Top Ten Security tools in Linux

A good collection of security tools available in Linux.

From Fedora to Ubuntu

alrite.. what do I say ?? I was a fedora user till yesterday. With all the news and references around Ubuntu, I thought I'll try out Ubuntu for a while and get back to Fedora. So I downloaded Ubuntu ISO and booted the CD.. They have this concept called "live CD" where the OS runs from the CD without having to be installed. It was impressive. Ubuntu recognized most of the hardware except the wireless card. From the Live CD, a simple double click helped me install Ubuntu. The partition tool was really simple to use and the whole install process was really friendly with no complaining. So after booting up into the installed version, I had to get my wireless card working. With fedora, I used to configure my wireless card through ndiswrappper (an utility which uses windows wireless driver to enable wireless card in linux). With Ubuntu, there was a well documented post to install the firmware for my card and within minutes my wireless card was configured. The whole install process took less than 2 hours. I am not familiar with the debian family but Ubuntu seems really "out of the box". so far i am impressed with Ubuntu and might not turn back to Fedora :( :)

Upgraded to Fedora 7

I have upgraded to fedora 7 (F7) in my laptop. The installation went smooth. As recommended by Fedora team, I basically installed F7 and didnt upgrade from Fedor Core 5(FC5). I had a few problems configuring my wireless but finally had it working. F7 comes with native drivers for my broadcom wireless card. Since I used ndiswrapper for configuring wireless in FC5, I wanted to take that route. so I installed ndiswrapper but then encountered conflicts with the native driver. After reading couple forums, I finally re-installed F7, blacklisted the native driver (bcm43xx, bcm43xx-mac80211) by adding an entry (blacklist bcm43xx, blacklist bcm43xx-mac80211) onto /etc/modprobe.conf , /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-compat and then installed ndiswrapper and configured my wireless card. The Login screen, desktop themes looks great. I installed skype, realplayer, xmms and flash plugin and all of them went smooth. I am yet to install Oracle and think I'll probably do it after my summer semester.Fedora 7 is so far so good.

Dell goes Ubuntu

Dell has unveiled desktops and laptops pre-installed with Ubuntu and has promised to get more hardware vendors to provide driver support for Ubuntu. This is a great news and a very positive move for the Linux community. I havent personally used Ubuntu but planning to try it out sometime. With all the claims of Ubuntu fans, I hope people would be happy with the ease and power of use of Linux. Way to go..