Two new versions of free software were released today. Thunderbird 2.0 a email client for Linux, OS X and Windows; as well as Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

If you are running windows and still using Outlook I would give Thunderbird a try. Definitely better than Outlook Express and Outlook 2000. If you are using Outlook 2003 or newer it is hard to say what is better, 2003 seemed buggy to me and I have yet to use 2007.

Ubuntu is perhaps the best “version” of Linux to replace Windows. They keep getting better and better with each release. If you are still using Windows, stop, Ubuntu is the way to go.

If you are running OS X Tiger version 10.4.x, you will need to install X11 in order to use applications like OpenOffice and other Linux ports. It is located on the first disk of the installation DVD.

System/Installation/Packages/X11User.pkg

After inserting the installation DVD, make sure to scroll down to find the System folder. X11 can also be found when installing Tiger under the advanced option. There is an older version of X11 for previous versions of OS X that can be found on the web.

The /etc/login.defs file controls the parameters we are interested in changing inorder to enable or disable passwords that expire in Linux. It contains a number of other configuration setting for user accounts on your machine. The following are the ones that we are interested in.

1. PASS_MAX_DAYS: Maximum number of days a password may be used. It controls how often users must change their passwords. Any passwords older than this will force the user to change their password the next time they login. To disable set to 99999.
2. PASS_MIN_DAYS: Minimum number of days allowed between password changes.This prevents people from changing their password 5 times in one day. To disable set to 0. 
3. PASS_MIN_LEN: Minimum acceptable password length. No short passwords will be accepted. 8 characters is a recommended length.
4. PASS_WARN_AGE: Number of days warning given before a password expires.

open the file /etc/login.defs using your favorite text editor.

# vi /etc/login.defs

edit the file (sample):

PASS_MAX_DAYS 90
PASS_MIN_DAYS 0
PASS_MIN_LEN 8
PASS_WARN_AGE 7

Save the file.

We had a old Mac G3 OSX system with a PowerPC processor that we needed to zero fill the hard drive inorder to get it ready to be donated. At first we tried DBAN which is said to work well for non mac systems. They have a beta version for PowerPC. We tried both, but neither worked. You can download DBAN here and try it for yourself.

So after some searching online we came across an alternate way to Clean a Hard Drive (zero fill). using Linux. The discussion for this thread can be found here. I wanted to verify this with a different website since I wasn’t familar with this process.

Another application of /dev/zero is to “zero out” a file of a designated size for a special purpose, such as mounting a filesystem on a loopback device (see Example 13-8) or “securely” deleting a file (see Example 12-55).

linux.com

Linux.com was able to explain what was going on a bit better than linuxquestions. We were satisfied. Next we needed was a live distro. We downloaded the PowerPC version of Ubuntu which allowed us to load a live version of Ubuntu and exit to the shell prompt. Once there we ran the command we got from linuxquestions.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1M

It seemed to work. Rebooting the machine verified that the MBR was overwritten. The ouput after the command had finished indicated that the entire drive had been filled. Not sure how long it took since we let it run overnight. Will have to use this process again if we ever have an older mac system to get rid of. DBAN will probably work on the newer macs.