NimbleX is the latest lightweight Linux distribution to hit the internets; it's somewhat unique in that it uses the KDE desktop environment in less than 100MB. It's something of a breakthrough, especially when considering that Open Office itself clocks in at around 200MB.
I found that my old test machine was too powerful for this distribution, so it was tested under VirtualBox, the free virtual machine player that lets you run other operating systems on top of your currently running one--kind of handy if you don't want to burn an ISO disk, or are trying to avoid becoming yet another bot in the Storm botnet (the most powerful supercomputer in the world). Or perhaps you just want to avoid the latest rootkit
But Columbia — it was some kind of corporate thing — had put spyware on the CD. That kept people from copying it, but it also somehow recorded information about whoever bought the record. The spyware became public knowledge, and people freaked out. There were some lawsuits filed, and the CD was recalled by Columbia.
Link to rootkit article here; more on Storm botnet here, and a choice quote:
The Storm worm authors have another trick up their sleeves. The massive botnet that the hackers have been amassing over the last several months actually is attacking computers that are trying to weed it out.
The botnet is set up to launch a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against any computer that is scanning a network for vulnerabilities or malware. All this, according to Doug Pearson, technical director of Ren-Isac, which is a collaboration of higher-education security researchers
A few more details on that Storm botnet supercomputer:
This doesn't seem to have received much attention, but the world's most powerful supercomputer entered operation recently. Comprising between 1 and 10 million CPUs (depending on whose estimates you believe), the Storm botnet easily outperforms the currently top-ranked system, BlueGene/L, with a mere 128K CPU cores. Using the figures from Valve's online survey, http://www.steampowered.com/... for which the typical machine has a 2.3 - 3.3 GHz single core CPU with about 1GB of RAM, the Storm cluster has the equivalent of 1-10M (approximately) 2.8 GHz P4s with 1-10 petabytes of RAM (BlueGene/L has a paltry 32 terabytes). In fact this composite system has better hardware resources than what's listed at http://www.top500.org for the entire world's top 10 supercomputers:
BlueGene/L: 128K CPUs, 32TB
Jaguar: 22K CPUs, 46TB
Red Storm: 26K CPUs, 40TB
BGW: 40K CPUs, 10TB
New York Blue: 37K CPUs, 18TB
ASC Purple: 12K CPUs, 49TB
eServer Blue Gene: ?
Abe: 10K CPUs, 10TB
MareNostrum: 10K CPUs, 20GB
HLRB-II: 10K CPUs, 39GB
This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer has been controlled not by a government or megacorporation but by criminals. The question remains, now that they have the world's most powerful supercomputer system at their disposal, what are they going to do with it? And I wonder what the LINPACK rating for Storm is?
In VirtualBox, I set the ram to a generous 256MB, the video memory to 8MB, and gave it 768MB hard drive space to run the liveCD on--more than ample for this tiny distro.
The boot time was nothing short of phenomenal, and zipping around in the menus, loading up the internets (via Konqueror) was equally fast. The system responsiveness was outstanding, especially considering that this was a liveCD inside a virtual machine--certainly faster than anything I tried when using Vmware-server (sadly no longer free).
For such a tiny distro, it certainly is packed with goodness: over 20 games; apps for viewing PDFs, images, paint; Konqueror web browser, ip phone, rss reader, chat program, torrent client (transmission), email (Kmail), ftp (Kasablanca), and a ton of programs to get wireless/ADSL/Modem up and working; Office Suite is KOffice (KWord, Kpresent, etc.); the package manager is GSlapt, and there is a nifty program that shows you how much disk space you have to work in (should you want to install programs); the multimedia apps are by no means lacking, with software to listen to mp3s, burn CD/DVDs, watch vids, and the like--while it doesn't include the best (Amarok, itself bigger than 100MB), the replacements are not bad at all.
From a security perspective, running your internets from a liveCD can't be beat (try hacking a burned CD!); if you are extra-ultra-paranoid, you can do a liveCD inside of a virtual machine, and if anything seems hinky, you just shut down the virtual machine.
Additionally, if you are curious about Linux/Open Source, but don't want to risk your Windows install (from user error, not some problem in Linux), then running it from the liveCD/virtual machine/combo of same will give you a nice introduction to what Linux/Open Source has on offer these days.
NimbleX is very intuitive, with the default placement of the KDE menu located where the Start menu is in Windows XP (bottom of screen, left corner); click it and it opens up a drop-up (?!) menu listing all the sub-categories: Games, internets, multimedia, graphics, settings, etc.
NimbleX and VirtualBox are a killer lightweight security combo that will work on Linux, Mac OS X (intel only), or Windows. Bonus points for making the script kiddies/botnet hackers cry.
If you are on the move and having to use strange computers, then you can pack up the liveCD and a USB flash drive (saving any work to that); alternately, you can just skip the CD and boot from the flash drive, and since NimbleX is so tiny, just about any flash drive will do--a GB flash drive goes for around $10 these days, or a little less.
Saving your work from the liveCD is a breeze, using a menu item called 'save in NimbleX; this launches a menu that allows you to insert a USB flash drive where your work, settings, etc. will be saved the next time you boot from the liveCD.
If you are not familiar with package managers, then the reference to GSlapt probably means little to you; if you are, then you know that NimbleX is based on the oldest of the Linux distros (and arguably one of the most stable) Slackware.
For language localization, you can use one of the custom made .mo modules; all of your particular foreign language needs will be taken care of. They can be found at the NimbleX website and loaded once you have the system up and running.
Though Flash (for youtube) is not enabled by default, a quick load of GSlapt will get it installed and you can go on your merry Flash-viewing way--it took me all of two minutes (if that) to load it up and install it.
Tiny download, very responsive, good language localization support, secure, stable, and quite polished looking, and when used in combination with VirtualBox, a hacker's worst nightmare (try that script on a CD!). The botnet has enough victims already--enjoy your internets experience on an older machine with limited ram/older graphics card/small hard drive with style and free of worry.
As always, any tech related stuff, comments, questions, or suggestions are welcome, even if completely unrelated to the above. Happy Labor Day Kossacks!
Surf safely, and free.
Cheers!