If you haven't heard of it, Haiku is a new operating system that I personally use most of the time. It's based on the BeOS of the 90s and comes with a lot of clever features, along with amazing speed and great thread management. It is also specifically built to take advantage of multi-core systems, and has stupidly low hardware requirements. It's still in alpha stage, but bugs are quite rare, and there is quite a lot of software available, with new ports progressing day by day.

If any of you are interested, more information is available at www.haiku-os.org

 

I like Haiku OS. I haven't used it yet, because I'm more fixed on Ubuntu. But BeOS and Haiku OS are two very good operating systems, and it is impressive how much performance you can get out of them.

 

Yeah, I seriously believe it could be as big as linux in the future. I only came across it because I couldn't get the former to work.

 

Hello,

Next to the beos and linux operating systems there are also some bsd like operating systems:
http://www.openbsd.org/
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/
http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.netbsd.org/

Bertus

 

I suppose you saw the xkcd cartoon from 10/15? It mentioned Haiku.

I put all my time in as a Linux admin and developer, not going to switch horses after a decade. Though Haiku does look pretty good, I can't see any huge benefits in a server application.

 

Hello,

BSD has the "advantage" that only members of a certain group can become "root" to install software.
In linux everybody can become "root" if they know the password.

Bertus

 

Hello,

BSD has the "advantage" that only members of a certain group can become "root" to install software.
In linux everybody can become "root" if they know the password.

Bertus

Sudo does have a list of allowed groups and users, you know. Not everyone can sudo in. And root is blocked on many desktop installs, for example logging into root on Ubuntu is very difficult.

 

For linux there's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

A Linux kernel integrating SELinux enforces mandatory access control policies that confine user programs and system servers to the minimum amount of privilege they require to do their jobs. This reduces or eliminates the ability of these programs and daemons to cause harm when compromised (via buffer overflows or misconfigurations, for example). This confinement mechanism operates independently of the traditional Linux access control mechanisms. It has no concept of a "root" super-user, and does not share the well-known shortcomings of the traditional Linux security mechanisms (such as a dependence on setuid/setgid binaries).

http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/index.shtml

 

SELinux is very good. I installed it on one server after an attack. (The attack was due to a vulnerability on a PHP web site.) I also installed a hardened Linux kernel, grsecurity. I did this on an Ubuntu desktop install (would have done it on a server install but had only a desktop CD.)