To many privacy geeks, it’s the holy grail – a totally anonymous and secure computer so easy to use you can hand it to your grandmother and send her off on her own to the local Starbucks. Titled Anonym.OS, the system is a type of disk called a ‘live CD’ – meaning it’s a complete solution for using a computer without touching the hard drive. Developers say Anonym.OS is likely the first live CD based on the security-heavy OpenBSD operating system.
Now here is a neat but perhaps slightly overambitious project.
I see no mention of a used desktop, so does this mean granny needs to be commandline savvy?
[i]I see no mention of a used desktop, so does this mean granny needs to be commandline savvy?/[i]
Well just downloaded and booted Anonym.OS
You can choose between a rather nice fluxbox GUI and CLI.
Off topic:
I ran it on a AMD64 2.0GHz and to be honest i like the responsiveness of a knoppix or kanotix live CD better.
All in one a nice approach to a safer an more anonymous internet presence.
great idea, and for once, this live cd booted and ran ok on my machine (a first for any bsd distro).
Sadly it wasn’t able to detect either of my usb wifi cards (linksys & D-Link) so couldn’t get online to test it out.
GRaphically, its’ simple, but very usable… there’s links to a web browser and email apps (thunderbird or mutt – for the tech savvy)
Overall a nice idea, but still fails the crunch test (actually being able to get online)
are your usb wifi cards actually supported under linux, or do you need to use ndiswrapper?
i doubt OpenBSD has builtin support for your wifi cards if linux doesn’t.
i doubt OpenBSD has builtin support for your wifi cards if linux doesn’t.
OpenBSD does indeed have much better support for wifi chipsets than linux. I believe they’ve implemented drivers for just about every mainstream chipset that releases sufficient documentation and they try hard on the ones that don’t.
could this be used for a live cd firewall type thing? maybe with a few hacks could it be turned into something like m0n0wall?
In principle; starting with security as an imperative and then working to add user friendly aspects seems a shrewd and refreshing approach.
As for wifi support; I have recently done battle with Linux and after trying other cards, (even) the Ralink drivers didn’t do the business. With OBSD the answer is clear as to support for specific cards, whereas with Linux it all feels more convoluted.
So much seems to thrown at the Linux kernel on a continuous blizzard basis that things don’t seem to settle to a reliable orthogonal state before being pushed out the door. In part I suspect that a benign totalitarian regime has real benefits for kernel development.