, a user’s system should do whatever the user wants it to do.  I just wonder if the ever increasing usage of ppas will lead the Ubuntu community to switch to a rolling release style distro.  Arch Linux users do enjoy having such a system, but they do admit that it can potentially lead to some instability if you upgrade right away when a new update comes through.

I first migrated to CrunchBang Linux because they kept talking about it on Linux Outlaws. Specifically they mentioned how fast it was and, if I recall correctly, Fab was using it on his netbook. My laptop battery life was quickly dwindling so, if I wanted to be able to use it on a plane, I needed a fast-booting distro. I enjoyed Crunchbang and the neat way it was setup. I loved just hitting Win-W to launch Firefox. Conky was really neat Terminator was the best term program I’d ever used. But it was getting a little long in the tooth. The most recent stable version was at least a year old if not 18 months old. It wasn’t keeping up with the Ubuntu releases. I was stuck using Firefox 3.0 (or some other such old version) Then came the announcement they were switching to a Debian base. Even if I stuck with CrunchBang, I’d be forced to reinstall anyway. So I decided to give Lubuntu a shot. I knew Ubuntu was too resource-heavy for my crappy battery life. I looked around and Lubuntu seemed to be the lightest - even lighter than Xubuntu. Could it match CrunchBang? CrunchBang took ten seconds from login to usable desktop and about 30 seconds until wifi was up.

This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows.  I pop the CD in and boot up.  I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.

Nothing here different from a Linux distro.  Then the Windows logo pops up.

This is going to be the first time I look at a fresh install of Ubuntu in a long while.  I first installed Ubuntu quite a while ago and then I just kept distro upgrading from there on.  Then I installed Crunch Bang Linux on my laptop.  So now I will be testing the installation.  This may end up being a pretty short review because not much has changed from the previous Ubuntu, or so I hear.  The biggest new change is the notification system.  I’ll be sure to check that out.

A few days ago it was announced that the Ubuntu release after Jaunty Jackalope will be known as Karmic Koala.  The funny thing is that a few months ago my friends and I were racking our brains for a K adjective and all we could come up with was Keen.  I was sure it would be Keen Koala or Keen Kangaroo.  The most interesting thing about Karmic Koala is that they will supposedly be considering getting away from brown.  Then again, they’ve been going on and on about a new art style for a few releases now.  We’ll see what they actually do.  I’m mostly excited for the new notification style in Jaunty and to see if/how this will be implemented in Crunch Bang Linux.