I can also vouch for Pardus’ quality: I even ordered a custom mug with the logo from CafePress! I’m not using it now because these days I prefer something lighter (Arch Xfce, or Zenwalk), but Pardus was really fantastic to use.

You missed one of the best parts of the installer, and that is resolution detection. It booted into widescreen perfectly on my MacBook and had no trouble setting 1280*1024 on another computer I used it on.

My favorite part of Pardus was actually the wireless performance. Who knows why, but Pardus did a better job of catching and holding signals with my Atheros (madwifi) card than any other distro has, with openSuSE a close second. Their unique network applet is nothing great, and I prefer KNetworkManager or gnome-network-manager in many ways, but I can’t argue with the results.

Pardus was, on my machine (which isn’t ancient: 1.6GHz P4, 1.5GB RAM), slower than average, which was one of the main things that put me off of it. The Murdur boot system didn’t noticeably speed up anything, and unlike openSuSE (which also boots slowly) there wasn’t the benefit of very snappy performance when logged in.

Anyway, I’m at work right now happily drinking from my Pardus mug, and can’t wait until this distro realizes its full potential. It will inevitably climb the ranks as an alternative to PCLinuxOS, MEPIS, and OpenSuSE as long as it keeps everything up. It’s funded by the Turkish government, which is a nice safeguard for the project, and I think it will be around for some time. If funding is pulled by the Scientific division that monitors development, you can bet these guys won’t just give up, either.

Additionally, I’ll be recommending this distro to anyone with fairly new hardware who’s interested in Linux. Its hardware detection is second to none, which is half the battle, and the whole distro seemed very appealing to the average user.

You are presumably aware that by design, Pardus wilfully confuses mere *membership* of the Wheel group (i.e. the group to which the default non-root account belongs) with *immediate and complete access* to its system configuration tools?

*At the very least* — and as Pardus readily concedes — this means that whoever has physical access to the your PC can install whatever they like and reconfigure whatever they like *without first having to provide a password*!

The Jem Report has more on Pardus’s “unique” security model here: http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/309/122/1/11/

> Pardus is currently ranked 46th overall, making it the lowest ranked distribution I have reviewed

Well it’s nice that common sense gets to prevail once in a while.

# gpasswd -r {username} wheel

sheesh

Pardus is marketed directly at newbies who find the business of logging on as Root puzzling and a chore (to quote Görkem Çetin, “a) current Linux security model is complex, b) complexity brings desktop abandoning.”) so it’s fair to assume that their target market wouldn’t have the faintest idea about usergroups or how to administer them.

Pardus is a fantastic distribution. It is really the fastest distribution I have used. Even on my slow machine, it blows the pants off anything else. AND ITS NOT BASED ON UBUNUTU

There is a lot of innovative and independently developed things within Pardus, so it is not like any other distro that used ded, rpm or slack packages.

Packaging is also generally easy for Pardus. I maintain a few packages found in the contrib repository. Learning to package was not as difficult as with RPM or Deb.

Pardus is an excellent distriribution for all users, experianced and novice alike. What more it has a fantastic community. Friendly, willing to help.

I reccomend it to everone

great distro!! I’ve been using pardus since 2007 version and every time I try to use an other distro like ubuntu, debian, pclinuxos and so on Igo back to pardus after a very short time. everything runs perfectly out of the box.
I just wont to suggest to add the “contrib” repository in the package manager to find many usefull packages like amule, opera, etc…

contrib repository:

http://paketler.pardus.org.tr/contrib-2007/pisi-index.xml.bz2

Osborne ===> you are right! Pardus has a bad policy of security. Basic Linux principles are broken! Pardus is a “black sheep from a security standpoint.”
The distrib is excellent but cannot be recommended because this big problem. It is directed at newbies and it is a very bad “practice” to give to a beginner under linux.
It should be hoped that no other distrib will follow this model of security…

[…] Læs mere her […]

Yes indeed Pardus is a great distro that deserves to be at the first 10 at Distrowatch…but their repositories are almost empty. They install Openoffice by default but no spanish o any other localization but english…what’s the deal? On the other hand we have Koffice with a lot of translations available but is not the default office suite. If you want Pardus to be at better place in the ranking you must fill up your repositories with this kind of absolutely important stuff…and this was just an example.

I am just enjoying my new Pardus 2007.2 install, in dual-boot alongside Beautiful Fedora 7 !

So far, so good, everything worked… I had to edit my xorg.conf to get 1280×1024, but then it worked like a charm. It seems to have all I need, and I plan to test it on the long run, to see if it can measure to the champ (Fedora)…

This last release of Pardus does ask you at install time if you want your user to have administrative privileges. If you don’t want it, then answer no. It’s not such a big deal to solve that security “problem” (for those who do see it as a problem - some others don’t give a shit about it).

Sorry Luis but yes it is a serious blow carried to Linux.
It is OK that “This last release of Pardus does ask you at install time if you want your user to have administrative privileges”, very good, but that should not even be an option in Linux but the rule. A user should not never have some special administrative privileges of root.

@ MacLone
I have my pardus installed totally in italian!
maybe you looked at the live edition wich has openoffice only in english, but once installed you can find every language pack

I use Pardus in Dutch, including OpenOffice. Pardus speaks also French, Italian and Catalan besides Turkish, English, Spanish, German, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese.

Jan.

@ massimo
I do have all KDE in spanish but if you look in the repositories there is no localizations but the english ones. Probably you foud your openoffice localization somewhere else.
What i meant is that Pardus need more help to fill up the stuff. There is no need of 10,000 packages but a couple of thousands makes more possible for us to find localizations and other software we use often beside the ones included. As far as i know openoffice does not include langauages, you have to install them apart.

@ MacLone
I found the italian localization after having installed the package “openoffice-dicts” wich you can find in the repository.
of course you have to change the language system in tasma, but I think you’ve already done that.
try it

I is a verry good OS. I like it. Pisi is fantastic.

also make a search for “i18n” and you’ll find many localization for spanish
ciao

From Osborne:

*At the very least* — and as Pardus readily concedes — this means that whoever has physical access to the your PC can install whatever they like and reconfigure whatever they like *without first having to provide a password*!

So you are saying that a person with pyhsical access to your Linux box can’t install/remove whatever s/he (dis)likes, can’t change the passwords anyhow, can’t break the integrity of the system? Isn’t it possible to change everything of a Linux box by just using a LiveCD? Isn’t it possible to install some other OS over it? If another user has physical access to your system, wheel group is just simply nothing.

One last thing about this root vs user idea. If my computer is my computer, if it is not public, if I installed Linux and I customized everything, should I be asked for the root password for almost all customization/ tweaks? I gave that password myself, and when the computer asks for it, as I have started the operation, I will simply type it. Then what’s the use of putting a password dialog/question everywhere?

And regarding Pardus. As far as I know, the GUI for pisi does not require a password, but the CLI does.

> So you are saying that a person with pyhsical access to your Linux box can’t install/remove whatever s/he (dis)likes,

In the case of a distribution that distinguishes administrator privileges from ordinary user privileges, and rigorously polices that distinction through the use of a separate password (i.e. ANY distribution other than Pardus), of course!

> Isn’t it possible to install some other OS over it?

Not in couple of minutes it takes to nip out of the room for a piss, no.

> And regarding Pardus. As far as I know, the GUI for pisi does not require a password, but the CLI does.

I take it all back, it’s OpenBSD on the Bosphorus!

@Necmettin

Very well you agree with this model, perfect. It remains that this model violates the principles of the Linux/BSD systems: “For the sake of the user’s convenience, basic Linux principles were broken” (The Jem Report)
Although in Vista Microsoft tried to improve the security, a Linux project trying to do the opposite. Let us go a little further and Linux will be completely perverted…

During the installation, you are given the option allow certain users to be part of the wheel group (the group that allows users to use the system admin gui tools etc), You do not have to allow users to have this privilage if you do not want to. You are not forced to allow all users to have this privilage and can be removed at any time after installation.

How does Linux have principles? How does Pardus Linux break these ‘principles’ Just because the tradional way of doing something was copied by all distributions does not make it a principle? You do not hear Linus or any other kernel devs proclaiming ‘you shall not give any system admin privilages by default to all users (not the same as root)’ do you? Distributions have freedom to chose a model that they fele is right, just because other disyributions do so doesnt mean they have to follow the same idea or models, if that was the case Ubuntu based distributions would be the only ones around.

The way I see it, the Pardus model is no different then giving the first user created on a system Sudo permissions.

In a system with sudo your are asked for a password, by example in Ubuntu. That is the difference.
That is not a question of distribution but of Linux itself and UNIX security model.
See here by example for some explanations:

http://www.beranger.org/index.php?page=3k&fullarticle=2677

Except for that Pardus is a very promising distrib.

Necmettin and others: Your argument is very understandable and is shared by most people. Not to be flippant about your knowledge, but it is from a very limited understanding of security, or shall we say how computers are hacked.

For example, needing to enter a password means that a remote hole in an app running as non root will not have root access automatically.

Thinking you are secure when you really don’t know what makes something insecure is folly.

Breaking into a computer it’s not done by “playing by the rules”. But is done by doing things “wrong”. As an example, back when IP firewalls came out they had rules about who’s allowed access simply by IP.

The firewall has to allow replies to requests back in or is useless. So it looked to see if the inbound packets followed the TCP rules of a reply, and if so allowed it access. That was broken by not following the standard TCP rules and they in effect gained access by saying here’s your reply. The firewall allowed the new connection thinking it was a reply.

After that we got stateful inspection which tracks outbound requests, and can therefor tell if a reply originated from an internal request or not.

This is a very old example but the principle still holds true. Holes are found by doing the unusual and often wrong thing.

Take buffer overflows, they have been the most commonly used method. Which consists of writing a lot more information into a field than is expected. The poorly written program cannot process the extra information and they end up someplace in memory where it is executed, resulting in illegal access, this is a simplified view but true.

When you think security, unless you have actually seen not one but how many illicit accesses are gained, don’t make the mistake in thinking that you even have a clue of what is or is not secure. It takes a LOT more than that. What’s even worse is that new holes are discovered all the time. Thus, you need to think in concepts of secure methods. Security becomes not if they can get in but finding the balance of secure vs productive methods of operating. Adding multiple levels of secure behavior with the final level being users who follow the established rules and has some respect for it all.

Look up some challenge when someone said we’ll pay you X dollars if you can break in. Then see how they did it. There were f.ex. a challenge on a shopping cart where it had some 600,000 attempts with a few successful entries. They were so ingenious nobody not experienced in real hands on hacking would have figured it out.

A bad but typical poor security example is from the early days on NT. Microslop claimed NT had received a government security rating. What they did not tell us was it required that the floppy and network card was disabled.

This false sense of security was then promoted by others, like those who wanted to defend their poor choice in OS, by promoting how secure it was. Subsequently others who knew they themselves did not understand security listen to those who knew even less and believed they actually had a secure OS.

Security is a pain in the butt, which simply has to be balanced with the pain of loosing confidential info or loss of operation, and must not be done by coffee shop security wanna bees.

At the very best you end up shooting yourself and others in the foot with your ignorance. There are plenty of places where you can find discussions by pros discussing holes in various programs and what not. Spend some time with them and get a feel of things. (Full disclosure, bug track. Crypto-Gram by Bruce Schneier is a very informative list for a layman. You’ll find good links and info on insecure.org.)

Good luck!

Deciding to run more securely I did not make myself an admin. The system warned me about not having any admin user and I had to tell it to go ahead anyway (one of the options).

Then once installation was done I could login as a user. But now you cannot run any config utils from the menu. Adding yourself to the group wheel helps, but still require work beyond any newbie to turn into a normally running KDE setup where the root password is asked for.

Before choosing Pardus you would do well to search the forums for a howto restore it to normal security mode.

If this design is really done by the Turkey government they have a lot to learn about security, as discussed in my previous post. One simply does not apply the MS model of security and hope for the best. Look at the world of viruses and crippled systems and see where that have gotten us.

At this point I’ve not spent that much time on the system as I’m not so sure I want to spend the time to fix it. There seem to be good things to say about it as far as some design choices, but for me it has already become unacceptable.

Thanks, now I want to try Pardus!

I don’t want to see wide spread Linux viruses because of distributions which don’t care security because they want to be “easy” and popular. And I don’t think Görkem’s security philosophy is worth mentioning; as far as I could see in irc this guy used to login as root habitually.

@Steve:
Yes, Pardus project belongs to “National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology” of TUBITAK which is a governmental entity. And unfortunately yes, they are degrading their title by being careless for security.