[sf-lug] Fedora 20 out!

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>  Hi LUGgers,
>    It comes on this month's issue of Linux Pro s on a double sided
> DVD with 32 bit on one side and 64 bit on the other.

In 2014, I find the perseistence of 32-bit, especiailly for a 
pretty hardware-intensive distro like Fedora, just a bit odd.

Used to be, there were some significant problems caused by lack of
x86_64 versions of popular proprietary Linux apps -- Adobe Flash Player
and some others -- but that's been made to go away in several ways over
the last half-decade.  I think the very last IA32 offerings (of any
consequence) vanished from the retail marketplace around 2007, right?
That was seven years ago, and any exceptions aren't reasonable
candidates for Fedora.  Either they have too little RAM, lack DVD
drives, or both.

One of the long-term lessons I've picked up in computing is that
old hardware doesn't age very well.  Computers you remember being great
five-to-ten years ago are now slow, expensive to upgrade, draw far too
much power from the wall, and are generally disappointing.

I remember around 2003, I was talking to my father-in-law about how
wonderful the old Macintosh IIci was -- 25MHz Motorola 68030 CPU, RAM up
to 128MB, 80MB HD, a dream to work on.  He still had one and gave it to
me.  

I installed Debian m68k on it.  People asked me how well Debian ran.  I
replied 'Well, the computer walked it briskly.'

Anyhow, it's 2014, and IA32 is mostly last millennium.  (Mind you, the
server running my mail and this mailing list is a 2001-era Pentium III,
but I don't brag about its leading-edge qualities.)

>     The issue contains information on a new ultra-secure package
> system among other matters too numerous to rail on about here.

What, TUF?

TUF doesn't have the significant advantage that Seifried claims it does
in the real world.  It's a respectable academic effort to explore better
key management, which is certainly a worthwhile thing and worth
watching, but it would be rash to adopt it for production (say, in a
distro), if only because it's too new.

>     Although I had a cold I spent a lot of last week putting a
> PC Linux OS 64 bit 2013.12 on a Dell featuring a large
> screen and an i5 processor.  It originally came with Windows
> of course but the user had forgotten the password.   I tried
> to fix this with various open source tools,
> trinity-rescue-kit.3.4-build-372.iso,
> systemrescuecd-sparc-0.4.0.iso, and the Super Grub disk all
> of which failed to work to deal with the password problems.

You needed this.  It works great:
http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/