Sheeped

Ubuntu 6.10 codenamed “Edgy Eft” has just been released. As the name implies, this release includes bleeding edge software. Users who are currently running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS can easily upgrade with the console command: gksu "update-manager -c"

Some highlights of this new release:

• Gnome 2.16
• Tomboy - Easy note taking and linking, wiki-style
• F-Spot - Replacement for GThumb, for easy photo managing
• Evolution 2.8.0 - Now with vertical message panes
• Firefox 2.0 - The browser
• OpenOffice 2.0.4 - The office package
• Gaim 2.0 beta 3.1 - The instant messenger
• Orca - A screenreader
• A new theme
• Rounded window corners
• New init system (Upstart) - allows for much faster and tidier boot of the system.
• New translations (Rosetta)
• Automatic crash reports - When a userspace application crashes, an error report is automatically created.
• Proactive security features.

Read more on Ubuntu.com.

The slamming hot new version of Mozilla Firefox, 2.0, is now available officially on Mozilla.org’s FTP. The official announcement and editing of the front page will be done later today.

Linux-i686, Windows (32bit), Mac OS X installers and the source can be found here. You may get a “Too many users” error, a lot of people are trying to get it after all. Just keep clicking.

UPDATE: Firefox 2.0 can now be downloaded from the front page

One thing I’ve always hated about the “big, bad” antivirus solutions like Norton and Mcafee, is their tendency to literally wrestle with my system’s resources, taking up a tremendous amount of RAM space and processor time. Sure, that’d be all fine and dandy if I just used my computer a few times a day to check my e-mail and chat with my friends, but that’s just not the case. I need something that just works, stays in the background and only bugs me when there is something of importance I need to respond to — and of course, it also needs to be capable of removing viruses.

I’ve tried out a few of the big ones: F-Secure, BitDefender, BullGuard, AntiVir, Mcafee, Avast, Norman, F-Prot, Norton Professional, AVG, Panda, PC-Cillin, etc… - but when it comes to “just working” and working damn well, my undisputed favorites are ESET NOD32 and Kaspersky. While NOD32 is marginally worse at detecting viruses (~95% compared to Kaspersky’s ~99%), it has powerful heuristics scanning (helps detect “in-the-wild” viruses, before they’re officially added to the virus definition database and the client is updated), and it is more quiet than Kaspersky. Kaspersky, however, detected 99.62% of 147,000 viruses in a large test conducted by Virus.gr, offers a lot more than NOD32, and it’s even available for free as the AOL-branded “Active Virus Shield“. Active Virus Shield is an AOL-branded clone of the commercial Kaspersky Antivirus with some features removed - If you’re just looking for good antivirus protection, it’s more than fit for the job.

The only real difference between Kaspersky Antivirus and Active Virus Shield is that Kaspersky (the commercial one) has a feature called Proactive Defense. It takes measures to stop unknown viruses before they break in, by e.g. monitoring Windows Registry changes, application hijacking attempts and what not. Another feature of Kaspersky and Active Virus Shield is that they scale based on CPU usage, so they won’t slow down your system when you’re running something demanding.

My recommendations:

• If you don’t mind shaking up a few bucks, want ultra-fast performance with minimal annoyance - go with NOD32 from ESET.
• If you still have money to spare, want the absolute maximum protection including paranoia features, go with Kaspersky Antivirus.
• If you don’t want to pay and just want maximum virus protection with little interruption, go with Active Virus Shield from AOL.

For further reading, see the article “And the best antivirus is…” at CyberNet Technology News that focuses on the results of the 147.000 virus detection test.