Submitted by rich_c on April 17, 2009 - 9:39am
A couple of things have occured to me lately that I think are worth mentioning. The first being a (Not exclusive...) capability of Mepis that although isn't anywhere near as exciting as a 3d desktop, is actually practically useful. Well to me, anyway.
This is the ability to allow applications to be run remotely. For example, with Xming and PuTTY installed on the family Vista PC I am able to run most of my apps just by starting Xming; logging on to my Mepis box using SSH with X forwarding enabled and then start whatever I want from the command line. Just last night I was running digiKam over the network to edit some photos and then run a slideshow. There was hardly any loss of performance compared to sitting in front of my Mepis PC and running the app natively. I don't think the other OS could easily be persuaded to do that! Licensing issues would be the first hurdle of many, I'm sure.
The second thing that came to my attention is a vulnerability in udev. I became aware of it yesterday and upon checking, an updated version was already available in the repositories! In fact, I had already patched the vulnerability on a dual boot system I'd been working on before I was aware of the existence of the issue. To the best of my knowledge, the vulnerability was only discovered on Wednesday... It seems the vulnerability would allow an ordinary user gain root access. So presumably to exploit it you'd need to be logged on to the host you intend to attack in the first place. So, not really any great risk in the first place... None the less, having a fix released probably within 24 hours is pretty impressive!
- rich_c's blog
- Login to post comments
