I was wondering about the security of these Aspire One's, since it is a mobile device it seems to me it's going to be used a lot in Starbucks and places like that where anyone can have a go at your laptop. Since it's a linux box the security issues are well known, and the usual answer is 'run iptables and set up some firewall rules' or 'have no open ports'. Both is probably a good idea. The One, however, doesnt have iptables either compiled into the kernel or available as a module. Either I'm not seeing it or it's just not there. Add to that that the box has a few ports open, X is listening on 6000/tcp, dhcp is listening on 68/udp, and cups on 631/tcp. Seems like if you are not using cups you can turn it off sudo /etc/init.d/cups stop - will turn it off sudo chkconfig --del cups - will remove it (who prints to paper these days anyway?) As for dhcp, it's a necesary evil these days. Someone else can say how to disable it. The X server however is a different thing. No modern distro should be shipping linux with a listening X server. The problem here is that they dont use GDM/KDM/XDM, so putting the option -nolisten tcp in the usual places wont do you any good, as someone else has pointed out on these forums Linpus uses an ugly hack to fire up X in the init scripts. The way to stop it from listening is this. Open /etc/rc.d/rc.S with an editor *as root* (launch your editor with sudo from a terminal) edit the line to be reboot voila etc (the unix domain sockets are local, not networked) port 68 udp is dhcp, like we said.
