Soma-notes - User contributions [en]

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:49:02Z

Dneray: /* Initialization */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:43:00Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:42:45Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:40:54Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:38:40Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

==Part II==
===Background===
[http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/ DSL-N] is a split from the [http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ DSL] distro which was aimed at maintaining a linux distro at under 50mb. The main difference between DSL-N and DSL is that DSL runs the 2.4.x linux kernel and gtk1 which DSL-N runs the 2.6.x kernel and gtk2 and hence the N indicates it is much bigger in size (roughly double).

This distro is aimed at super low power computers, with an image weighing in at 100mb and containing a very minimalistic amount of software and features. It is based on Knoppix and the latest release was Tue Apr 18, 2006.

===Software Packaging===

Although I would have expected this distribution to use dpkg/apt because it is knoppix based, it seems in the interest of saving space they switched to the rpm package system (as revealed by rpm -i), the functionality is provided by busybox which provides a number of normal system functions at a reduced size.

As with DSL, DSL-N has an incredibly minimalistic guy for the custom package manager and provides repositories of apps ready to install. To access the list of programs you simply right click on the desktop and go to net and choose 'mydsl extension browser'. Then you select a section as shown in my screen shot. You're then presented with a simple list of applications and you can download and install them or remove them with one click. It also has the option to

The software catalog is not very extensive but it contains everything you would expect to find (although a little out of date) like firefox, openoffice, thunderbird, etc. There generally seems to be a focus on smaller less known educational apps as I would see this distribution having a large percentage of its presence in the educational market on low budget computers.

If you don't have access to the gui you can install packages using rpm by dong rpm -i package.rpm. There doesn't appear to be any easy straightforward way of removing packages from the command line.

===[http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/f/viewtopic/3.html Major package versions]===

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Software
! Information
|-
| [http://www.kernel.org Linux Kernel:]
| Version Present: 2.6.12

Source: uname -r

Build Release Date: 17-Jun-2005

Current Version: 2.6.39

Current Release date: 19-May-2011

Blurb: The linux kernel 2.6.x offers a wide range of features over the 2.4.x line that it took over from. That being said, it also became a lot more bloated in size and it dropped support for older legacy hardware. This is the main reason there was a split between DSL and DSL-N.

|-
| [http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/ libc:]

| Source: ls /lib/libc*

Version Present: 2.3.2:

Current Version: 2.14

source: http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/

Blurb: likely the latest version that was around when it was released, libc is a necessary component of any linux distribution. LibC contains functions that are required by C applications, it is required by many applications to run and by nearly all C applications to compile.

|-
| [http://www.gtk.org/ gtk+ 2:]
| Current Version GTK+ 2.24.8

Current release date 10-Nov-2011

Blurb: GTK+ does a lot of the work of getting a GUI up and running, managing windows, providing an interface for applications to create graphics. The base GTK is very small and makes perfect sense to include with this distro along with a super lightweight window manager.
|-
| [http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/ Bash:]

|Source: bash --help

Version Present:2.05b

Build release date: 17 July 2002

Current Version 4.2

Current Release Date: 13 February 2011

Blurb: bash is a necessary part of all linux distros and is not in need of new features and is therefore not updated very often, this was likely the latest version available when it was released.

|-
| [http://busybox.net/ busybox:]
| Source: rpm -i

Version Present: v1.0.0.0

Build Release date:2006.01.20

Current Version: BusyBox 1.19.3

Current Release Date: 29 October 2011

Blurb: busybox is designed with the exact same main goal as dsl/dsl-n, size. It integrates a number of system functions and takes up a fraction of the space of having them all separate, making it an ideal application to include with DSL-N.
|-
| [http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ Seamonkey Email + Web Browser:]
| Web Browser Version Present: 2.0.2

Email Version Present: seamonkey 1.0.2

Build release date: 2006/05/16

Current Version: 2.4.1

Current Release date: Sept. 29 2011

Blurb: Seamonkey integrates email and browser together and shares an engine between the two of them. It maintains a familiar mozilla feel to it and shaves off space when compared to competitors.

|-
| [http://www.abisource.com/ abiword]
| Version Present: 2.2.7

Build release date: 18 December 2003

Current Version: 2.8.6

Current release date: Oct 27 2009

Blurb: Abiword is extremely lightweight, small and it has all the features that the average user would use from a more advances text editor. It won't do the trick for really complicated documents but overall it's compatible with a wide range of formats and has extremely low space and resource requirements. It is an ideal application to include because of how little space it uses, while still allowing necessary options like opening Microsoft Word documents. In general other text editor either come very small and lacking many of the features that Abiword includes or they come bloated with more features than an average user ever needs (ex. Open/Libre office), Abiword is a perfect balance for this distro.

|-
| [http://www.gftp.org/ Gftp:]
| Version Present: 2.0.18

Build release date: 05 Feb 2005

Current Version: 2.0.19

Current release date 11/30/2008

Blurb: gftp is a simplistic ftp client for file transfers, it fits with dsl-n overall with its simplistic feel and low resource use. This application does seem a little unfitting to me given that it depends on many gnome libraries that would otherwise be unnecessary for this distro.
|-
| [http://www.pidgin.im/ gaim]
| Version Present: 0.7.7

Current Version: pidgin 2.10

Current release date: 08/20/2011

Blurb: Gaim is a multi-protocol IM client, at the time it was the gold standard for linux distros to include as the default IM client. It is also small, relies on gtk libraries and has low resource usage so it fits with DSL-N.
|}

[http://www.kernel.org Linux Kernel:]
Version Present: 2.6.12

Source: uname -r

Build Release Date: 17-Jun-2005

Current Version: 2.6.39

Current Release date: 19-May-2011

Blurb: The linux kernel 2.6.x offers a wide range of features over the 2.4.x line that it took over from. That being said, it also became a lot more bloated in size and it dropped support for older legacy hardware. This is the main reason there was a split between DSL and DSL-N.

[http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/ libc:]

Source: ls /lib/libc*

Version Present: 2.3.2:

Current Version: 2.14

source: http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/

Blurb: likely the latest version that was around when it was released, libc is a necessary component of any linux distribution. LibC contains functions that are required by C applications, it is required by many applications to run and by nearly all C applications to compile.

[http://www.gtk.org/ gtk+ 2:]

Current Version GTK+ 2.24.8

Current release date 10-Nov-2011

Blurb: GTK+ does a lot of the work of getting a GUI up and running, managing windows, providing an interface for applications to create graphics. The base GTK is very small and makes perfect sense to include with this distro along with a super lightweight window manager.

[http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/ Bash:]

Source: bash --help

Version Present:2.05b

Build release date: 17 July 2002

Current Version 4.2

Current Release Date: 13 February 2011

Blurb: bash is a necessary part of all linux distros and is not in need of new features and is therefore not updated very often, this was likely the latest version available when it was released.

[http://busybox.net/ busybox:]

Source: rpm -i

Version Present: v1.0.0.0

Build Release date:2006.01.20

Current Version: BusyBox 1.19.3

Current Release Date: 29 October 2011

Blurb: busybox is designed with the exact same main goal as dsl/dsl-n, size. It integrates a number of system functions and takes up a fraction of the space of having them all separate, making it an ideal application to include with DSL-N.

[http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ Seamonkey Email + Web Browser:]

Web Browser Version Present: 2.0.2

Email Version Present: seamonkey 1.0.2

Build release date: 2006/05/16

Current Version: 2.4.1

Current Release date: Sept. 29 2011

Blurb: Seamonkey integrates email and browser together and shares an engine between the two of them. It maintains a familiar mozilla feel to it and shaves off space when compared to competitors.

[http://www.abisource.com/ abiword]

Version Present: 2.2.7

Build release date: 18 December 2003

Current Version: 2.8.6

Current release date: Oct 27 2009

Blurb: Abiword is extremely lightweight, small and it has all the features that the average user would use from a more advances text editor. It won't do the trick for really complicated documents but overall it's compatible with a wide range of formats and has extremely low space and resource requirements. It is an ideal application to include because of how little space it uses, while still allowing necessary options like opening Microsoft Word documents. In general other text editor either come very small and lacking many of the features that Abiword includes or they come bloated with more features than an average user ever needs (ex. Open/Libre office), Abiword is a perfect balance for this distro.

[http://www.gftp.org/ Gftp:]

Version Present: 2.0.18

Build release date: 05 Feb 2005

Current Version: 2.0.19

Current release date 11/30/2008

Blurb: gftp is a simplistic ftp client for file transfers, it fits with dsl-n overall with its simplistic feel and low resource use. This application does seem a little unfitting to me given that it depends on many gnome libraries that would otherwise be unnecessary for this distro.

[http://www.pidgin.im/ gaim]

Version Present: 0.7.7

Current Version: pidgin 2.10

Current release date: 08/20/2011

Blurb: Gaim is a multi-protocol IM client, at the time it was the gold standard for linux distros to include as the default IM client. It is also small, relies on gtk libraries and has low resource usage so it fits with DSL-N.

None of the packages I reviewed here appear to be modified by the developer, they are simply packaged together.

===Initialization===
I discovered the boot scripts in /etc/rcS.d, there are 2 boot scripts:

S00knoppix--autoconfig runs first and does the following:

1.reinit usb devices that could not be started from linuxrc, probe necessary modules

2. mount filesystem readonly, with or without encryption

3. load alas sound daemon

4. load localization

5. set time

6. if running from HD, check file systems

7. mounts in read-write before continuing

8. if running from hard drive, regenerate module dependencies (klconfig ; depmod -a 2>/dev/null)

9. Set resolution and load /etc/init.d/splash.sh

10. delete links to hardware that doesn't exist ie. /dev/sdrom /dev/mouse, etc

11. write knoppix config files for other scripts to parse

12. Activate modules for acpi (power management)

13. usb mouse check/seup. try both usb mouse modules in case someone has 2 different controllers usb-uhci and usb-ohci

14. load firewire modules, search and configure hardware, setup carom that hasn't been setup by hwsetup

15. automatic xf86 setup using /usr/sbin/mkvf86config

16: create /etc/fstab and scan for partitions/hard drives to add

17.auto mount all devices; floppies, cds, etc

18. overwrite old /etc/fstab

19. run /etc/init.d/autofs start to start the automounter

S01dsl-config runs next and does the following:

1. loads special modules for different devices

2. makes a list of installed applications

3. makes menus

4. /etc/sysconfig/mydsl

5. ensures networking modules are loaded

6. deletes temporary folders created during boot /tmp/firstboot /miniroot /var/tmp and sets up a sym link from /var/tmp to /tmp and sets permissions on it.

7. checks for validity of user account and forces you to set a new password if you must

8. sets boot device

9. starts the appropriate user defined services in this order: ssh, lp, nfs, monkey web server, syslog, ftp, /etc/init.d/mkwriteable, touch /etc/sysconfig/unionfs touch/etc/sysconfig/writeable, load rest of
modules

10. mount directories

11. iconcheck, orphancheck, mkmydslmenu

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:33:45Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:33:22Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:27:25Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:18:49Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:14:14Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:06:40Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T18:03:58Z

Dneray: /* Software Packaging */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-12-20T17:50:47Z

Dneray: /* Background */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-12-20T17:49:47Z

Dneray: /* Background */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off of Fedora Linux OS and the Xen Hypervisor. It is aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information, but could it be used by anybody who is concerned about their computer security.

The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011, and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here]. The install dvd is quite big at 1.59gb for the install DVD. In comparison, Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions will still fit on a 700mb CD.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system.

From my research it does not appear that there are any other operating systems available that have used this technique. There are many users of the Xen software in combination with Linux, but it is always used to run multiple Operating Systems simultaneously. This approach to security is significantly more secure (between the different OSs) than the Qubes approach (between the different app VMs) but at the expense of a multitude of CPU power.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking (by isolating them in a VM) for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements<ref>http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide</ref>===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for tweaking the system for extra security at the expense of speed) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.

The default option creates a dom0 VM that is used system operations that require special access, a networking VM, a separate VM for other system applications and one for user applications. By manually defining more VMs you could also create separate VMs for work apps, home apps, apps that deal with confidential information, etc. If you select to not create any VMs then the system is essentially a modified Linux distro, and it takes away the most of the advantage of this OS, it will only have the dom0 virtual machine and everything runs on that.

[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

The way the system manages interaction between the virtual machines is the key of this distribution. All applications have their files stored in the .img file of the VM which they are part of. Applications have readonly access to the image filesystem and store their files directly on the filesystem.

[[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

In terms of security, there are clear advantages to this approach to managing applications in this manner. It makes it theoretically very difficult for a malicious 3rd party to exploit an application and gain root access to the system. There is definitely a big performance hit that occurs when running so many VMs at the same time though.

Everything seems very sluggish when compared to other linux distributions like Ubuntu running in the same environment. Like many modern operating systems, the scheduler in Qubes appears to prioritze the things that people notice. For example, opening a program might take 10-20 seconds from clicking on it to start actually seeing the program open, but things like highlighting, moving the cursor around, etc did not lag at all which makes the user feel better about the performance.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements.

As I mentioned I ran Qubes in a VM, obviously this is not a fair test since it runs VMs inside of itself and my system is not powerful enough to fully utilize the system like this. I did it that way because I had no choice when it refused to boot natively on any of my computers. I still think it has been enough experience to learn what I needed to learn in order to write this report.

===References===
<references/>

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-12-20T17:44:41Z

Dneray: /* Usage Evaluation */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off of Fedora Linux OS and the Xen Hypervisor. It is aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information, but could it be used by anybody who is concerned about their computer security.

The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011, and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here]. The install dvd is quite big at 1.59gb for the install DVD. In comparison, Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions will still fit on a 700mb CD.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system. From my research it does not appear that there are any other operating systems available that have used this technique.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking (by isolating them in a VM) for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements<ref>http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide</ref>===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for tweaking the system for extra security at the expense of speed) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.

The default option creates a dom0 VM that is used system operations that require special access, a networking VM, a separate VM for other system applications and one for user applications. By manually defining more VMs you could also create separate VMs for work apps, home apps, apps that deal with confidential information, etc. If you select to not create any VMs then the system is essentially a modified Linux distro, and it takes away the most of the advantage of this OS, it will only have the dom0 virtual machine and everything runs on that.

[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

The way the system manages interaction between the virtual machines is the key of this distribution. All applications have their files stored in the .img file of the VM which they are part of. Applications have readonly access to the image filesystem and store their files directly on the filesystem.

[[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

In terms of security, there are clear advantages to this approach to managing applications in this manner. It makes it theoretically very difficult for a malicious 3rd party to exploit an application and gain root access to the system. There is definitely a big performance hit that occurs when running so many VMs at the same time though.

Everything seems very sluggish when compared to other linux distributions like Ubuntu running in the same environment. Like many modern operating systems, the scheduler in Qubes appears to prioritze the things that people notice. For example, opening a program might take 10-20 seconds from clicking on it to start actually seeing the program open, but things like highlighting, moving the cursor around, etc did not lag at all which makes the user feel better about the performance.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements.

As I mentioned I ran Qubes in a VM, obviously this is not a fair test since it runs VMs inside of itself and my system is not powerful enough to fully utilize the system like this. I did it that way because I had no choice when it refused to boot natively on any of my computers. I still think it has been enough experience to learn what I needed to learn in order to write this report.

===References===
<references/>

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-12-20T17:39:08Z

Dneray: /* Basic Operation */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off of Fedora Linux OS and the Xen Hypervisor. It is aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information, but could it be used by anybody who is concerned about their computer security.

The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011, and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here]. The install dvd is quite big at 1.59gb for the install DVD. In comparison, Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions will still fit on a 700mb CD.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system. From my research it does not appear that there are any other operating systems available that have used this technique.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking (by isolating them in a VM) for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements<ref>http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide</ref>===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for tweaking the system for extra security at the expense of speed) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.

The default option creates a dom0 VM that is used system operations that require special access, a networking VM, a separate VM for other system applications and one for user applications. By manually defining more VMs you could also create separate VMs for work apps, home apps, apps that deal with confidential information, etc. If you select to not create any VMs then the system is essentially a modified Linux distro, and it takes away the most of the advantage of this OS, it will only have the dom0 virtual machine and everything runs on that.

[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

The way the system manages interaction between the virtual machines is the key of this distribution. All applications have their files stored in the .img file of the VM which they are part of. Applications have readonly access to the image filesystem and store their files directly on the filesystem.

[[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

In terms of security, there are clear advantages to this approach to managing applications in this manner. It makes it theoretically very difficult for a malicious 3rd party to exploit an application and gain root access to the system. There is definitely a big performance hit that occurs when running so many VMs at the same time though.

Everything seems very sluggish when compared to other linux distributions like Ubuntu running in the same environment. Like many modern operating systems, the scheduler in Qubes appears to prioritze the things that people notice. For example, opening a program might take 10-20 seconds from clicking on it to start actually seeing the program open, but things like highlighting, moving the cursor around, etc did not lag at all which makes the user feel better about the performance.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===
<references/>

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-12-20T17:17:07Z

Dneray: /* Installation/Startup */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off of Fedora Linux OS and the Xen Hypervisor. It is aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information, but could it be used by anybody who is concerned about their computer security.

The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011, and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here]. The install dvd is quite big at 1.59gb for the install DVD. In comparison, Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions will still fit on a 700mb CD.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system. From my research it does not appear that there are any other operating systems available that have used this technique.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking (by isolating them in a VM) for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements<ref>http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide</ref>===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for tweaking the system for extra security at the expense of speed) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.

The default option creates a dom0 VM that is used system operations that require special access, a networking VM, a separate VM for other system applications and one for user applications. By manually defining more VMs you could also create separate VMs for work apps, home apps, apps that deal with confidential information, etc. If you select to not create any VMs then the system is essentially a modified Linux distro, and it takes away the most of the advantage of this OS, it will only have the dom0 virtual machine and everything runs on that.

[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===
<references/>

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-12-20T15:56:06Z

Dneray: /* Background */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off of Fedora Linux OS and the Xen Hypervisor. It is aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information, but could it be used by anybody who is concerned about their computer security.

The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011, and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here]. The install dvd is quite big at 1.59gb for the install DVD. In comparison, Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions will still fit on a 700mb CD.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system. From my research it does not appear that there are any other operating systems available that have used this technique.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking (by isolating them in a VM) for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements<ref>http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide</ref>===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for setting home/work bottles, etc) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.
[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===
<references/>

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-11-17T03:48:03Z

Dneray: /* Part II */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-11-17T03:42:44Z

Dneray: /* Major package versions */

==Part II==

===Software Packaging===

Although I would have expected this distribution to use dpkg/apt because it is knoppix based, it seems in the interest of saving space they switched to the rpm package system (as revealed by rpm -i), the functionality is provided by busybox which provides a number of normal system functions at a reduced size.

As with DSL, DSL-N has an incredibly minimalistic guy for the custom package manager and provides repositories of apps ready to install. To access the list of programs you simply right click on the desktop and go to net and choose 'mydsl extension browser'. Then you select a section as shown in my screen shot. You're then presented with a simple list of applications and you can download and install them or remove them with one click. It also has the option to

The software catalog is not very extensive but it contains everything you would expect to find (although a little out of date) like firefox, openoffice, thunderbird, etc. There generally seems to be a focus on smaller less known educational apps as I would see this distribution having a large percentage of its presence in the educational market on low budget computers.

===Major package versions===

[http://www.kernel.org Linux Kernel:]
Version Present: 2.6.12

Source: uname -r

Build Release Date: 17-Jun-2005

Current Version: 2.6.39

Current Release date: 19-May-2011

Blurb: The linux kernel 2.6.x offers a wide range of features over the 2.4.x line that it took over from. That being said, it also became a lot more bloated in size and dropped support for older legacy hardware which is what cause the split between DSL and DSL-N

[http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/ libc:]

Source: ls /lib/libc*

Version Present: 2.3.2:

Current Version: 2.14

source: http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/

Blurb: likely the latest version that was around when it was released, libc is a necessary component of any linux distribution

[http://www.gtk.org/ gtk+ 2:]

Current Version GTK+ 2.24.8

Current release date 10-Nov-2011

Blurb: GTK+ does a lot of the work of getting a GUI up and running and managing windows, etc, the base GTK is very small and makes perfect sense to include with this distro along with a super lightweight window manager

[http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/ Bash:]

Source: bash --help

Version Present:2.05b

Build release date: 17 July 2002

Current Version 4.2

Current Release Date: 13 February 2011

Blurb: bash is a necessary part of all linux distros and is not in need of new features and is therefore not updated very often, this was likely the latest version available when it was released

[http://busybox.net/ busybox:]

Source: rpm -i

Version Present: v1.0.0.0

Build Release date:2006.01.20

Current Version: BusyBox 1.19.3

Current Release Date: 29 October 2011

Blurb: busybox is designed with the exact same main goal as dsl/dsl-n, size. It integrates a number of system functions and takes up a fraction of the space of having them all separate, making it an ideal application to include with DSL-N

[http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ Seamonkey Email + Web Browser:]

Web Browser Version Present: 2.0.2

Email Version Present: seamonkey 1.0.2

Build release date: 2006/05/16

Current Version: 2.4.1

Current Release date: Sept. 29 2011

Blurb: Seamonkey integrates email and browser together and shares an engine between the two of them. It maintains a familiar mozilla feel to it and shaves off space when compared to competitors.

[http://www.abisource.com/ abiword]

Version Present: 2.2.7

Build release date: 18 December 2003

Current Version: 2.8.6

Current release date: Oct 27 2009

Blurb: Abiword is extremely lightweight, small and it has all the features that the average user would use from a more featureful text editor. It won't do the trick for really complicated documents but overall it's compatible with a wide range of document formats and has extremely low space and resource requirements which makes it an ideal application to include.

[http://www.gftp.org/ Gftp:]

Version Present: 2.0.18

Build release date: 05 Feb 2005

Current Version: 2.0.19

Current release date 11/30/2008

Blurb: gftp is a simplistic ftp client for file transfers, it fits with dsl-n overall with its simplistic feel and low resource use but it seems a little unfitting to me given that it depends on many gnome libraries that would otherwise be unnecessary for this distro.

[http://www.pidgin.im/ gaim]

Version Present: 0.7.7

Current Version: pidgin 2.10

Current release date: 08/20/2011

Blurb: Gaim is a multi-protocol IM client, at the time it was the gold standard for linux distros to include as the default IM client. It is also small, relies on gtk libraries and has low resource usage so it fits with DSL-N

None of the packages I reviewed here appear to be modified by the developer, they are simply packaged together

===Initialization===
I discovered the boot scripts in /etc/rcS.d, there are 2 boot scripts:

S00knoppix--autoconfig runs first and does the following:

1.reinit usb devices that could not be started from linuxrc, probe necessary modules

2. mount filesystem readonly, with or without encryption

3. load alas sound daemon

4. load localization

5. set time

6. if running from HD, check file systems

7. mounts in read-write before continuing

8. if running from hard drive, regenerate module dependencies (klconfig ; depmod -a 2>/dev/null)

9. Set resolution and load /etc/init.d/splash.sh

10. delete links to hardware that doesn't exist ie. /dev/sdrom /dev/mouse, etc

11. write knoppix config files for other scripts to parse

12. Activate modules for acpi (power management)

13. usb mouse check/seup. try both usb mouse modules in case someone has 2 different controllers usb-uhci and usb-ohci

14. load firewire modules, search and configure hardware, setup carom that hasn't been setup by hwsetup

15. automatic xf86 setup using /usr/sbin/mkvf86config

16: create /etc/fstab and scan for partitions/hard drives to add

17.auto mount all devices; floppies, cds, etc

18. overwrite old /etc/fstab

19. run /etc/init.d/autofs start to start the automounter

S01dsl-config runs next and does the following:

1. loads special modules for different devices

2. makes a list of installed applications

3. makes menus

4. /etc/sysconfig/mydsl

5. ensures networking modules are loaded

6. deletes temporary folders created during boot /tmp/firstboot /miniroot /var/tmp and sets up a sym link from /var/tmp to /tmp and sets permissions on it.

7. checks for validity of user account and forces you to set a new password if you must

8. sets boot device

9. starts the appropriate user defined services in this order: ssh, lp, nfs, monkey web server, syslog, ftp, /etc/init.d/mkwriteable, touch /etc/sysconfig/unionfs touch/etc/sysconfig/writeable, load rest of
modules

10. mount directories

11. iconcheck, orphancheck, mkmydslmenu

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-11-17T03:30:56Z

Dneray:

==Part II==

===Software Packaging===

Although I would have expected this distribution to use dpkg/apt because it is knoppix based, it seems in the interest of saving space they switched to the rpm package system (as revealed by rpm -i), the functionality is provided by busybox which provides a number of normal system functions at a reduced size.

As with DSL, DSL-N has an incredibly minimalistic guy for the custom package manager and provides repositories of apps ready to install. To access the list of programs you simply right click on the desktop and go to net and choose 'mydsl extension browser'. Then you select a section as shown in my screen shot. You're then presented with a simple list of applications and you can download and install them or remove them with one click. It also has the option to

The software catalog is not very extensive but it contains everything you would expect to find (although a little out of date) like firefox, openoffice, thunderbird, etc. There generally seems to be a focus on smaller less known educational apps as I would see this distribution having a large percentage of its presence in the educational market on low budget computers.

===Major package versions===

Report on the version numbers and upstream source (URL of original source) for some of the major software packages included in your distribution as part of the standard install:

Choose at least 10 packages that fit into this list (you don't need to cover every category) and report the following:
* What is the vintage of the included package? How old is it, and how far is it behind the latest stable release for this package?
* How heavily has the package been modified by the distribution authors? (You'll need to figure out how to determine this.)
* Why do you think this particular package was chosen for this distribution's standard install? You may speculate, but please make an argument informed by relevant facts.

[http://www.kernel.org Linux Kernel:]
Version Present: 2.6.12

Source: uname -r

Build Release Date: 17-Jun-2005

Current Version: 2.6.39

Current Release date: 19-May-2011

[http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/ libc:]

Source: ls /lib/libc*

Version Present: 2.3.2:

Current Version: 2.14

source: http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/

[http://www.gtk.org/ gtk+ 2:]

Current Version GTK+ 2.24.8

Current release date 10-Nov-2011

[http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/ Bash:]

Source: bash --help

Version Present:2.05b

Build release date: 17 July 2002

Current Version 4.2

Current Release Date: 13 February 2011

[http://busybox.net/ busybox:]

Source: rpm -i

Version Present: v1.0.0.0

Build Release date:2006.01.20

Current Version: BusyBox 1.19.3

Current Release Date: 29 October 2011

[http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ Seamonkey Email + Web Browser:]

Web Browser Version Present: 2.0.2

Email Version Present: seamonkey 1.0.2

Build release date: 2006/05/16

Current Version: 2.4.1

Current Release date: Sept. 29 2011

[http://www.abisource.com/ abiword]

Version Present: 2.2.7

Build release date: 18 December 2003

Current Version: 2.8.6

Current release date: Oct 27 2009

[http://www.gftp.org/ Gftp:]

Version Present: 2.0.18

Build release date: 05 Feb 2005

Current Version: 2.0.19

Current release date 11/30/2008

[http://www.pidgin.im/ gaim]

Version Present: 0.7.7

Current Version: pidgin 2.10

Current release date: 08/20/2011

===Initialization===
I discovered the boot scripts in /etc/rcS.d, there are 2 boot scripts:

S00knoppix--autoconfig runs first and does the following:

1.reinit usb devices that could not be started from linuxrc, probe necessary modules

2. mount filesystem readonly, with or without encryption

3. load alas sound daemon

4. load localization

5. set time

6. if running from HD, check file systems

7. mounts in read-write before continuing

8. if running from hard drive, regenerate module dependencies (klconfig ; depmod -a 2>/dev/null)

9. Set resolution and load /etc/init.d/splash.sh

10. delete links to hardware that doesn't exist ie. /dev/sdrom /dev/mouse, etc

11. write knoppix config files for other scripts to parse

12. Activate modules for acpi (power management)

13. usb mouse check/seup. try both usb mouse modules in case someone has 2 different controllers usb-uhci and usb-ohci

14. load firewire modules, search and configure hardware, setup carom that hasn't been setup by hwsetup

15. automatic xf86 setup using /usr/sbin/mkvf86config

16: create /etc/fstab and scan for partitions/hard drives to add

17.auto mount all devices; floppies, cds, etc

18. overwrite old /etc/fstab

19. run /etc/init.d/autofs start to start the automounter

S01dsl-config runs next and does the following:

1. loads special modules for different devices

2. makes a list of installed applications

3. makes menus

4. /etc/sysconfig/mydsl

5. ensures networking modules are loaded

6. deletes temporary folders created during boot /tmp/firstboot /miniroot /var/tmp and sets up a sym link from /var/tmp to /tmp and sets permissions on it.

7. checks for validity of user account and forces you to set a new password if you must

8. sets boot device

9. starts the appropriate user defined services in this order: ssh, lp, nfs, monkey web server, syslog, ftp, /etc/init.d/mkwriteable, touch /etc/sysconfig/unionfs touch/etc/sysconfig/writeable, load rest of
modules

10. mount directories

11. iconcheck, orphancheck, mkmydslmenu

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-11-17T03:29:44Z

Dneray:

==Part II==

===Software Packaging===

Although I would have expected this distribution to use dpkg/apt because it is knoppix based, it seems in the interest of saving space they switched to the rpm package system (as revealed by rpm -i), the functionality is provided by busybox which provides a number of normal system functions at a reduced size.

As with DSL, DSL-N has an incredibly minimalistic guy for the custom package manager and provides repositories of apps ready to install. To access the list of programs you simply right click on the desktop and go to net and choose 'mydsl extension browser'. Then you select a section as shown in my screen shot. You're then presented with a simple list of applications and you can download and install them or remove them with one click. It also has the option to

The software catalog is not very extensive but it contains everything you would expect to find (although a little out of date) like firefox, openoffice, thunderbird, etc. There generally seems to be a focus on smaller less known educational apps as I would see this distribution having a large percentage of its presence in the educational market on low budget computers.

===Major package versions===

Report on the version numbers and upstream source (URL of original source) for some of the major software packages included in your distribution as part of the standard install:

Choose at least 10 packages that fit into this list (you don't need to cover every category) and report the following:
* What is the vintage of the included package? How old is it, and how far is it behind the latest stable release for this package?
* How heavily has the package been modified by the distribution authors? (You'll need to figure out how to determine this.)
* Why do you think this particular package was chosen for this distribution's standard install? You may speculate, but please make an argument informed by relevant facts.

[http://www.kernel.org Linux Kernel:]
Version Present: 2.6.12
Source: uname -r
Build Release Date: 17-Jun-2005 Source Code: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/
Current Version: 2.6.39
Current Release date: 19-May-2011

[http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/ libc:]
Source: ls /lib/libc*
Version Present: 2.3.2:
Current Version: 2.14
source: http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/

[http://www.gtk.org/ gtk+ 2:]
Current Version GTK+ 2.24.8
Current release date 10-Nov-2011

[http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/ Bash:]
Source: bash --help
Version Present:2.05b
Build release date: 17 July 2002
Current Version 4.2
Current Release Date: 13 February 2011

[http://busybox.net/ busybox:]
Source: rpm -i
Version Present: v1.0.0.0
Build Release date:2006.01.20
Current Version: BusyBox 1.19.3
Current Release Date: 29 October 2011

[http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ Seamonkey Email + Web Browser:]
Web Browser Version Present: 2.0.2
Email Version Present: seamonkey 1.0.2
Build release date: 2006/05/16
Current Version: 2.4.1
Current Release date: Sept. 29 2011

[http://www.abisource.com/ abiword]
Version Present: 2.2.7
Build release date: 18 December 2003
Current Version: 2.8.6
Current release date: Oct 27 2009

[http://www.gftp.org/ Gftp:]
Version Present: 2.0.18
Build release date: 05 Feb 2005
Current Version: 2.0.19
Current release date 11/30/2008

[http://www.pidgin.im/ gaim]
Version Present: 0.7.7
Current Version: pidgin 2.10
Current release date: 08/20/2011

===Initialization===
I discovered the boot scripts in /etc/rcS.d, there are 2 boot scripts:

S00knoppix--autoconfig runs first and does the following:
1.reinit usb devices that could not be started from linuxrc, probe necessary modules
2. mount filesystem readonly, with or without encryption
3. load alas sound daemon
4. load localization
5. set time
6. if running from HD, check file systems
7. mounts in read-write before continuing
8. if running from hard drive, regenerate module dependencies (klconfig ; depmod -a 2>/dev/null)
9. Set resolution and load /etc/init.d/splash.sh
10. delete links to hardware that doesn't exist ie. /dev/sdrom /dev/mouse, etc
11. write knoppix config files for other scripts to parse
12. Activate modules for acpi (power management)
13. usb mouse check/seup. try both usb mouse modules in case someone has 2 different controllers usb-uhci and usb-ohci
14. load firewire modules, search and configure hardware, setup carom that hasn't been setup by hwsetup
15. automatic xf86 setup using /usr/sbin/mkvf86config
16: create /etc/fstab and scan for partitions/hard drives to add
17.auto mount all devices; floppies, cds, etc
18. overwrite old /etc/fstab
19. run /etc/init.d/autofs start to start the automounter

S01dsl-config runs next and does the following:
1. loads special modules for different devices
2. makes a list of installed applications
3. makes menus
4. /etc/sysconfig/mydsl
5. ensures networking modules are loaded
6. deletes temporary folders created during boot /tmp/firstboot /miniroot /var/tmp and sets up a sym link from /var/tmp to /tmp and sets permissions on it.
7. checks for validity of user account and forces you to set a new password if you must
8. sets boot device
9. starts the appropriate user defined services in this order: ssh, lp, nfs, monkey web server, syslog, ftp, /etc/init.d/mkwriteable, touch /etc/sysconfig/unionfs touch/etc/sysconfig/writeable, load rest of modules
10. mount directories
11. iconcheck, orphancheck, mkmydslmenu

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-11-17T03:26:50Z

Dneray:

==Part II==
'''Due:''' November 16, 2011, 11:30 PM

The goal for Part II is for you to investigate and report what software is in your chosen distribution and how it is put together. My preference is that you work with the same distribution as for Part I. If you switch distributions, please include a background section as in Part I.

===Software Packaging===

Although I would have expected this distribution to use dpkg/apt because it is knoppix based, it seems in the interest of saving space they switched to the rpm package system (as revealed by rpm -i), the functionality is provided by busybox which provides a number of normal system functions at a reduced size.

As with DSL, DSL-N has an incredibly minimalistic guy for the custom package manager and provides repositories of apps ready to install. To access the list of programs you simply right click on the desktop and go to net and choose 'mydsl extension browser'. Then you select a section as shown in my screen shot. You're then presented with a simple list of applications and you can download and install them or remove them with one click. It also has the option to

The software catalog is not very extensive but it contains everything you would expect to find (although a little out of date) like firefox, openoffice, thunderbird, etc. There generally seems to be a focus on smaller less known educational apps as I would see this distribution having a large percentage of its presence in the educational market on low budget computers.

===Major package versions===

Report on the version numbers and upstream source (URL of original source) for some of the major software packages included in your distribution as part of the standard install:

Choose at least 10 packages that fit into this list (you don't need to cover every category) and report the following:
* What is the vintage of the included package? How old is it, and how far is it behind the latest stable release for this package?
* How heavily has the package been modified by the distribution authors? (You'll need to figure out how to determine this.)
* Why do you think this particular package was chosen for this distribution's standard install? You may speculate, but please make an argument informed by relevant facts.

Linux Kernel: http://www.kernel.org
Version Present: 2.6.12
Source: uname -r
Build Release Date: 17-Jun-2005 Source Code: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/
Current Version: 2.6.39
Current Release date: 19-May-2011

libc: http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/
Source: ls /lib/libc*
Version Present: 2.3.2:
Current Version: 2.14
source: http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/

gtk+ 2: http://www.gtk.org/
Current Version GTK+ 2.24.8
Current release date 10-Nov-2011

Bash http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/
Source: bash --help
Version Present:2.05b
Build release date: 17 July 2002
Current Version 4.2
Current Release Date: 13 February 2011

busybox http://busybox.net/
Source: rpm -i
Version Present: v1.0.0.0
Build Release date:2006.01.20
Current Version: BusyBox 1.19.3
Current Release Date: 29 October 2011

Seamonkey Email + Web Browser http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
Web Browser Version Present: 2.0.2
Email Version Present: seamonkey 1.0.2
Build release date: 2006/05/16
Current Version: 2.4.1
Current Release date: Sept. 29 2011

abiword http://www.abisource.com/
Version Present: 2.2.7
Build release date: 18 December 2003
Current Version: 2.8.6
Current release date: Oct 27 2009

Gftp http://www.gftp.org/
Version Present: 2.0.18
Build release date: 05 Feb 2005
Current Version: 2.0.19
Current release date 11/30/2008

gaim http://www.pidgin.im/
Version Present: 0.7.7
Current Version: pidgin 2.10
Current release date: 08/20/2011

===Initialization===
I discovered the boot scripts in /etc/rcS.d, there are 2 boot scripts:

S00knoppix--autoconfig runs first and does the following:
1.reinit usb devices that could not be started from linuxrc, probe necessary modules
2. mount filesystem readonly, with or without encryption
3. load alas sound daemon
4. load localization
5. set time
6. if running from HD, check file systems
7. mounts in read-write before continuing
8. if running from hard drive, regenerate module dependencies (klconfig ; depmod -a 2>/dev/null)
9. Set resolution and load /etc/init.d/splash.sh
10. delete links to hardware that doesn't exist ie. /dev/sdrom /dev/mouse, etc
11. write knoppix config files for other scripts to parse
12. Activate modules for acpi (power management)
13. usb mouse check/seup. try both usb mouse modules in case someone has 2 different controllers usb-uhci and usb-ohci
14. load firewire modules, search and configure hardware, setup carom that hasn't been setup by hwsetup
15. automatic xf86 setup using /usr/sbin/mkvf86config
16: create /etc/fstab and scan for partitions/hard drives to add
17.auto mount all devices; floppies, cds, etc
18. overwrite old /etc/fstab
19. run /etc/init.d/autofs start to start the automounter

S01dsl-config runs next and does the following:
1. loads special modules for different devices
2. makes a list of installed applications
3. makes menus
4. /etc/sysconfig/mydsl
5. ensures networking modules are loaded
6. deletes temporary folders created during boot /tmp/firstboot /miniroot /var/tmp and sets up a sym link from /var/tmp to /tmp and sets permissions on it.
7. checks for validity of user account and forces you to set a new password if you must
8. sets boot device
9. starts the appropriate user defined services in this order: ssh, lp, nfs, monkey web server, syslog, ftp, /etc/init.d/mkwriteable, touch /etc/sysconfig/unionfs touch/etc/sysconfig/writeable, load rest of modules
10. mount directories
11. iconcheck, orphancheck, mkmydslmenu

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not

2011-11-17T01:32:18Z

Dneray: Created page with " ==Part II== '''Due:''' November 16, 2011, 11:30 PM The goal for Part II is for you to investigate and report what software is in your chosen distribution and how it is put toge…"

COMP 3000 Distribution Sign-up 2011

2011-11-17T01:08:14Z

Dneray: /* Distributions A-D */

Sign up for the distribution you want to report on here. Note that others are also editing page so verify that the page hasn't been mangled after you make your changes. To help with this, try to only edit the section for the appropriate alphabet range (e.g., Ubuntu should go under T-V).

Note that no more than two people may sign up for each distribution. If two people sign up for a distribution, you two '''should be working together''' on a joint report. If you are not working together, then note that the person who picked the distribution gets a 10% bonus: that person, after all, did the work to find the distribution.

Please sign up with your wiki name (which, generally, should be the same as your connect username). See [http://www.distrowatch.com Distrowatch] to see what distributions are out there. Also, search for types of operating system distributions.

Please '''do not''' sign up for a major distribution. This includes but is not limited to the major distributions listed by Distrowatch. Pick out something specialized and obscure! If in doubt, please email the instructors and TAs.

If you are submitting your report on the wiki, please add a link to it as shown in the example. Please title the page using the name of your distribution, not your name.

Further information on the report is [[COMP 3000 Distribution Report Specifications 2011|here]].

Example entry:

* [http://www.ubuntu.com Ubuntu]: asomayaj, snetimar ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Ubuntu|Report]])

==Distributions A-D==
[http://alpinelinux.org/ Alpine Linux]: mevans ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Alpine|Report]])

[http://www.apodio.org/ APODIO]: mbrowna ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: APODIO|Report]])

[http://www.artistx.org/site3/ ArtistX]: adangel2 ([[Comp 3000 ArtistX Report|Report]])

BackTrack: dcarson

[http://www.bodhilinux.com/ Bodhi Linux]: jboucha2 ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Bodhi|Report]])

[http://Caine-Live.net/ CAINE Linux]: nyoung2 ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: CAINE|Report]])

Chromium OS(Chrome OS): baathari

[http://crunchbanglinux.org/ CrunchBang]: drewmartin ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: CrunchBang|Report]])

[http://crux.nu/ CRUX]: ttian1 ([[COMP 3000 2011 report ttian1|Report]])

[http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ Damn Small Linux]: MartyV ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux|Report]])

[http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/ Damn Small Linux - Not]: dneray ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Small Linux - Not|Report]])

Damn Vulnerable Linux: amurphy7 , vsanthir ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Damn Vulnerable Linux|Report]])

[http://www.deftlinux.net/ DEFT Linux]: deadlytea ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: DEFT Linux|Report]])

[http://www.doudoulinux.org/ DoudouLinux]:fmcyamwe,tchopel([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: DoudouLinux|Report]])

[http://dream.dickmacinnis.com/forum/ Dream Studio]: smaqsood ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Dream Studio|Report]])

==Distributions E-H==

[http://www.edubuntu.org/ Edubuntu]: smaqsood ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Edubuntu|Report]])

[http://www.funtoo.org/ Funtoo Linux]: porter.nicolas ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Funtoo Linux|Report]])

[http://www.gobolinux.org/ GoboLinux]: NameGoesHere

[http://haiku-os.org/ Haiku]: nhoda, thildebr ([http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~nhoda/haiku/ Report])

[http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/Site/Home.html Hannah Montana Linux]:ttian1

==Distributions I-M==
Incognito Live System: bwernik ([[Report: TAILS]])

[http://www.inquisitor.ru/ Inquisitor]: atchekan ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Inquisitor|Report]])

[http://www.jolicloud.com/ Joli OS (Jolicloud)]: nkathrad tsukasa19([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Joli OS|Report]])

[http://knosciences.tuxfamily.org/doku.php KnoSciences]: nTierney([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: KnoSciences|Report]])

[http://www.dee.su/liberte/ Liberté Linux]: Murals

[http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm Lightweight Portable Security]: jeckhard ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: LPS|Report]])

[http://linhes.org/bugs/ LinHes]:jmarcha1 ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: LinHES|Report]])

[http://live.linux-gamers.net/ linuX-Gamers Live]: dlpkelly ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: linuX-gamers Live|Report]])

Linux Mangaka One: AsoCchahal ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Linux Mangaka One|Report]])

[http://lubuntu.net/ Lubuntu]: falaskar

[http://www.menuetos.net/ MenuetOS]: Caesar, Vangelis ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: MenuetOS|Report]])

[http://puppylinux.org/wikka/LegacyOS/ Legacy OS]:rnyssanb, zzhou6([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Legacy|Report]])

[http://macpup.org/ Macpup]: kbyrd, rcarrot1 ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Macpup|Report]])

==Distributions N-P==

[http://www.nova.cu/?q=en/start Nova]: jaze ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Nova|Report]])

[http://partedmagic.com/doku.php Parted Magic]: erhodes

[http://peppermintos.com/ PeppermintOS]: fmuhamma

[http://perllinux.sourceforge.net/ Perl/Linux]:

Privatix Live-System: gbooth, sbrett ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Privatix|Report]])

[http://puppylinux.org/ Puppy Linux]: mwooff, jnrahme ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: PuppyLinux|Report]])

[http://www.pinguyos.com/ PinguyOS]: ssivara, uramazan (pdawod)

[http://www.en.poseidonlinux.org/ Poseidon Linux]: 36chambers ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: PoseidonLinux|Report]])

PC-BSD : todetoyi([[COMP 3000 2011 Report:PC-BSD|Report]]), qliu1 ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: qliu|Report]]) ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report II:PC-BSD|ReportII_todetoyi_qliu1]])

[http://www.parsix.org/ Parsix GNU/Linux]: tzhang1, jzhang ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Parsix GNU/Linux|Report]])

[http://www.pardus.org.tr/en/ Pardus]: ksubedi ([[Report: Pardus Linux|Report]])

[http://www.puredyne.org/ Puredyne]: Carlton

==Distributions Q-S==
[http://www.qimo4kids.com Qimo]: rwolfe ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qimo|Report]])

[http://qubes-os.org/Home.html Qubes]: dneray ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2|Report]])

[http://bkhome.org/quirky/ Quirky]: Qingming_no_lisca（[[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Quirky|Report]]）

[http://www.swiftlinux.org/ Swift Linux]: mabadeer, Yliu11([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Swift Linux|Report]])

[http://www.salineos.com/ SalineOS]: drhill ([[COMP 3000 2011 Drhill's Report: SalineOS 1.4|Report]])

[http://www.scientificlinux.org/ Scientific Linux]: kfourni1

[http://www.slackware.com/ Slackware]: sturnbu5 ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Slackware 13.37|Report]])

[http://www.slax.org/ SLAX]: Andre Song

[http://www.slitaz.org/en/ SliTaz]: Bobbybobbets ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: SliTaz|Report]])

[http://www.stresslinux.org/sl/ StressLinux]: achaddad

[http://sourceforge.net/projects/suicide-linux/ Suicide-Linux]:

[http://www.sabayon.org/ Sabayon Linux]: mabdirah, selmoafi

==Distributions T-W==
[http://tails.boum.org/index.en.html/ TAILS]: Khorrus

[http://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html TCCBOOT: TinyCC Boot Loader]:

[http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/welcome.html/ Tiny Core Linux ]: aadegbem ([[Comp 3000 2011 Report: Tiny Core Linux|Report]])

[http://tinymelinux.com/doku.php TinyMe]: jaze ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: TinyMe|Report]])

[http://www.minimalinux.org/ttylinux/ ttylinux]: kmacmart ([[COMP_3000_2011_Report: ttylinux|Report]])

[http://www.uberstudent.org/ UberStudent]: akwiatko ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: UberStudent|Report]])

[http://ubuntustudio.org/ Ubuntu Studio]: Chashem and Jbyford ([[Editing COMP 3000 2011 Report: Ubuntu Studio|Report]])

[http://vectorlinux.com/ VectorLinux]: judethedude,Lkuate ([[ VectorLinux|Report]])

[http://www.planetwatt.com/ wattOS]: JPAL

==Distributions X-Z==
[http://www.zentyal.com/ Zentyal]: cyu3 ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Zentyal|Report]])

[http://www.zenwalk.org/ Zenwalk]: mgizbert ([[Editing COMP 3000 2011 Report: Zenwalk|Report]])

[http://http://www.zeroshell.net/ ZeroShell]: bvardal ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: ZeroShell|Report]])

[http://www.zorin-os.com/ Zorin OS]: awillman ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: Zorin OS|Report]])

[http://www.xbmc.org/ XBMC]: awallac1, ketsiagb ([[COMP 3000 2011 Report: XBMC|Report]])

[http://www.xubuntu.org/ Xubuntu]: ernibek, Komarova

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T03:07:35Z

Dneray: /* References */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off the Fedora Linux OS combined with the Xen Hypervisor and X Windows System GUI aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information but also anybody who is concerned about their computer security. The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011 and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here] weighing in at a hefty 1.59gb for the install dvd.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements<ref>http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide</ref>===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for setting home/work bottles, etc) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.
[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===
<references/>

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T03:06:47Z

Dneray: /* Hardware Requirements */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off the Fedora Linux OS combined with the Xen Hypervisor and X Windows System GUI aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information but also anybody who is concerned about their computer security. The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011 and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here] weighing in at a hefty 1.59gb for the install dvd.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements<ref>http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide</ref>===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for setting home/work bottles, etc) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.
[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===

File:AddNewVMs.png

2011-10-20T03:00:10Z

Dneray:

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T02:43:51Z

Dneray: /* Basic Operation */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off the Fedora Linux OS combined with the Xen Hypervisor and X Windows System GUI aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information but also anybody who is concerned about their computer security. The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011 and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here] weighing in at a hefty 1.59gb for the install dvd.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for setting home/work bottles, etc) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.
[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T02:43:28Z

Dneray: /* Basic Operation */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off the Fedora Linux OS combined with the Xen Hypervisor and X Windows System GUI aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information but also anybody who is concerned about their computer security. The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011 and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here] weighing in at a hefty 1.59gb for the install dvd.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for setting home/work bottles, etc) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.
[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T02:42:20Z

Dneray: /* Basic Operation */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off the Fedora Linux OS combined with the Xen Hypervisor and X Windows System GUI aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information but also anybody who is concerned about their computer security. The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011 and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here] weighing in at a hefty 1.59gb for the install dvd.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for setting home/work bottles, etc) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.
[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T02:40:06Z

Dneray: /* Basic Operation */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off the Fedora Linux OS combined with the Xen Hypervisor and X Windows System GUI aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information but also anybody who is concerned about their computer security. The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011 and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here] weighing in at a hefty 1.59gb for the install dvd.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for setting home/work bottles, etc) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.
[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[[File:LoginScree1n.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]

[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T02:39:32Z

Dneray: /* Basic Operation */

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off the Fedora Linux OS combined with the Xen Hypervisor and X Windows System GUI aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information but also anybody who is concerned about their computer security. The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011 and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here] weighing in at a hefty 1.59gb for the install dvd.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for setting home/work bottles, etc) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.
[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]] The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[File:VMlist.png|200px|thumb|right|lThis is how you manage the VMs, you can pause, stop or start them from here]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===

File:LoginScreen.png

2011-10-20T02:37:48Z

Dneray:

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T02:36:07Z

Dneray:

'''Part 1'''

===Background===
[[File:droppedImage.png|200px|thumb|right|A visual representation of the security system used by Quebes]]
[http://qubes-os.org/ Quebes] is a very new Operating System based off the Fedora Linux OS combined with the Xen Hypervisor and X Windows System GUI aimed primarily at people dealing with confidential information but also anybody who is concerned about their computer security. The first beta was released on Apr 11, 2011 and the 2nd beta was released on Sep 19, 2011. It is actively being developed by [http://invisiblethingslab.com/ Invisible Things Lab] and it can be downloaded from [http://wiki.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide here] weighing in at a hefty 1.59gb for the install dvd.

This OS is designed with the primary goal of being secure. It employs a highly unique and interesting technique to achieve this; it runs some of the system components in a virtual machine and it runs user applications in separate user defined virtual machines. This theoretically isolates applications and their memory contents. This makes it such that if one application misbehaves or is maliciously exploited it is unlikely to have an effect on other applications in a separate VM or the running system.

One of the truly revolutionary parts of this platform is the way that the GUI integrates the multiple VMs in order to make it as seamless as possible for the user to manage. The other majorly revolutionary part of this platform is the fact that it sandboxes parts of the system like networking for extra security.

===Hardware Requirements===

'''Minimum:'''

4GB of RAM
64-bit Intel or AMD processor (x86_64 aka x64 aka AMD64)

Intel GPU strongly preferred (if you have Nvidia GPU, prepare for some troubleshooting; we haven't tested ATI hardware)

10GB of disk (Note that it is possible to install Qubes on an external USB disk, so that you can try it without sacrificing your current system. Mind, however, that USB disks are usually SLOW!)

Fat SSD disk strongly recommended

'''Additional criteria'''
Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU technology (this is needed for effective isolation of your network VMs)

If you don't meet the additional criteria, you can still install and use Qubes. It still offers significant security improvement over traditional OSes, because things such as GUI isolation, or kernel protection do not require special hardware.

Note: We don't recommend installing Qubes in a virtual machine! Note: There is a problem with supporting keyboard and mouse on Mac, and so Mac hardware is currently unsupported (patches welcomed!)

===Installation/Startup===
Install is pretty standard and straightforward compared with other OSs and Linux distros I am installing on a 2011 MacBook pro (which I know is unsupported, but let's see how it goes…) unfortunately I am going to be installing to an external hard drive so I will not be able to give a true performance evaluation.

[[File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you see when booting this disk]]
I ran into my first issue very quickly which was that I did not read there release notes for beta 2 and I discovered that the installer does not support my macbook pro keyboard but this was quickly remedied by plugging in a USB keyboard. I decided to skip the disk check and then I was asked to partion my drive and set a time zone. I chose to encrypt my hard drive because it would feel a little hypocritical not to with such a secure OS.
[[File:partitioning.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Partitioning the disk]]

After that the install failed, let this be a lesson to you to check your disk if you want to potentially save some time. I redownloaded the imagine and went through the installation again, now after completing the installation my mac was unable to boot from the USB hard drive, so I gave the usb hard drive a try on a PC as well as through REefIt mac software and it wouldn't boot. So I gave a native installation a try, I wiped my bootcamp partition off my macbook and I installed Qubes in its place. To my disappointment it still would not boot and REefIt could see it but it would just say "No Operating System Present, Insert Bootable Disk and Press Enter To Continue".

So I gave up and I installed Qubes in a VM which is incapable of showing its true power and is not recommended but I was left with no options to get this OS up and running. I used VMWare Fusion to run it.

[[File:FirstBoot.png|200px|thumb|right|The first screen you will see after starting up the new system (running in a VM]] Upon the first boot I was greeted with a nice welcome screen that walked me through creating a user account and asked me how I wanted to manage my VM bottles. It gives you 3 options at this point, you can have it automatically create the default app VMs (which is what most basic users want), you could manually specify the app VMs (which could be useful for setting home/work bottles, etc) and then there's the option not to create any VMs which is not recommended.
[[File:CreateServiceVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|Creating the VMs]]
After these simple steps you will end up at the standard KDE login screen.

===Basic Operation===

[[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Qubes runs a seemingly unmodified version of KDE graphical environment but unfortunately it is stripped down and contains only a few of the nice goodies that usually come along with that. The only difference that can be noted from a standard linux desktop running KDE is that it has an extra icon in the taskbar which can be used for managing app VMs. This app gives you all the options you need to manage your different VMs, you first name the VM, then you can choose whether or not this VM has access to the network, then you can transfer over to the advanced tab and set the maximum size of the VM and how much ram and cpu resources you would like to devote to it.

[File:addNewVMs.png|200px|thumb|right|This is how you add a custom VM]]The intended usage for this distribution is general productivity in a secure manner, so I decided to try installing some applications and putting them in different VMs in order to see how the VMs look to the user and how it deals with package management and updates inside the VMs.
[File:LoginScreen.png|200px|thumb|right|login to your newly installed OS]]
Since this system is baed on fedora, it uses RPM packages and has the default package manager 'yum' with a kde frontend. It worked flawlessly, I installed a web browser and the open office suite and attempted to separate them into multiple VMs. Unfortunately this was too much for my system to handle running it in a VM and it politely displayed the message 'failed to start custom VM' and open office refused to open until I moved it back into the default VM. This is perfectly acceptable though given that my system just meets the requirements to run this OS natively so some hiccups are to be expected.

===Usage Evaluation===
With the goal being security, this distribution definitely accomplishes that in a way that provides different levels of security depending on the computing knowledge of the user or administrator. It appears to be aimed at advanced computer users especially given that the website makes little effort to explain the basic concepts behind a VM which the whole OS is based on. From my experience this distribution need not only be aimed at advanced users because it provides a much higher level of security than a normal OS in some fields and unless the user wants to manage it, it is almost completely transparent.

Note: This is beta software and it might just not be aimed at regular users for this reason.

From the start the system will setup VMs for the user, mainly the system VMs; it creates one for the networking components of the OS and one for the GUI, and then it also creates a default user application VM. Then if the user is advanced enough and understands the advantages they can manually separate apps into the 2 VMs with ease.

Overall this is great for people who really need the security and stability that this architecture provides, but the requirements are a little bit too ridiculous (and it might be a little unnecessary for ordinary users) to become truly mainstream at the moment. In my VM with 3.2gb of ram dedicated I was only able to run the basic VMs. While 4gb and a 64bit processor is standard in computers purchased in the past year, the reality is that right now, most computers out there do not meet these requirements. It could also be adapted easily to be better for "clueless" users by providing a set of preset VMs that users can choose from to fit different peoples needs (as opposed to making everybody create their own VMs entirely).

===References===

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T02:16:41Z

Dneray: /* Basic Operation */

File:Partitioning.jpg

2011-10-20T01:59:41Z

Dneray:

File:FirstBootInstalling.jpg

2011-10-20T01:52:47Z

Dneray:

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T01:51:07Z

Dneray: /* Usage Evaluation */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T01:45:28Z

Dneray: /* Basic Operation */

File:CreateServiceVMs.png

2011-10-20T01:43:58Z

Dneray:

File:FirstBoot.png

2011-10-20T01:42:33Z

Dneray:

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T01:40:59Z

Dneray: /* Installation/Startup */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T01:02:53Z

Dneray: /* Usage Evaluation */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T00:54:21Z

Dneray: /* Basic Operation */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T00:39:06Z

Dneray: /* Background */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T00:38:34Z

Dneray: /* 'Hardware Requirements */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-20T00:13:02Z

Dneray: /* Installation/Startup */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-17T19:40:32Z

Dneray: /* Installation/Startup */

COMP 3000 2011 Report: Qubes beta 2

2011-10-17T02:42:28Z

Dneray: /* Installation/Startup */