Re: [trinity-users] Beowulf/Buster upgrade - password problems - firewall - the saga resumes

On Sunday 30 August 2020 11:19:03 Slávek Banko wrote: Sorry to take so long to respond. I was AFK and lost in the physical world, and dealing with the problems of living in meatspace. The mysterious E (for Enigmatic) raised the issue of su against sudo; and I've also heard Nik mention that su is better for the single home user, which is myself. Until now, sudo + tdesudo has always done the trick for me, but if it is less secure, and my system will work, then at least I ought to make myself aware of the distinctions. I've tried out su, but so far I don't see any benefit, and only hear about the perils of sudo. It is possible that I can change my habits, so I will look into su. But if anybody can explain why su or why *not* sudo, I would be grateful, as the technical descriptions I can find online, or in my Linux guides, do not guide me toward any decisive points, and I see no reason to change what works. However, I will suppose that E knows something that I don't on this point, so I am considering how to implement such a change in my working habits. Yes, I gathered that Firestarter is probably not worth the effort. Anyway, after reading Michael's praise of gufw, I decided I ought to explore that option more deeply, but the last couple days have been busy. I did try KMyFirewall, and while it looks like it has loads of features, I've never been able to get it to do anything more than start up; beyond that, so far as I can tell, it does NOTHING. For now I will look into ufw/gufw, as I can see a way forward there. Thanks to all the other comments and suggestions. (I'll respond to more of them individually, as I have time again.) I've mentioned before that I wanted to make some hardware upgrades, and needed to get a few items that would not only help me in my work, but indeed will bestow upon me superpowers. :-} So I have been making the nest ready for the new arrivals; yesterday was a big day, and I am still exhausted. For these upgrades, I needed to search out the software packages, which are posted; for Brother printers, in particular, the deb packages were always really old (Hardy 8.04 = Debian pre-Wheezy, I believe). Now, however, I noticed that packages were being kept current for certain models, so it looked more promising: I could keep a printer working for a few years into the future, without force-installing old packages. My machine already violates the laws of nature, as well as plain common sense; a little of that sort of thing is already too much. Then, when I tried to upgrade my Jessie system, I found that the Devuan netinstall disc for Jessie no longer could download packages; which, I surmised, had been moved to the archives, meaning that the download URLs in the netinstall disc would not work. (That's one advantage to using a full installation disc.) So I was forced into upgrading, like it or not, since I only had the netinstall discs for Devuan. When I had tried to upgrade from Devuan Jessie to Ascil/Stretch, I ended up with networking problems, but when I tried a new installation of Beowulf/Buster, it went well, and moreover it proves much faster to get from nothing to a working system (with a working TDE desktop). It used to take me about 5 hours to install the Jessie system, sometimes longer, sometimes a few days, if I didn't follow all the steps exactly right; but with Beowulf/Buster, the initial installation is less than an hour, and getting TDE installed is only a little longer -- so maybe less than two hours to reinstall completely -- and now that I have packages already downloaded, it will be faster yet. Michael did raise one interesting possibility, and maybe I ought to direct it to the developers: Is it possible to download *all* the packages in the TDE repositories (that is, that will run on my system), rather than having to pick through and guess? I have lists of packages from Jessie and earlier, but then I have to weed out the obsolete packages. What I want is to create my own local repository, to use when I have connection problems or Internet is down. In Debian, for example, I can download not only the installation discs, but also all the current packages (which usually takes about 3 or 4 discs, I believe). I thought that I had already downloaded tdesudo, for instance, but it got lost in the shuffle; also some of the repositories in my sources.list had been marked as sid instead of jessie (which worked better for me at the time), but with an upgrade to Beowulf/Buster, it is preferable to stick with stable, beowulf or buster (which are equivalent, at present), depending on which repository I'm using. Anyway ... so now Beowulf/Buster with TDE is installed, and my system is stable, and I feel confident in deleting all my old packages that are eating up space on that hard drive. I miss some of the old favorites that have fallen out, but I've also discovered newer packages that fill the void, and usually improve upon what I had, so now I have found a way forward again. Thanks to the devs for all their hard work, as well as to everybody who helped out with suggestions and comments. This was rather a rush job for me, as I do not yet have a test machine that I can use for experiments, and I needed to get my desktop up and running quickly, within a few days, as I was pressed to make some decisions in the real world, here at home, and I had deadlines and commitments and so on. Now this part is done, and I can relax a little. Bill