A few comments

[rustleg]

My first comment is that your intro to the beta says that you'd prefer people to run off a DVD rather than a USB stick because the latter can be written to. Does this represent a change of philosophy from KNOS8 since this was deemed ok on a stick?

Also you mention backing up the application customisations. What about the Gnome ones which you previously said would be coming in KNOS9? This is something I will need before I can really use KNOS9. What is the position on this one?

Interestingly I looked for Lastpass for Firefox but their web site said "Lastpass not available for your platform". However it worked in Chromium from the Chrome web store. (I can't remember if this applied to KNOS8)

My initial impressions of Chromium were a bit negative but I haven't really tried it enough yet to see how to alter my working methods to overcome this. One thing is I think Chrome autoupdates without asking and I wondered if this would apply to Chromium once you invoke it. In which case I assume it will always do this when started from the copy on the DVD which is almost certain to be superseded soon after the initial launch of KNOS9. Not a problem for me but might be for those with slow internet connections perhaps.

By the way is this the existing Gnome? It looks familiar - hopefully you can avoid Gnome 3 which my initial impressions of elsewhere were quite negative although that may be just due to unfamiliarity. (Let other folks smooth out the rough edges before you have to move in KNOS10?)

[Kevin McAleavey]

Feb 1, 2012 16:00:48 GMT -5 rustleg said:

My first comment is that your intro to the beta says that you'd prefer people to run off a DVD rather than a USB stick because the latter can be written to. Does this represent a change of philosophy from KNOS8 since this was deemed ok on a stick?

"Absolute" security is accomplished best by using the DVD and a stick for your data which you keep with you since there's absolutely no way to write to the DVD. That's the "100%" standard to us. However, because of the way we built KNOS and the protections built into it, we can promise "99.9999%" on a writable medium as of KNOS 9 such as a USB stick and even a hard disk. We've spent the past year bringing that up from the 98% assurance we had with KNOS 8 ... it would be immensely difficult, assuming that someone were to successfully write malware for KNOS, to make it "stick" given our design.

But the primary reason for that effort is that a 5 to 6 minute bootup time from a DVD irritates many and they'd be willing to be ever so slightly more at risk to have KNOS up in under 2 minutes, and DVD media is never going to approach the speed or convenience of writable media. That said, we've done remarkable things on the back end of security for KNOS 9. FAR more secure than Linux will ever be.

Also you mention backing up the application customisations. What about the Gnome ones which you previously said would be coming in KNOS9? This is something I will need before I can really use KNOS9. What is the position on this one?

As the saying goes, "it's IN there!"

Interestingly I looked for Lastpass for Firefox but their web site said "Lastpass not available for your platform". However it worked in Chromium from the Chrome web store. (I can't remember if this applied to KNOS8)

My initial impressions of Chromium were a bit negative but I haven't really tried it enough yet to see how to alter my working methods to overcome this. One thing is I think Chrome autoupdates without asking and I wondered if this would apply to Chromium once you invoke it. In which case I assume it will always do this when started from the copy on the DVD which is almost certain to be superseded soon after the initial launch of KNOS9. Not a problem for me but might be for those with slow internet connections perhaps.

Chromium isn't Chrome. It's the source tree that Chrome branched from under google, but Chromium contains no google at all. So the hooks that google is looking for don't exist in Chromium and we don't allow google's plugins in Chromium. The only reason why we added it is that many people prefer Chrome to Firefox, and Firefox has been getting pretty awful lately with memory leaks, and numerous insects as they shove out new versions before they're ready to eat. I personally still prefer Firefox, but we added Chromium due to popular request. I've tried it, I don't really like it. Too unwieldy for my taste.

By the way is this the existing Gnome? It looks familiar - hopefully you can avoid Gnome 3 which my initial impressions of elsewhere were quite negative although that may be just due to unfamiliarity. (Let other folks smooth out the rough edges before you have to move in KNOS10?)

Yes ... we looked at Gnome 3 and thought about it for a while. KNOS isn't a phone and their new interface ... well ... it sucks.

The Gnome people are no longer supporting the "2 version" that KNOS has used for years and with their 3, they have no intention of supporting anything other than the Ubuntu branch of Linux so we're SOL as far as they're concerned. Their final 2.31.1_3 was an unmitigated disaster and so we branched from the 1_2 version and are now maintaining our own version of Gnome "in house" ... we've looked at other alternatives and so far haven't found anything better.

So our plans, assuming that we can get our hands on some funding for it, is to continue developing the 2.32.1_2 version of it ourselves until we can come up with a better desktop environment than we have. Gnome 3 is definitely NOT it.