Hi everyone.

I used to use Windows (ME) on my system,
but, I got pretty fed up with it, and its
numerous faults. As an alternative, I went
to Linux (RadHat 8.0) but quite frankly, as
much as I hate to say it, I am really
dissapointed in it, notwithstanding many of
its features that I like (for example, the
good quality command line terminal
interface, which is unlike the crummy
MS-DOS window in Windows; don't get me
wrong, I like DOS, but, the MS-DOS window,
even full-screen, while Windows is running
is not the same). I was rather dissapointed
by the overall commercial tone that I detect
in this distribution, as well as there being
too many "automatic" features that drive me
nuts.

In any case, I want to address one issue in
particular. One of the most frustrating
things about Windows was when I would leave
the computer idle, and, much to my
frustration, the computer would clearly
spring into action when I was not using it.
It's not subtle or anything. Unless I was
completely def, there's no way that I can't
hear the hard drive working. This was
one of my main beefs with Windows, the fact
that these people at Microsoft thought that
it was somehow their right to program my
computer to do not what I ask it to, or
rather, not ONLY what I asked it to, but to
also in addition to that to do whatever they
felt that it was their right to ask my
computer to do. I still don't know exactly
what it was doing, but, I cannot allow MY
machine to do whatever it wants. In any
case, much to my (DEEP) dissapointment,
Linux also seems to have been designed with
this "you may have paid for it but we feel
we can do whatever we want with your
computer attitude". The bottom line is that
Linux does the same thing that my Windows
used to do, with only one difference.
Windows would spring into action when the
computer was completely idle, reasoning, I
suppose, that when the computer is idle but
running, the user had gone out of the room.
But, Linux does this crap right then and
there, right in from of me. For example, I
could be using the "terminal", and, for no
reason, the hard drive starts working
violently away, and, it is not possible that
this is related to what I am actually asking
it to do. I may not be that bright, but I
know that it does not take 2 minutes of
intense hard drive accessing to carry out my
"ls" command in a folder which has only 20
or so files in it. Plus, if it did really
require this much effort, it would require
this effort EVERY time I do the "ls"
command. Anyways, the bottom line is that
Linux does some stuff behind my back,
without my consent. Even though in theory I
could perhaps stop these tasks from running
by completely re-building the kernel and
every software package, I just don't have
that kind of time, and quite frankly, I
should not need to do this. My reasoning is
that, should it be a legitimate process that
is occuring, they should bring it to my
attention that this is necessary, and, I
should run these tasks, if I choose to do
them (btw, it is up to me if I want to not
take care of my system and let it go
un-maintained. This is not a good idea,
though..........). When it starts to
violently work away on a task that I did not
request, I do the top command, and, it seems
that often, a program called awk is running.
I have no clue what it is doing, except that
I did not request it to run, and, when I try
to kill it using top, even as root, it does
not work. What happens is that I kill its
PID, but, right after that, the process is
back with a different PID. I should also
point out that, when my computer starts to
exhibit a mind of its own, I know for a fact
that it is not accessing the "swap"
partition, since, every time I use the
computer, I first log on as root and use the
"swapoff" command. As an aside, does anyone
find it weird that, according to Red Hat,
the MORE RAM you've already got on your
machine, the MORE ADDITIONAL memory you need
in the form of a swap partition? I am not
an expert on computers, but, I do believe
that, the more RAM you've got, the LESS
additional memory you need in the form of a
swap partition, and, eventually, if your RAM
is large enough, you should not need a swap
partition at all. For example, if my total
software requires, say 384 MB (which seems a
bit large) of memory in total, and if I have
128 MB of RAM, then I could see that I would
require 256 MB (or twice as much as my RAM)
of memory on a swap partition. But, if I
already have 384 MB of RAM, then, with the
same applications, I should not need any
additional memory. But, according to Linux,
someone with 128 MB of RAM needs a total of
384 MB (by adding a 256 MB swap), but, I
require a total of 1152 MB, seeing as I
already have 184 MB of RAM. That seems
fishy to me...........

So, my question is as follows: what file (or
files) should I delete from my computer,
and/or what programs should I uninstall for
these unnautorised programs to stop running?
Or, much better yet, does anyone know a
better, TRUSTABLE distribution of Linux (or,
for that matter, another operating system
altogether) that I could buy, and that would
meet all the criteria (able to use the
internet, have a graphical interface, as
well as a text-only interface, reasonalbe
office software, compatibility with my
hardware, including my zip drive, my CD-RW,
my printer and my cable modem, and finally
good FORTRAN and C compilers)? I would
actually be willing to pay up to $200 or
$300 for this. In any case, I want to have
a good computer system set up, that has
reasonable software to get my work done
(this includes compilers, particularly
FORTRAN, and office programs, and also good
plotting programs), that is reasonably easy
to use, without too many (or any) annoying
feature such as AutoCorrect (or, at the very
least, they should be easy to turn off),
and, also, very importantly, that I can
TRUST. I gotta be able to trust it, and, I
can't trust any machine that does stuff
behind my back. I just can't! Like I have
said, if there is a genuine necessity that a
particular task be run periodically to
ensure the good health of my machine, they
should mention it to me that it needs to be
done, and it is up to me to do it. And,
also like I said, although it may not be
smart, the computer should let you if you
want to not take proper care of the machine.

So, to reiterate, can anyone tell me what
files or programs to remove in order to stop
Red Hat from doing stuff behind my back?
Or, even better, can anyone recommend a
better distribution, or even a non-linux OS,
that does not pull crap like doing stuff
with my (I really gotta stress thuis word,
**MY**...... I did pay for this machine!)
computer behind my back? I love computers, and, I love how they are quit practical in many ways, but, I just gotta be able to trust them! I will have no choice but to stop using them, excpet for the bare minimum that I need, if I cannot trust them. That's kinda sad, really.

georges, i think you've got a touch of paranoia. but really you have a point about windows and it all goes back to their ceo, bill gates, and his monopolistic ways. if it was up to bill he would control your computer and believe me he tries. i use redhat 8 but my experience with linux distributions is different, open source doesn't work like that, or does it?

If ls takes that long, get a new hard drive. That might explain the random noises too.

If you want a system you have more control over, try Slackware. If you have some spare time, patience, and a desire to learn, jump into the deep end and try Gentoo. If you're really a control freak, you could use Linux from Scratch. I consider myself much more paranoid than most (for example, I have a 111Gb partition encrypted), and I'm happy with Gentoo.

If you check your procs you will see that it is probably the juorneled file system fixing itself. This is a good thing.
If you type top at the terminal you can see exactly what is going on.
As for windoze mine doesnt do that but then again I have removed much spyware and turned off unneeded services in XP. I only use XP for games. I got fedup as well and started with RedHat 7.3. I am now up to the bloated 9.0.

the difference is that you can CHANGE everything to your liking, even if it is not to your liking by default.
You can do anything you like.

I think you don't even know what linux is. Linux is the name of a kernel. Companies and ogranisations like redhat combine other free tools and utilities with the kernel to make a complete OS. You can compile everything yourself and make your own System, but that would be a waste of time. Why? Because you can just take redhat or something which has been tested by the redhat people and change it to your liking.

If you do not like the word "linux", you can use FreeBSD instead. FreeBSD is a complete system (like a distribution of linux), it has built around their own FreeBSD kernel. go to freebsd.org for more info.

This is my little contribution:

As mentioned before, the noises you hear might be related to journaling system or that your harddrive needs to be optimized or something.
Red Hat in particular, try to make it easy for people to use the system out of the box. For example, they anble Wine, Portmapper, cron, gpm, lpd,kudzu, netfs, random numbers, rawdevices, etc. Thinking like: "If at any time the user wants to use 'this', let's just turn it on by default, so he doesn't have to figure out where are the kernel modules or where do I turn it on". In a way this is good, because it makes the distributions easy for people that used that other OS to switch to Linux without thinking too much.
However, the distribution itself, if they decide, as you mentioned, to do many things automatically, it might become like M$ Window$.
So what I do is modify the services running in the computer and leave only the ones that I know I need. I don't use cron, I don't add hardware every day, so I disabled kudzu. I don't have anything connected to my USBs, so I disable probing/enabling, etc.
The good thing is, as mentioned before, you can customize it as much as you like. However, like the journaling system, it's not good idea to turn it off, unless you don't care to get corrupted files.
You can configure what services you want running in your system by going to the option "Service Configuration" under System (in RH 7.3, I don't know about RH 8)

Another thing that really makes a difference is the hardware.
The first time I tried Red Hat 7.2 I said that "what is all the "hype" about? this thing is so slow". I was using my old 8GB harddrive, which used to "work a lot" for no reason.
Then I got a new 80GB hard drive (new technology, faster, better PIO, etc) and now, I don't hear it working, never again.
All that noise and work that I heard in the old harddrive I don't hear it anymore and the system is wwaaaaaaaayyyy much faster now. So if I would had stay with my old harddrive, I would have probably cursed Linux all day long, but it wasn't linux fault, it was the old technology I was using. The same happened at work, I was trying to use KDE, but the computer only had 64MB Ram and it was a pain, once I got 192MB Ram, I saw the light :)

Now, about the "swap" thing, yes it's true what you said. It makes no sense that the more memory you have the more swap you need (so a 16GB RAM server needs 32GB swap? I don't think so). I've seen (my computer for example) systems that never use swap, becuase they use the memory instead. I have 392MB and the system never uses swap, no matter what I do.

I don't know of other linux distributions that much (I just bought Mandrake, RH 9, Suse Live CD and I'm going to try them), but I think that with some time and with message boards like this ones, you can make your RH system work as you want it to work.

Linux is a kernel, nothing more. Your complaints are stemming from Red Hat's choices, not Linus's. Please dont condem Linux for one companies "mistakes". If you dont like Red Hat, try another distro, thats choice my friend.

Yes, Journalized file Systems are always writing and updating the the journal, so there will ALWAYS be hard drive activity. This means that if you shutdown the computer improperly, theres a power outage, etc, you wont lose any data, or is data not important to you?

There are also almost always going to be other background processes writing to a hard drive. An OS doesnt just STOP working. Its always doing things. Remember, it spitting that image your seeing on the screen takes work.

You can of course change what is running at startup. Check your rc.d file and Your xinitrc files.

And check out your currect processes using : ps -aux.

And you are REALLY paranoid. If you want a trusted OS, Linux is the best, by far. EVERYTHING is open source. You can go in and change the OS bit by bit if you desired. The company gives you access to every line of code in the OS. Thats not enough control for you?

This is Georges again. I wanna say thanks to all of you who responded to my original message, especially since it was a long one. I appreciate your input.

I do admit that I have a touch of paranoia. This is not only a trait that I have regarding computers, but, in life in general. Oh well, nobody's perfect.

I should point out that ls did not take 2 minutes. I may not have been as clear as I could have been. What I meant was that the hard drive would be working hard more or less steady for 2 minutes straight, and, this would happen while I was using the computer, but, it did not seem to be correlated to my current activity. So, for example, I was using the terminal sometime, and, for whatever reason, at some point, it would start working hard for no apparent reason, and, I knew that it was not directly related to the command that I had just typed. As an example, if I typed the "ls" command, and it was at that moment that the hard drive started to work, I knew that it could not be the ls command that brought on all that hard drive activity.

I acknowledge that I do not know all there is to know about Linux, nor about computers in general for that matter. I know certain things, however. And now, thanks to your responses, I know a little more than I did before. I think that the most likely explanation was the one about the journaling. I don't know what that is, but, I will look into it. I would be happy if that is what is happening, because then I could trust Red Hat, and everything would be good. However, I still maintain, though, that they should somehow write somewhere a little note about this, just so that people like me don't freak out. If they did write it somewhere in their documentation, but that it is the case that I just did not see it, then I guess that's ok. Although, if they do have such a note, and I did not come across it, they could perhaps put it in a more prominent place. The thing that does kind of puzzle me is that I remember that my older system (running Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS 6.22) never did this. But, I suspect that perhaps journaling was not necessary back then, due to smaller hard drives, or that, since hard drives were much smaller, maybe this "journaling" would happen so quickly and quitely without my hearing anything. In any case, in life in general, as a philosophy, I always like to learn new things, and, this is going to be one of them.

In retrospect, I did really over-exaggerate things regarding Linux's behind my back attitude. I may have made it sound like it was as bad as Windows, but it's not. After all, with no documentation whatsoever regarding this program, my computer shipped with a program called "BackWeb". I don't know exactly what it does. Also, when I recently installed Zone Alarm on my system (the Windows partition), I was made aware that many of the programs on my computer had, the whole time before I had the firwall installed, been in constant communication with Lord Knows Where? One particularly strange one is my "One Touch Multimedia Keyboard". For some reason, this program was in constant (literally, every 10 or so seconds whenever I had my connection up; and, of course, ever since I have had my cable modem, this was all the time) communications on the net. I also recently started to notice that there are a great number of useless programs in Windows. In fact, when I have no real applications going, there are 31 processes running on the system. That is, when I start the computer but do not start any specific application, there are avout 31 programs running. Some of them are necessary, but others are kind of dumb. For example, 2 of them belong to RealOne Player (don't get me started on that piece of software). These are the program that deliver those lovely pop-up messages every once in a while when I start my computer. In any case, I was deeply dissapointed, and enfuriated, when I found out about all of these things, especially since, prior to my discovery of all these things, I was so trusting, so naive. So, when I got Red Hat 8.0, and I saw the drive working on its own, I just sort of freaked out. I was horrified at the possibility that my attempt to escape from the horrors of Windows had only led me to another, miniature version of the same thing. However, I still maintain that Red Hat seems to have a somewhat more commercial flavour than I had anticipated.

Now, I got a kick out of what was said about Bill Gates. However, I agree with what was said about him, and what was implied about Microsoft as a whole. I don't like monopolies.

Now finally, I get to my follow up question. I currently have a 60 GB hard drive. It's configured as a dual-boot system with Windows ME and Red Hat 8.0. When I originally did the partitioning, I did not know how much space to allocate to Linux, and how much to keep for Windows. So, I chose, more or less arbitrarily, to use roughly 15 GB for Linux, and keep the remaining 45 GB for Windows. Would it help things, ie, make the system run faster, if I completely removed all partitions (I have all my important stuff backed up) and used a different allocation of space? If so, how much bigger would the partition have to be for there to be a noticeable increase in the overall speed of the machine? For a couple of reasons, one of them being that other people use the same computer and have some Windows applications that they use, I can't use the full 60 GB for Linux, and, I don't really want to buy a second hard drive right now. I have tried to set up some of these Windows applications to run in Linux using Wine, but, I could not get it to work. The applications would install, but after that, they would not run. Like they say, Wine is far from being "perfected", and is still under development.

Cheers everyone,

Georges

Journalizing is just what it sounds like. The OS is always recording in a big table what and where all the info on your hard drive is. There is one big database that is updated every second. This way, if the computer shuts down wrong, the computer just reads from the Journal to find out what information is where, so you know whats on your hard drive at all times.

Older versions of Windows and DOS did not have this feature at all (simply because the technology was too bad), so if you shut down wrong, the computer had to scan the whole hard drive at bootup to find out what information was made during the improper shutdown.

The newer linux file systems (ext3, ReiserFS) all have Journaling.

Some of your paranoias aren't completly inaccurate. There are a lot of devious people (and companies) out there, that would love to get trojans on your computer and spy on you. RealOne does do that, and Real is EVIL. You have to be careful. Run an Anti Virus and keep it up to date. Also, Get SPYBOT SEARCH AND DESTROY (and update that too). It will remove all that pesky spyware, and adware.

If you want to change what starts up in your computer in Windows, type "msconfig" into the RUN box, and you can check/uncheck whatever you like.

Luckily, there are NO Unix viruses and Trojans,literally! You dont even need an Antivirus. So you have nothing to fear there.

You shouldnt have to change your paritioning scheme. I dont think it will increase performance.

It's me again. I agree about Real Player, or Real one, or whaterver the name is! It is evil. It's so proprietary, and so ad-supported. I read somewhere that REAL had sued other companies who had developed software that allowed people to convert real player files into other formats, the reasoning being, of course, that they can't make money off of advertising if you don't use their software to listen to music files and to view video files. Is this true, what I read, about REAL suing other companies, or was it just a rumor? That's the downside of the net: advertising. It's so annoying. I always wonder. If they keep doing it, there MUST be people who actually buy stuff from advertisements and spam. And, since most of the people I know don't, and, presumably, most internet users don't, there's gotta be a small percentage of internet surfers out there that just go nuts on shopping sprees on the net. Anyways, I just think it's not fair the things that real player does. This software is one that uses secret (well, technically, they tell you about it in the EULA, but really...) internet connections. Fortunaltely, Zone Alarm has come to the rescue.

I realise this is off topic from my original post, but, seeing as we are on the topic of players and music and all..... I consider myself a decent person, and usually law abiding. I don't like to break the law. I was wondering about this. Why is it that, at least the last I checked, legitimate, legal services to download music are only available in the United States (my apologies if this changed). That seems like a dumb thing to me. I mean, there are some people in other coutries that are, like me, honest, and would go to legal options if they were available. It seems stupid to me that big record labels would not allow people in other countries to pay money to download music. I am from Canada by the way.

I forgot to say this. I don't use services like KaZaA, or iMesh. Some of my friends do, but I don't, because, as I have said, I am law-abiding.

firstly, THIS HAS GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH JOURNALING. Redhat has set cron jobs, ie scheduled jobs that run when they are supposed to. Look in /etc/cron.d and you'll know what I'm talking about. These jobs are for basic system maintainance like updaing the rpm and other databases.

George you are SO right about something. Everyone listen up.

Install a linux distro. istall rp-pppoe or whatever way get on the internet, and go to www.grc.com (shield's up) and port scan yourself.

I don't know about red hat much, I know it has some servers installed by default. I know peanut linux does this:

ftp server running
telnet server running
http server running
mail server running
and many others!

AND WORSE, ANYONE GET LOG ON YOUR HTTP SERVER AS AN ADMINISTRATOR USING USER:FOO PASSWORD:BAR

And that right after install.

Come on, check it out yourself! maybe there's a "foo bar" kinda secret login for the telnet server running on your computer you don't know about!!

I know only one distro that asks you during install "these RPMs are servers run by default, you sure you wanna install them?" and if you say "no" after install you can portscan yourself and all ports are "closed". That is Mandrake Linux.

this DOES NOT HAPPEN! username: foo password: bar ????? WHat JOKE is this. The HTTP server you're talking about is none other than Apache. Its used by more than 80% of the web's http servers!!! And THERE IS NO SUCH BUG IN APACHE>

By the way, telnet is different from apache! ITS NOT A WEB SERVER.

you clearly have no idea what you're talking about, and I think you should not confuse people for no reason at all. All this you talked about is TOTALLY WRONG.

It is not apache: it is XITAMI and it does happen.

I am talking about peanut linux distribution here.

And I am saying red hat default install probably installs servers too. If apache is better than xitami good... but you still have to be carefull when you install linux.. servers are installed and usually you don't know about it.

And I never sayd a telnet server is a web server. Man, Balram Adlakha, Read before you reply!

Remember, these servers are naturally secure. Users can only get into the Apache Web folder. I suppose they COULD manage to hack it and invade your system, but if they can hack Apache for no reason, then you got bigger problems.

I'm talking about redhat. Its their job to make sure there are no such exploits in the software they provide.

No its not. They dont make the programs. They are just a packager. There are thousands of programs included. Is it their job to check every single one for unknown exploits?

You have to go to the Program's maker for bugs/problems.

thats why I said "provide". It doesn't mean they make them. Secondly, IT IS their job to see that the programs they provide in their cds work as they should, thats why they test their packages so much and release beta versions before releases. However, they do not give any support for that until you by and register your copy.

Well of course they dont give you support unless you register. Why do they have to give it you for free, AND give you support? They have to make money somewhere along the line. Why would they feel they have to help you, if your too cheap to pay them $40.

Someone said something about GRC.Com well I am running RedHat 9.0 and 7.3 before that and at grc.com all ports are in stealth mode. I set the firewall to high on install and did not install apachee or any other type of server services.
I read somewhere that in mandrake only netbios is closed all other ports where open.
This is why you need to do your research before you install. If you dont need or know how to gonfig a server dont install one.