Pogo Linux: 1GHz for under $1000

Kernel Options

We had expected a stock Red Hat 7.0 kernel on this machine for several reasons. First, it's easy. Almost every driver is enabled and compiled as a module. Second, it's patched with several useful patches including AGP and USB support. Third, it's supported by third parties such as NVIDIA, eliminating the need to recompile the NVIDIA kernel module before installing. However, Pogo replaced this kernel with the current kernel, 2.2.17. By comparison, Red Hat 7.0 ships with a heavily modified 2.2.16 kernel. This is probably a good thing, as the kernel is probably more stable and supports more devices than the Red Hat kernel. Unfortunately, the Pogo install limited device drivers to a small subset of those available, meaning many system upgrades will require a kernel recompile. Of course, the shipped components will work perfectly out of the box as the modules selected correspond to the hardware originally supplied by Pogo. We wish they would have included support for more network and SCSI cards to make future upgrades easier. Other kernel features missing in the Pogo kernel include PPP/SLIP, Parallel Printer (although support for the parallel port and external devices connected via the parallel port was included), Video4Linux (for video input devices such as TV cards), APM support, and framebuffer access to the video card (by means of VESA, as the GeForce2GTS is not specifically supported by the kernel). On the other hand, file system quotas and almost every file system and sound card supported by the kernel were included.

The one kernel related problem we did find was that the proper sound module had not been configured. This is analogous to selecting the proper driver in Windows-land. Red Hat 7.0's sndconfig utility listed the card as unsupported as well. Some experimenting revealed that it worked fine with the es1371 module.

System Services

Simply deciding to run Linux opens the doors to many methods of intrusion for the simple reason that it is much easier and more common to run services that Windows users would not. Further, it is important to note which services are running on a newly installed machine to be able to limit external access to only what is needed.

For the most part, this machine resembles a standard (and updated with the latest RPMS) Red Hat 7.0 machine. The machine started such services as portmap, atd, lpd, xfs, finger, rlogin, rsh, telnet and wu-ftpd. To our surprise, Apache was running right out of the box. No, this is not a security hole necessarily as there are no CGI binaries installed by default and there is no way to get one on the machine without first cracking another service. It does represent a level of service not normally used however, and is not necessary for most end users.