Thanks for reviewing the website, sorry it was down for a few hours. I am afraid that getting information out of Demon about problems is like getting blood out of a stone, but this maintenance was scheduled about 2 weeks in advance. They have been upgrading their storage systems for a couple of months, with occasional service breaks over weekends.Unix is the original commercial system supplied to the early mainframe users, and it has obviously been upgraded over many years. Other compatible operating systems have been developed which do not infringe on the Unix copyright, and these include the BSD and Linux systems.Individual software items can be written or developed by anyone, often professionals, university staff, and students writing as part of their course. It is added to the pool of available software, the open source code examined and tested , and modified as necessary.Most of the free software is written in high level computer languages, and is relatively easy to compile in any of the compatible operating systems with only minor adjustments.The various distributions such as Debian, RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, and the BSD variants make their selections from the software available, review the original code, do their own bug testing, add some of their own documentation, then supply the distribution as an entire distribution that should work with the minimum of problems on a wide range of hardware. They do share libraries and code, some prefer to spend longer doing testing than others, but any problems are reported back to the original authors and maintainers of each individual package.The software is being continually developed, as is most commercial software, the differences being that bugs found in commercial software are normally fixed a year or so later in the next distributed version sold, whereas individual bugs found in free software are usually fixed almost immediately, and users can normally contact the maintainers directly to suggest changes.I normally run the stable or testing Debian distributions, although as someone remarked a few days ago the Debian unstable distribution is usually more stable than the final offering from some other distributions.There has never been a Unix compatible virus, and it is very difficult to breach the inherent security, although it is possible to write offensive code in universal scripts such as Java which may affect individual users. Firewalls are designed to reduce direct hacking, monitor and block continuing attacks, although they may not run antivirus software as such. Antivirus software is normally incorporated to block any virus attempting to attack a Microsoft computer attached to the network. Dedicated firewalls such as IPCop can run "intrusion detection" software such as Snort, written by an organisation that receives about 75% of its finance through protecting the American government systems. The only problem I have had here in nearly 25 years has been on a Microsoft computer carrying a keylogger brought in and connected to my network.I have suggested that a Knoppix live CD or DVD can give a good demonstration of the abilities of an open source system, with a good selection of applications and utilities including Multimedia, Open Office, graphics, educational, mail, and internet packages, and I have given away several hundred discs. Many people only bother to look at their copy when their Microsoft system crashes, and they are desperate to recover their files. In fact hardware recognition is excellent, and it is frequently used to test hardware that does not work with the supplied Microsoft system.I have also included details of sources of help and information, and proposed a local computer facility where people can try and learn more about what is available.
Chris Bell ● 6218d