I've noticed in my kernel an option for BSD secure levels. I've used them under FreeBSD before but I was wondering how well they work for Linux. Is there anything I need to know about using them? Why wouldn't more distros come with it installed out of the box?

I can't answer your question, as I've never used BSD. But this shouldn't surprise you. I switched to Gentoo so I knew exactly what was and was not in my kernel and on my machine. When I used Ubuntu I went through dependecy hell trying to get C++ to compile. You would think programs like make would come by default to, but they don't. I don't know why? The best I answer I found as to why was, "Ubuntu is for newbies, newbies don't compile"

I'm a little off with where you're going with this. Ubuntu is a binary based distro with one of the best package management systems available. Gentoo is source based with a package management system similar to BSD's ports. It's a better system however less packages and no GUI package installer (that I saw). Gentoo is the Linux distro designed after BSD so it's funny you've never tried out BSD.

Ubuntu is good for newbies because it has over 17000 packages available in their repositories (if universe is set) with a nice GUI interface and it also maintains itself. I would have an end-user use Ubuntu or Debian for the same reason. Since apt-get resolves dependencies and upgrades itself all a user has to go is go to synaptic and click Firefox, apt-get will go out get the package and dependencies, install them, and automatically do upgrades. They could install 400 apps at once and not even need a reboot. How could this be any easier? They never need to use a compiler which is why they don't install one for you by default. However, you can easily add one if you wish.

I'm not slamming Ubuntu's repository system. I like apt and Synaptic is a nice GUI for it as well. I'm not saying Portage is better than Apt, or is any easier than Apt. I'm just mad that what would appear to me to be a basic neccesity of Linux in general is missing, and I have to find and then install myself. Just like you mentioned secure levels would sound like something more distros would use, make sounds to me like something more distros would install and use by default.

No, I've never used BSD. Though I am aware of the relationship between BSD and Gentoo. I've been told BSD isn't really the kind of OS you use on a regular basis, though I know people do. I'm very happy with Gentoo Linux, but since you brought it up I might give BSD a shot. That massive empty parition on my HDD needs something to do

ps. Sorry I took you off topic

FreeBSD is pretty popular and is similar to Gentoo as far as packages go. The one thing I hate about BSD based systems is the difference between their BSD and Linux shells is night and day. Linux offers syntax highlighting, history functions and scrolling, being able to use page up and down to look at past info. BSD acts like an old MS-DOS shell. If you work on the shell a lot it annoys the piss out of you. However, once you're in a GUI using the shells in them is much nicer. One thing annoying about OpenBSD is that the root partion needs to be in the first 500MB of the disk, and the other BSDs I believe it needs to reside in the first 8GB on the disk. Makes it hard to dual boot with Windows like that. It is possible though. I would recommend creating a Windows 2GB FAT16 filesystem with DOS installed on it and use the spare space for your Virtual Memory in Windows. It's better on performance. Then install FreeBSD and then afterwards install the Windows systems on the partition afterwards. Windows needs to reside on the C partition, however DOS will work as it when Windows installs it will use MS-DOSs boot manager to create a link to where Windows XP resides. You would first choose the OS you want BSD or Windows and if you choose Windows it will ask you whether you want MS-DOS or Windows. This will work but it might be annoying setting up. BSD doesn't have seperate partitions like Linux. Basically, you set up a chunk of space (say 20GB) for BSD and in there you'd set up your individual partitions. I don't know why they do it like this. I would never try, by the way, installing a BSD dual boot with Windows without first trying it on a spare hard drive. You might end up lossing your data. I use Linux for my servers as well as desktop but OpenBSD's security rep is extremely high so I plan to switch my servers to it eventually. I'd recommend getting a book on line before trying BSD. There's a lot of similarity with Linux and a lot of differences. Having a guide you can look at is a major plus. But that's me I like having books in front of me.

PS I think the reason Ubuntu doesn't have the compiler installed is because it's a possible security issue. Since most users don't use it, especially end-users, they don't bother installing it by default. Gentoo couldn't avoid it because it's whole package system is reliant on it.

You must be referring to the shells, which are in the default BSD installations, and operate in compatibility modes to ensure proper operation on older systems. Not being much of a tcsh user myself, I use Bash (straight out of the Ports trees and pkgsrc), and I've got Home/End/Delete/Backspace and ANSI colour support. The BSDs also have scrollback support: FreeBSD's is activated by pushing (appropriately) scroll-lock and then up/down arrow; NetBSD is disabled by default in the kernel (for security), but it's just a wscons option you have to change; OpenBSD just press shift + page-up/page-down. And I don't mean to flame you, but the shells don't change when you're running X, your interface (by which I mean the terminal emulator, keyboard maps, etc.) does. Anyways...

I don't know about securelevel support in Linux, but in the BSDs some of their most useful features support BSD-only functions. For example, sysctl knobs and filesystem flags (immutable, append-only, etc.); so I don't think these same features would be supported (at least not at the same level) in Linux.

OK, when I used BSD I switched to bash, I wasn't aware of using the scroll lock for history searching. I also didn't activate BSD's color support at the time. I didn't know if it came with it. I know the same shells were in the GUI I just had the scroll bar available under the GUI so I could go back in history. That was one of the most annoying things for me was not being able to scroll back. Although now I know how.

Sysctl is ported to Linux although I don't know how well it works. The filesystem flags do work on an ext2 or ext3 filesystem. You can also disable people being able to turn on/off specific flags with the LCAP utility. It will honor current flags set but make it impossible to turn on/off flags. Once set it lasts until a reboot and can't be turned back on, so files can become immutable or append-only. If you set up some scripts you can automatically enable it in certain runlevels. I do it on all runlevels with networking enabled.

Sorry for my incorrect info. I haven't used BSD a great amount of time. The book I had didn't go into this stuff (Absolute OpenBSD) it was more focused on setting up the system and security fields. PS Did OpenBSD 3.8 get rid of their ports system? I had it installed and I didn't see it so I'm wondering if they switched totally to packages.

Hmm, I didn't know that; it's pretty cool that such features have been backported into Ext2 and Ext3.

Eh, that's alright. I just couldn't let you get away with comparing BSD's console to MS-DOS.

It doesn't seem like it: ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.9/PORTS but since the OpenBSD project recommends the pre-compiled binaries, I just use those, so I don't know for certain. Come to think of it, I think I said to install them too, but I don't have a /usr/ports directory. Of course, I just did an FTP install, so it may not work that way... ?

The filesystem flag with LCAP trick I found in Hardening Linux, which is very nice. Unfortuntely, it doesn't work on ReiserFS. You can set it it will act like it will work but it won't enforce.