With all the concern shown in recent days about privacy and security, it's no surprise that more and more folks are hopping on to the Open Source bandwagon. If you are waiting for UltraMegaCorp or some politician to come the rescue on this, then good luck with that.
If, however, you wish to take matters into your own hands, then you may find something of worth here. Open Source operating systems are secure, stable, easy to set up and configure, and no longer reliant on command line inputs (similar to the Dos shell of old).
Within thirty minutes you can ensure that your system is controlled by you and you alone; a system that won't phone home without your knowledge, one that does not rely on 'Patch Tuesdays', and a system that is hidden inside a proprietary black box that may or may not have exploits, backdoors, and other nasties.
This is no longer rocket science. If you are handy enough to click a few buttons and fill out a few information boxes, you will have a system where all your data is yours to do with as you please, to be upgraded when you choose (or not), and be supported by a community that is always available and easily reached, 24/7/365.
With Windows XP on its last legs, and Windows 7 coming in two years, your only choice is 'upgrading' to Vista, or running a less than robust XP system until 2010. There are some worries on the Mac front as well. The increase of OS X users means that the rise of attacks on that system are on the rise as well, though this is more due to the influx of former Windows users than anything else.
If your system is compromised (XP), then you are looking at a lengthy re-install of several hours, provided that it will install at all without Nliting the installer. A number of folks (myself included) using the more modern SATA disks found that without loading hard disk drivers, the XP installer would simply fail to install. Not to mention that you have to have all of the anti-spyware/virii/adware/etc in place before connecting to the net, or your system will be compromised in the space of a couple of minutes. Not what one would exactly call robustly secure. And once one does get online, the security horrors of IE and Outlook Express facing off against the ever smarter trojans, botnets, worms and the like, ones that don't disappear with the simple click of a cancel/allow dialogue box. All those great games come at a pretty steep price. Nice if you're willing to trade your privacy and security for some GTA IV action.
If you do have some big bucks in a trust fund somewhere, then by all means step up and get the new macbook air, or some of the other fine Mac products; if you are just making ends meet that may not be an option, and you will want security, stability, choice, and the ability to use that older hardware longer now, and not some distant future time when the economy has improved and gas is below $5 a gallon.
Should you be in the latter category, then there are a ton of options available, two of which I will mention today. Note: I have gone through the steps involved, and not just cribbed this from the numerous reviews available online, all in the space of just over an hour.
What you will need: one or more blank cd's; a cd burner; the wherewithal to type info in a few dialogue boxes and click a few 'continue' buttons. That is all it takes.
First, you need to download the iso files and burn them to disk. You can get them via straight http or bit torrent. You need to burn them as images and not data files--nero and isorecorder2 for Windows or the built-in Disk Utility in OS X can accomplish this effortlessly. You may wish to burn at a lower speed to be certain of disk image integrity as well as checking the iso md5sum before burning. Once you are finished burning, open the CD bay, plop in the disk, and restart your computer. You may need to hit esc key as computer boots to get into bios and set it to look for CD drive before hard drive as system source; once you have done that, then start up in your live CD session.
The first system I tried was the recently released OpenSuse 11.0; reviews for it have been very positive and can be found in a number of locations, some even with screenshots.
Total installation time from first startup to first boot into the new system was approximately forty minutes. A handy help icon on the desktop took me directly to a live IRC support channel where I asked about how to get some software installation help. Total waiting time for help: 120 seconds. OpenSuse 11.0, with the exception of Mandriva 2008, is the most polished system out there today. Very professional looking. The learning curve on this system is a bit steeper than for Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian, but not insuperable. The documentation, both built-in to the system, and available in IRC and documents online and in forums is quite good.
As nice it is, it was not quite what I was looking for, so in went the second disk I had burned, followed by a quick restart. Note: once you have set the bios to look for the CD first, it will do that every time until you change it back.
The second system, Fedora 9, is also a very recent release, and considered the most cutting edge in terms of new software and kernel used. It is something of a test bed for the Red Hat (professional version) Enterprise Linux brand, best known for its most excellent artwork as well as its security (in the form of SELinux).
A number of reviews can be found here, here, here, and screenshots here. While not as polished as OpenSuse 11.0, it runs considerably faster and lighter. The menus and layout are of the more conventional Gnome desktop, and the addition of external software repositories (for media playback) is considerably easier and more intuitive. A quick Google of livna repository fedora 9 led to the one click installer file that added it to my software repository ( a kind of software warehouse) list, from which I was able to install the swiss army knife of media, VLC. SELinux can be set to very strict, moderate, or off, depending on your level of paranoia. You can also choose full disk encryption during installation, if you are truly worried about security. Total installation time from initial boot to start up into my new system was approximately 20 minutes.
In both of the above you also have the option to use gpg to encrypt data, email, etc. There is even a Firefox plugin that works quite well.
In sum, it is best to take security into your own hands, ensuring your own privacy, exercising the choice to do with your system and data what you wish. There is no more barrier to adoption save complacency. The tools to have a stable, fully functional, free and Open Source OS are available today.