Hi Richard,

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 12:46:05PM +0000, Richard Forth wrote:
>    2009/12/17 Richard Forth <[1][email protected]>
>    I liked the fact that in 9.04 you could choose to type in a username and a
>    password so if it fell into the wrong hands no one would know any of the
>    two bits of information needed to get in.

If your computer fell into the wrong hands it's trivial to find out what 
your username is, and whilst there change your password. Once someone has 
your laptop in their hands all bets are off. You can use encryption to 
reduce the chance that they will have access to your data, but relying on 
security via obscurity isn't really worthwhile.

Personally I encrypt the files in my home directory using 'ecryptfs' which 
is encrypted with a key which initially matches my password. However if 
someone steals my laptop and changes my password the key will no longer 
match and they will not have access to my files.

>    If you follow the cracker's 50% rule, then if my username is up on screen
>    to select then that's 50% closer to breaking in than not knowing what
>    username to try (except maybe root but that is not allowed to log in)

You can logon as root in Ubuntu if you reboot and choose recovery mode. This 
is also how you can change another users password.

>    All the desktop icons and task bar icons certainly seem more polished,
>    unfortunately the system ran like�a dog so that's all I had time to look
>    at, but apparently there's some other cool feature including a different
>    package manager but I cannot comment on that.

I'd be interested in helping you get 9.10 working well. Have you now 
reverted back to 9.04? If you're on 9.10 we could look at why it's running 
slow and maybe resolve it.

>    Has anyone else upgraded to 9.10 and what are your thoughts?

I have upgraded multiple machines and had a few issues here and there which 
I have filed as bugs or found existing bugs on. Most have been fixed or are 
in progress.

Looking forward to 10.04 :)

Cheers,
Al.

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