[waldojim]

I am dropping this here today because there are just some days Linux earns some very positive threads.

Today is one of those days.

My wife has a recent notebook from Lenovo, an IdeaPad Z656. This machine isn't really anything special. It runs a dual core AMD Phenom II processor, has 3GB DDR3 1333Mhz ram, and a 320GB WD Scorpio Blue hard drive. Coupled with an AMD Chipset with integrated graphics, and a cheap 1366x768 display. This machine also shipped with Windows 7.

As of today Windows 7 has been fired. So you all understand why, let me make this clear, I took my time to protect her machine from the usual baddies out there, but nothing can protect a user from themselves. First, the machine was running MSE, had auto updates, and used Firefox for the primary browser. Then the wife installs a coupon application, which promptly took over the browsers (ALL OF THEM), redirecting to their home page, using their tool bars, etc. This alone is easy enough to deal with. But then came the Facebook games. We all should know where this is going....

Hijacked.

The entire farking OS was consumed by Windows Antivirus 2012. This took HOURS to get the machine back to "normal" this morning. While I was at work, I thought long and hard about how she uses her machine: Email, Facebook, Skype. That is 99% of her time on her machine. When I got home, I looked at her and told her to say good bye to Windows. She looked up, smiled and told her machine "SEE YA! It's about time!"

So I break out my favorite distro - Mepis. Even downloaded the latest pre-release of V 12. WOW! Talk about fast. Even running from the DVD it was loading faster than Windows. I don't mean the OS either (though it certainly was too), I mean the applications. The important part: day to day usage stuff. Everything WORKS. The video resolutions are perfect, the sound works well, the wifi works out of the box (Broadcom 4727), even the webcam works. The only issue we have so far is the touchpad - WAY too sensitive. There was a quick and easy fix for that though.

So here I am a couple hours later, with a fully functional laptop, no work involved, no command line trickery needed, and no worries. Mepis has once more proven that Linux CAN be easy to use, if someone wants it to be.

[coastie65]

That Windows Anti Virus 2012 seems to be getting rather popular these days. I have MSE on the new laptop, but am not on it all that much ( just for brief forays to the forums when I am doing something else on this thing and I don't want to puinch out of it ).

[waldojim]

MSE won't detect that sucker, so be careful!

[LiveBrianD]

coastie65, on 31 December 2011 - 06:53 AM, said:

That Windows Anti Virus 2012 seems to be getting rather popular these days. I have MSE on the new laptop, but am not on it all that much ( just for brief forays to the forums when I am doing something else on this thing and I don't want to puinch out of it ).

Oddly enough, I can never run into fake av programs when I'm TRYING to (in a vm). I'm messing with linux mint in a vm right now, and it's a bit annoying how, for instance, you install vmware tools. You tell vmware to install it, it mounts the iso image in the vm, I open the archive and extract it to the desktop, that wasn't bad. Now I open the terminal, have to cd my way to that folder, then run sudo */thenameofthatthing.pl or whatever it is (it doesn't even mention the sudo part anywhere, I already knew that I had to use that), and I have to push enter 20 times to get through all these config options and I don't know what they are... and THEN I'm done. Gee, in a windows vm, I just tell vmware to install it, the setup wizard appears, and I click through a few buttons and I'm done (it's as easy as installing FF). I'll check out Mepis in a vm though.

Edit: First, I found a Mepis 11.0.09 64-bit HTTP download, and that maxed out at 80KB/sec. I looked around a bit more and found a bittorrent version, and am ranging from 230-300KB/sec right now. Not even close to maxing out my connection (1.9MB/sec or 15mbps), but still decent.

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 31 December 2011 - 12:23 PM

[waldojim]

Don't bother with the VM tools, no need for them. 99.99% of the stuff works OOTB.

I have to make a confession though: I did use the command line today. I used it to edit the sources list (it is easier for me than using a graphical editor to hunt down the file) and install wine, Skype, & virtual box. It is just easier for me since I know the commands... not that the commands were needed.

[LiveBrianD]

I guess manually installing drivers might mean a tad better performance, but for most people it's unnecessary, right?

[coastie65]

waldojim, on 31 December 2011 - 10:12 AM, said:

MSE won't detect that sucker, so be careful!

Like I said, I don't do a lot of heavy surfing on that laptop, so shouldn't be a problem. You would think that they would have that thing in their definitions files by now.

[waldojim]

coastie65, on 31 December 2011 - 12:47 PM, said:

waldojim, on 31 December 2011 - 10:12 AM, said:

MSE won't detect that sucker, so be careful!

Like I said, I don't do a lot of heavy surfing on that laptop, so shouldn't be a problem. You would think that they would have that thing in their definitions files by now.

I would have thought so, but apparently this sucker found its way under the MSE radar...

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 31 December 2011 - 12:37 PM, said:

I guess manually installing drivers might mean a tad better performance, but for most people it's unnecessary, right?

Most of those drivers are natively supported by Linux. As in, already compiled, and optimized for your running kernel. The best performance will actually come from the included drivers most of the time with Linux.

[LiveBrianD]

waldojim, on 31 December 2011 - 01:44 PM, said:

coastie65, on 31 December 2011 - 12:47 PM, said:

waldojim, on 31 December 2011 - 10:12 AM, said:

MSE won't detect that sucker, so be careful!

Like I said, I don't do a lot of heavy surfing on that laptop, so shouldn't be a problem. You would think that they would have that thing in their definitions files by now.

I would have thought so, but apparently this sucker found its way under the MSE radar...

Usually, I just kill the browser via the task manager if I run into something like that.

waldojim, on 31 December 2011 - 01:46 PM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 31 December 2011 - 12:37 PM, said:

I guess manually installing drivers might mean a tad better performance, but for most people it's unnecessary, right?

Most of those drivers are natively supported by Linux. As in, already compiled, and optimized for your running kernel. The best performance will actually come from the included drivers most of the time with Linux.

Hmm... I ran ubuntu 7.0.4 I think on my old pentium 4 machine once and the resolution (nvidia riva TNT2 32MB AGP card) was limited to 1024x768, as I recall (screen was 1280x1024).

Grr... I started downloading Mepis 11.0.09 x64 off bittorrent 4 hours ago (not kidding) and it still has 25% to go, average 213KB/sec, 1 hr 15 minutes estimated remaining. That's definitely not even close to saturating my connection (still better than HTTP though).

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 31 December 2011 - 04:17 PM

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 31 December 2011 - 04:11 PM, said:

Usually, I just kill the browser via the task manager if I run into something like that.

Can't the application killed task manager.

Quote

Hmm... I ran ubuntu 7.0.4 I think on my old pentium 4 machine once and the resolution (nvidia riva TNT2 32MB AGP card) was limited to 1024x768, as I recall (screen was 1280x1024).

Grr... I started downloading Mepis 11.0.09 x64 off bittorrent 4 hours ago (not kidding) and it still has 25% to go, average 213KB/sec, 1 hr 15 minutes estimated remaining. That's definitely not even close to saturating my connection (still better than HTTP though).

I found a mirror that I downloaded from - had it in less than an hour.

[LiveBrianD]

So your wife downloaded and ran the program that the malware site wanted her to? Or did it manage to get through a security hole in Firefox?

I messed with Mepis a little, but ultimately decided I didn't like it. The interface seems a bit odd to me, and it kept resetting the screen res to 800x600 (I want 1280x800, which is good enough given that I want to fit multiple things on this 1920x1080 monitor at once). On the up side, it detected all the resolutions that vmware has (but put them in an odd order). As with all the linux distros I've tried, the mouse pointer moves smoothly in and out of the vm (with windows, it sometimes works without vmware tools, and the cursor is often choppy). I think I'll boot up my Ubuntu VM and play with it a little... (note: I'm running 11.04 x64, which doesn't seem to have unity, or at least it's disabled for some reason, and I messed with the theme a little because I like the default except for the window close icons and such being on the left, I'm used to them on the right) By comparison, I find ubuntu's interface is quite a bit easier to use.

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 31 December 2011 - 06:25 PM

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 31 December 2011 - 06:18 PM, said:

So your wife downloaded and ran the program that the malware site wanted her to? Or did it manage to get through a security hole in Firefox?

Security hole. Probably a combination of a FF hole, and Flash. As I mentioned elsewhere, the recent FF updates have not been helping. The recent memory leaks are unacceptable.

Quote

I messed with Mepis a little, but ultimately decided I didn't like it. The interface seems a bit odd to me, and it kept resetting the screen res to 800x600 (I want 1280x800, which is good enough given that I want to fit multiple things on this 1920x1080 monitor at once). On the up side, it detected all the resolutions that vmware has (but put them in an odd order). As with all the linux distros I've tried, the mouse pointer moves smoothly in and out of the vm (with windows, it sometimes works without vmware tools, and the cursor is often choppy). I think I'll boot up my Ubuntu VM and play with it a little... (note: I'm running 11.04 x64, which doesn't seem to have unity, or at least it's disabled for some reason, and I messed with the theme a little because I like the default except for the window close icons and such being on the left, I'm used to them on the right) By comparison, I find ubuntu's interface is quite a bit easier to use.

If you don't have unity, then check your emulated video settings for 3d acceleration. As for Mepis, that is best viewed from the live disk of a real machine. You can't understand why it is as nice as it is otherwise.

[LiveBrianD]

What FF version was she running, 9.0? Also, do you remember what site that was? I want to mess with it in a vm (I know what I'm doing there, maybe you should send that over PM). I recall that, to get vmware unity and the vm's automatic screen res resizing when I resized the window, in ubuntu, I needed vmware tools. At the moment, I haven't gotten it to work in Mepis yet. In Ubuntu, it keeps defaulting to 1024x768 at the login screen, and then it realizes that the window size is 1280x800 and changes when I login.

[waldojim]

FF was set to auto update, so yes it should have been 9. She was using Facebook, playing the Storage Wars game. Very likely it was a rouge advertisement, as she had been playing it for quite some time.

[LiveBrianD]

Man, just another reason to run an adblocker. I wonder - could Chrome's sandbox have prevented this? Granted, I'm still hesitant to use Chrome because of google backing it and their advertising methods (being included in other installers like malware, opt-out), but the browser itself is better.

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 31 December 2011 - 11:17 PM, said:

Man, just another reason to run an adblocker. I wonder - could Chrome's sandbox have prevented this? Granted, I'm still hesitant to use Chrome because of google backing it and their advertising methods (being included in other installers like malware, opt-out), but the browser itself is better.

I really don't know if Chrome would have been immune or not. In either event, I won't be using that either. Right now, the only 100% sure fire solution is Linux.

[waldojim]

Well... One major problem. Damn Mepis knows how to kill a battery. The laptop went from about 2.5 hours to 1 on the battery. Why can't Mepis solve this problem?

[linuxrants7xpg]

waldojim, on 01 January 2012 - 11:52 AM, said:

Well... One major problem. Damn Mepis knows how to kill a battery. The laptop went from about 2.5 hours to 1 on the battery. Why can't Mepis solve this problem?

Which kernel are you using?

[waldojim]

I am not sure at the moment - I handed it back off to the wife! But it is the stock kernel from Mepis testing.