Hiya,
Did you guys read the review in ActiveWin.com about Linux Mandrake 7.2?
Since last year I've been saying "Turn off services by default" for more
than 10 times. Now I read a review in ActiveWin.com about LM 7.2 being a
resource hog, and it's true because they're running a whole bunch of
services turned on by default - I guess they install the "Customized ->
Development" version. For God's sake, what for?
I've told many times that this is for security and *speed*, why nobody
(developers) listened to me? Users, being Linux newbies, have all
promiscous services running, and if they forget to run Mandrake Update
they will get hacked. They don't even know what a daemon is, so why
bother turning all NFS server on? Why not just give a message box after
install saying that the services for servers are turned off by default
and that they can run drakxservices?
How many times Zope has a security vulnerability? What about rpc.statd?
And in 8.0 there's an install option that asks them about what services
they want to run. For God's sake, they're Windows-convert users, how can
you expect them to know what a daemon is. Most of my friends who runs
Mandrake don't even know what xfs means. They go like "Huh?" when I told
them what nfs, identd, etc means. *Just turn the services off _by
default_*. This is because Mandrake have ALL services running, at least
it is for the development version. I don't know how many times I've told
Mandrake developers to turn it off by default, and they NEVER listen to
me. And now a whole bunch of people who don't know how to turn it off,
of course, say that LM is slow, whereas it's actually much faster than
Win 2000 if they turn them off by default.
Why not put a message saying them to run "drakxservices"? That's better
than turning all junk services like cfengine and stuff that won't be use
by regular users?
And also, they say that LM 7.2 is bloated (read ActiveWin.com). Of
course it is, since it includes stuff like GIMP, XMMS, etc. However,
I've personally never used stuff useless stuff like xmame and xmess
which takes a lot of hard-drive space and they're in the default
selection of install. I never run tin, xrn, or other old and ugly news
readers.
I'm not trying to flame here. I personally like Mandrake and I dedicate
my software for Mandrake, and so far I've contributed 2 (gnome-telnet -
7.2 ext CD #2 and Mandrake Update Robot - contrib 8.0). I really hope
Mandrake will now turn off the services by default like Redhat 7.0. Many
people don't like services turned on by default, it's useless, trust me.
If they want to know about how to turn it on, give a simple message box
after the install to run drakxservices.
I hope this time Mandrake will listen the opinion of users. I've had
many people who are confused - what is "heartbeat", "cfengine",
"bootparamd", "xntpd","tftp", "xinetd", etc. They don't even understand
those cryptic abbreviation. My point is, I hope for 8.0 all of the junk
services are turned off by default.
I believe if we run a vote in MandrakeForum.com, a lot of people will
want to have services turned off by default, for security and speed.
--
Prana <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.cyest.org
GnuPG Key ID: 0x33343FD3 (2000-07-21)
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