in English

I decided to create a finnish advent calendar (ie. countdown to Christmas) in my blog this year starting from tomorrow, the 1st advent. I’ll be publishing some new material every morning (06:00 EET) for you to enjoy and help you to count the days of Advent. I haven’t planned it all exaclty yet but I have some ideas so come back tomorrow to see what’s new.

To see the rest you need to come back daily or grab the RSS feed (calendar only or all posts) in your feed aggregator. You’ll find all calendar posts in the Advent calendar category. Feel free to comment the posts!

Only this first post will be posted to Planet Ubuntu and Planet Fnoss..

Suomeksi

Päätin laittaa blogiini pystyyn jonkinlaisen adventtikalenterin (lue: joulukalenteri) jonka avulla voi laskeskella näitä joulun odotuksen päiviä. Ensimmäinen luukku aukeaa huomenna, ensimmäisenä adventtina, kuudelta aamulla.

Ihan tarkkaan en vielä kaikkea ole suunnitellut mitä kalenteriin tulee enkä sitä tietenkään paljastaisi vaikka olisinkin. Tämän kalenterin hyvä puoli on että luukkujen sisällöstä voi (ja suositellaankin!) helposti antaa palautetta ja jopa toiveita siitä, mitä toivoisi jäljellä olevista luukuista löytävän.

Päästäksesi aukomaan luukkuja laita RSS-syöte (pelkkä kalenteri tai kaikki kirjoitukset) seurantaan tai laita sivun osoite mieleen ja tule heti huomenna aamulla vilkaisemaan mitä uutta on tarjolla. Kaikki kalenterin luukut löydät ‘Advent calendar‘ -kategoriasta.

Vain tämä ensimmäinen viesti ilmestyy Vapaasuomen blogeissa.

Tags: photo, planet-fnoss, planet-ubuntu, planet-vapaasuomi, suomeksi


View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 2 d, 2 h, 10 min and 41 secs ago | Share

If you’re missing out on WordCamp Australia this weekend, you might really be missing out! A bunch of sessions that will be of particular interest to WordPress fans (and fans of all things new and groovy) have snuck their way into the published schedule, including:

• “Launch: Prologue Groups” at 11:05 on Saturday, from Sam Bauers and Jane Wells
• A “Special Presentation” at 13:30 on Saturday, from an undisclosed speaker
• “Launch: Secret Product!” at 10:05 on Sunday, from Alex Shiels
• Certain titles that may or may not suggest other project releases…

Might we see a live WordPress 2.7 release? Perhaps we’ll see some of the goodies previewed in Ranaan Bar-Cohen’s recent “Seven Tips for Virtual Collaboration” presentation… of course, you’ll never-never know if you never-never go.

I will be there. Wearing green.

Bonus: Crikey Blogs is now featured on WordPress Showcase!

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 3 d, 8 h and 5 min ago | Share

Referenced CVEs: CVE-2008-3863, CVE-2008-4306Description:  =========================================================== Ubuntu Security Notice USN-660-1 November 03, 2008 enscript vulnerability CVE-2008-3863, CVE-2008-4306 =========================================================== A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Ubuntu 7.10 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Ubuntu 8.10 This advisory also applies to the corresponding versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu. The problem can be corrected by upgrading your system to the following package versions: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS: enscript 1.6.4-7ubuntu0.2 Ubuntu 7.10: enscript 1.6.4-11ubuntu0.2 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS: enscript 1.6.4-12ubuntu0.8.04.1 Ubuntu 8.10: enscript 1.6.4-12ubuntu0.8.10.1 In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes. Details follow: Ulf Härnhammar discovered multiple stack overflows in enscript's handling of special escape arguments. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a malicious file with the "-e" option enabled, a remote attacker could execute arbitrary code or cause enscript to crash, possibly leading to a denial of service.
[usn ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 27 d and 17 h ago | Share

I started GHRML some time ago as port of haml to Genshi but the initial reception was not that good, from the few blog comments and discussions on IRC I pretty much lost the interest in the project and haven’t used it myself.

However I’m pleased to announce that Richard Davies took over the GHRML maintenance and hosts the project at ghrml.org. He’s also using the project for a Django powered website and wrote a simple django integration module for it.

%GHRML still looks the same but some bugs are fixed now and template inheritance works. Appetizer:

%html %head %title Hello World %style{'type': 'text/css'} body { font-family: sans-serif; } %script{'type': 'text/javascript', 'src': 'foo.js'} %body #header %h1 Hello World %ul.navigation %li[for item in navigation] %a{'href': item.href} $item.caption #contents Hello World!

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

I’m happy to announce new versions of the WSGI utility library Werkzeug and the general purpose templating language Jinja in Version 2.

Over the last few months many improvements went into those libraries.

Werkzeug 0.4

Werkzeug 0.4 (codename Schraubenzieher) got many detail improvements, tons of new unittests and a better WSGI and HTTP compatibility:

• Client supports an empty data argument now.
• Fixed a bug in Response.application that made it impossible to use it as method decorator.
• The session system should work on Google’s Appengine now
• The secure cookie works properly in load balanced environments with different cpu architectures now.
• CacheControl.no_cache and CacheControl.private behavior changed to reflect the possibilities of the HTTP RFC. Setting these attributes to None or True now sets the value to “the empty value”.
• Fixed a bug in boolean attribute handling of the html and xhtml builders.
• Added graceful error handling to the debugger pastebin feature and made it compatible with latest lodgeit.
• added a more list like interface to Headers (slicing and indexing works now)
• added remove_entity_headers which removes all entity headers from a list of headers (or a Headers object)
• the responses now automatically call remove_entity_headers if the status code is 304.
• fixed a bug with Href query parameter handling. Previously the last item of a call to Href was not handled properly if it was a dict.
• Headers now support a `pop` operation to better work with environ properties.

Jinja 2.1

Jinja 2.1 (codename Yasuzō) is a new Jinja2 release with tons of new features. A lot of feedback went into improved and new features:

• The i18n extension looks up foo.ugettext now followed by foo.gettext if an translations object is installed. This makes dealing with custom translations classes easier.
• added a sort filter that works like dictsort but for arbitrary sequences.
• implemented a bytecode cache system that improves startup performance for forking applications. (see documentation for more details)
• Template contexts are now weakref-able.
• Inclusions and imports “with context” forward all variables now, not only the initial context.
• Added a cycle helper called cycler.
• Added a joining helper called joiner.
• added a compile_expression method to the environment that allows compiling of Jinja expressions into callable Python objects.

Furthermore many bugs where fixed:

• Fixed a bug with nested loops and the special loop variable. Before the change an inner loop overwrote the loop variable from the outer one after iteration.
• Fixed a bug with the i18n extension that caused the explicit pluralization block to look up the wrong variable.
• Fixed a limitation in the lexer that made {{ foo.0.0 }} impossible.
• Index based subscribing of variables with a constant value returns an undefined object now instead of raising an index error. This was a bug caused by eager optimizing.
• Fixed a confusing behavior with conditional extending. loops were partially executed under some conditions even though they were not part of a visible area.

Download the latest releases from the cheeseshop:

• Jinja2
• Werkzeug

A new bugfix release of Jinja 1 will follow in the next days, there are some things that have to be figured out first.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 7 d and 21 h ago | Share

So Matthew Garrett dissects what he thinks powerdevil is doing wrong and gives a couple of point that in his view, power managemers on the Free Desktop aren't doing right at the moment. Let's have a look at Matthew's points (I'm paraphrasing here for ease to follow, hoping I'm not getting his points wrong):

• "Powersave is the wrong governor". First of all, Matthew assumes that the setting "powersave" will actually use the powersave cpufreq governor. Fair enough, the label offers it as powersaving mode. The CPU governor in use though is not the powersave governor, but the "conservative" governor, which indeed is an "ondemand" governor, meaning it gives you the extra needed CPU power when you ask for it. As its name says, it's slightly more conservative than the ondemand governor when scaling up. Matthew gets this wrong, but he's probably misled by the label we present to the user.
  The "powersave" performance profile does more than just switching the cpufreq governor, it can also control your display's power consumption (and in the future probably even disable animations all over the place so you don't loose any of these CPU cycles for eye-candy).
• "Thermal management is not the job of a power manager". True, mostly. Usually, it should be controlled by the BIOS. The default setting though is usually very conservative / safe. In general, we don't want users to fiddle with the limits (at what temperature should your CPU cooler start spinning?). Powerdevil doesn't offer such option, so Matthew will be happy about this item. (I don't see how Matthew gets to think that powerdevil does poke into thermal management settings, so I guess Matthews point was more a general one in the first place.)
• "Presentation mode". Something the app does indeed. We've discussed this on the hardware-devel list and came to the same conclusion. Again, powerdevil doesn't offer an option for presentation mode to the user because it's "an application behaviour policy" as Matthew tells us. I do agree. What Matthew is missing here is that PowerDevil manages those policies. It's in fact the central place to do so in KDE 4.2. Apps will tell powerdevil that a presentation is running, powerdevil will keep track of all apps inhibiting certain PM features (screensaver, dimming, suspend, ...), check other policies (e.g. "lock screen on resume?"). There's no "inhibit suspend" button in Powerdevil though. Downside is that we have to rely on apps actually setting this cookie -- which might or might not be more reliable than the user herself. So it might take some time until this feature in powermanagement on the Free Desktop works for everybody. (Until that time, you can switch to a power profile that doesn't suspend / screensave in the first place. All happy. :)
• "3d takes more energy than 2d". Might be true. From my measurements, however, facts are: a) KWin with compositing enabled does hardly spend "a significant proportion of the time on the GPU". (In fact, it sleeps most of the time.) and b) KWin in compositing mode does hardly need any more energy than when compositing is off. (Again, results of my measurements, those might be off. I'd invite Matthew or everybody else to provide additional data points so we can improve our default setting to optimize its behaviour further.) Users can of course easily check this themselves. Run powertop with compositing on, measure your power consumption, switch it off (alt+shift+f12), measure again, compare. In my tests, results have been in the 1% - 'hardly measurable' range. If that's different on your machine, configure powerdevil to automatically switch off compositing. If you're findings vary from mine, let me know and we can further improve powerdevil's set of policies.

Lesson learned: Check your facts before you publically dissect the inner workings of something that is as complex as powermanagement for a desktop system and that you're obviously not familiar enough with to judge wether this piece of software gets it right or not. I'm assuming that Matthew does know *his* stuff (his general points are pretty much all sensible). Unfortunately his arguments in the light of powerdevil's actual implementation are all strawmen. I'd have expected a more thorough analysis from Matthew.

I'd also like to thank Matthew for his input on these matters, and I'm glad it's not as disheartening or dramatic as he tries to put it. In fact, reading his blog, I'm now even more confident that we have something that is both, in its default setting a very sensible system to manage power consumption while not getting in the way of the user, and also very powerful for all those cases where machines are just a bit different -- so we're also set to deal with a great variety of systems and usecases.

Update: I've read one of Matthew's points incorrectly, as opposed to "3d takes more power than 2d", I overread a "no". Reflects my findings though.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 8 d and 1 h ago | Share

if you like Openbox and want to play with the upcoming 3.4.8 version, download the release candidate 1 here: http://icculus.org/openbox/releases/openbox-3.4.8-rc1.tar.gz. Keep in mind that you’ll have to patch obconf by basically replacing ‘obrender-3.0′ and ‘obparser-3.0′ to ‘obrender-4.0′ and ‘obparser-4.0′ respectively in the configure.ac file.

Or you use a conary-based system, there is a version packaged directly from their git repository which you can install by running sudo conary update openbox=foresightlinux.rpath.org@fl:2-devel.

If you find an issue, please read this page to learn how to report it (that goes for translations too).

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 8 d and 1 h ago | Share

The Fedora project is claiming between 9.5 and 10.5 million users, as measured by unique IP addresses asking for updates*.  This puts them ahead of the latest published estimate for Ubuntu, of about 8 million users.

The 8 million figure is out of date.  I first remember hearing it about a year ago.  Historically, Ubuntu has been doubling in users every year, so there's a good chance the 8 million figure is far too small.  The 8 million was also a conservative estimate from Canonical using someone mysterious means.  It would be nice if they were open about the process - at the very least we could release a figure using the same methodology as Fedora (unique IPs poking the update server).

I'm skeptical of Fedora's claim to be ahead of Ubuntu, even if the 9.5 million users is accurate.  In 2007, a Desktop Linux Survey estimated Ubuntu had a 30% marketshare while Fedora had about 6%.  A google trends search shows searches for Ubuntu increasing substantially over that time, while Fedora has been decreasing.  It just doesn't seem right that Fedora would quintouple in marketshare while simultaneously experiencing fewer google searches.

Now, people often only run google searches when they have problems; trends data could then be a measure of bad things.  However, it's not a terrible proxy for popularity; Ubuntu is 5 times as trendy as Fedora, which fits nicely with the survey data.  It's unlikely Ubuntu users would be 5 times as likely to google as Fedora users.  Perhaps another desktoplinux.com survey will help settle things.

Usage Statistics are Important:

Every once in a while, I ask myself if my volunteer contributions matter.  I know from popcon results that Wine is installed on about 10% of Ubuntu machines.  I have hundreds of thousands of users.  If I were to improve the Wine package to give the software equivalent of a stick of gum to every user (about 10 cents or so), then in real terms I've just created 80 thousand dollars in value.  That's a conservative estimate: maybe there are twice as many Ubuntu users, popcon doesn't count Wubi users who are probably more likely to use Wine, and so on.

I do this for free.  I've been working on Ubuntu and Wine for about 5 years now, and sometimes when I'm low on money I find myself asking if it's really worth it.  I struggle with a part time job to make rent, and dedicate the equivalent of a full-time job volunteering for Ubuntu; meanwhile, my consultant friends charge 150 an hour to format/reinstall Windows.

I ask myself if it's worth it.  Looking at those user stats, I have no doubt that it is.  Even if I'm only making a stick of gum's worth of improvement.  Sometimes it's a thankless job, but then again charity usually is.



*bad journalism: see first comment



View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 7 d and 21 h ago | Share

On the Ubuntu NL servers, we use puppet for centralized configuration management. Some would say it is overkill fpr only a few hosts but keeping systems consistent makes life easier. Here’s how we integrated the debian-style vhost management with puppet:

There’s a class called apache in modules/apache/init.pp, it defines which packages are needed for an apache setup and which vhosts run where:

class apache { $packages = [ "libapache2-mod-php5", "libapache2-mod-wsgi", "php5-gd", "php5-mysql", "php5-ldap", "python-ldap", "python-mysqldb","libnet-ldap-perl"] $vhosts = $hostname ? { caterpillar => ["intranet","proxy","archive","default"], bumblebee => ["mail","lists","otrs","people","feeds","default"], dragonfly => ["blogs","chat","forum","passwd","planet","wiki","www","default","kaart"] }

Also make sure all packages are installed, and some general files as well:

package{$packages: ensure => installed, notify => Service["apache2"], } file{”/etc/logrotate.d/apache2″: owner => “root”, group => “root”, mode => “0444″, source => “puppet://$servername/apache/apache2.logrotate”, } file{”/etc/apache2/force-https.include”: owner => “root”, group => “root”, mode => “0444″, source => “puppet://$servername/apache/force-https.include”, notify => Service["apache2"], } file{”/var/www/index.php”: owner => “root”, group => “root”, mode => “0444″, ensure => “/srv/bzr/503/index.php”, } file{”/var/www/index.html”: ensure => absent, }

The logrotate config is because each vhost logs into its own directory. All these logs need to be rotated too of course :)

Speaking of logs, here’s more magic for them:

dir{$vhosts: dir => "/var/log/apache2", } define dir($dir){ file{"$dir/$name": ensure => directory, owner => root, group => adm, before => Service["apache2"], } }

Just making sure that all logdirs get created before apache starts. The real fun comes next though, with the vhosts. This handles installing configfiles, doing the equivalent to a2enmod en also handles SSL vhosts (the ssl key/cert is handled by a different module).

First there’s a small separate script that autogenerates ssl vhosts (we use a wildcard certificate, so we can run several ssl vhosts on one address. We also use mod_wsgi for MoinMoin, so we need some mangling there as well

#!/usr/bin/python import os, re root = '/etc/puppet/modules/apache/files/vhosts' ssl_snippet = """ SSLEngine on SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ubuntu-nl.org.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/ubuntu-nl.org.key""" for f in os.listdir(root): if f.endswith('-ssl'): continue conf = open(os.path.join(root, f)).read() conf = conf.replace('*:80','*:443') conf = conf.replace('\n<VirtualHost>',ssl_snippet + '\n<VirtualHost>') conf = re.sub(r'(WSGI(?:DaemonProcess|ProcessGroup)\s+\S+)', r'\1-ssl', conf) fd = open(os.path.join(root, f + '-ssl'),'w') fd.write(conf) fd.close()

So after creating a vhost in the puppet root, I run this script to autogenerate the https vhost. DRY. When I want to force a specific vhost to use SSl, it includes the force-https.include, which contains this:

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule /?(.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1

So we can still autogenerate the https vhost based on the http vhost :). Here’s the last snippet for puppet to finish our class apache.

vhost{$vhosts: } define vhost(){ $linkname = $name ? { "default" => "000-default", default => $name } file{"/etc/apache2/sites-available/$name": owner => root, group => root, mode => 0444, source => "puppet://$servername/apache/vhosts/$name", notify => Service["apache2"], before => File["/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/$linkname"], } file{”/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/$linkname”: owner => root, group => root, mode => 0444, ensure => “/etc/apache2/sites-available/$name”, notify => Service["apache2"], } file{”/etc/apache2/sites-available/$name-ssl”: owner => root, group => root, mode => 0444, source => “puppet://$servername/apache/vhosts/$name-ssl”, notify => Service["apache2"], before => File["/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/$linkname-ssl"], } file{”/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/$linkname-ssl”: owner => root, group => root, mode => 0444, ensure => “/etc/apache2/sites-available/$name-ssl”, notify => Service["apache2"], } } }

So we install a vhost config for each vhost, both http and https. Then we link them similar to what a2ensite does, including prepending 000- to the default vhost. This default vhost is pretty special too, to take a vhost down for maintenance, I simply stop puppetd on the relevant webserver and a2dissite the vhost. Requests for that vhost will then be caught by the default one, which has a RewriteRule for all nonexisting files to index.php (so all urls are caught by it). The index.php will actually emit an ‘HTTP/1.1 503 Temporarily Unavailable’ response so errorpages are not caught by indexers.After the maintenance, puppet is started again and the first thing it does is reenabling that vhost.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 7 d and 19 h ago | Share

Description:  =========================================================== Ubuntu Security Notice USN-670-1 November 13, 2008 vm-builder vulnerability https://bugs.launchpad.net/+bug/296841 =========================================================== A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Ubuntu 7.10 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Ubuntu 8.10 This advisory also applies to the corresponding versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu. The problem can be corrected by upgrading your system to the following package versions: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS: passwd 1:4.0.13-7ubuntu3.3 Ubuntu 7.10: passwd 1:4.0.18.1-9ubuntu0.1 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS: passwd 1:4.0.18.2-1ubuntu2.1 Ubuntu 8.10: passwd 1:4.1.1-1ubuntu1.1 python-vm-builder 0.9-0ubuntu3.1 In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes. Details follow: Mathias Gug discovered that vm-builder improperly set the root password when creating virtual machines. An attacker could exploit this to gain root privileges to the virtual machine by using a predictable password. This vulnerability only affects virtual machines created with vm-builder under Ubuntu 8.10, and does not affect native Ubuntu installations. An update was made to the shadow package to detect vulnerable systems and disable password authentication for the root account. Vulnerable virtual machines which an attacker has access to should be considered compromised, and appropriate actions taken to secure the machine.
[usn ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 17 d and 15 h ago | Share

Published on: 25 April 2008 at 15:53 except it was published as a page, not a post. So, here it is for everyone:

A few of us on Launchpad have been playing with Angus’ RescueTime Linux Uploader which feeds data up to http://www.rescuetime.com/. RescueTime is billed as

Ridiculously Easy Time Management and Analytics.

So far, it’s been very informative.  For me though it doesn’t count the time I spend talking on the phone when not actually taking notes on the computer.  I’m currently only using the Gnome information applet and the firefox plugin and it works surprisingly well.  You might give it a try if keeping track of time is interesting to you.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

We use winbind at work to auth our Ubuntu desktops to Active Directory. I am the first to upgrade to Intrepid, in which winbind seems to be broken. It fails at random intervals (or so it seems). The way I found easiest to get it back up is to run wbinfo -u. If you don't do this, you can't use sudo, pwd won't work (a lot of stuff breaks, essentially). So, to hack around it, I wrote a script called keepActiveDirectoryAlive and put it in $HOME/bin.

keepActiveDirectoryAlive:


#!/bin/bash

while true
do
sleep 30s; wbinfo -u;
done


Easy! This probably isn't the best or most efficient way to do this, so if you have a better idea, I am more than welcome to suggestions.

I set this to start with GNOME in my Sessions. I also had to set wbinfo -u to run in /etc/rc.local (though I seem to remember Ubuntu/Debian ignoring this file) so that I can login through GDM. It seems to be working as expected.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 53 d ago | Share

<!---->

Today I needed to setup a couple of virtual machines for a client and realized that I had removed my installation of VMware Server.  Off I went to the VMware download page and what did I find?  A day-old release of VMware Server 1.0.6!  I figured you’d all appreciate an updated blog post on how to install VMware Server 1.0.6 on Ubuntu 8.04, so here we are.  (This is much simpler than the previous post, How To Install VMware Server 1.0.5 on Ubuntu 8.04)

Downloading the Requirements

The first step, of course, is to download VMware Server 1.0.6. You’ll want to download the .tar.gz version.  This command can be used for a direct download:

wget -c http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-server-1.0.6-91891.tar.gz

The second step is to install some development tools that we’ll need to get things running. Use the following command or click the package names to install the requirements:

sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-kernel-devel linux-headers-generic xinetd

You will also need to generate a serial number to run VMware Server. Visit this link to register and generate the number of codes you might want. Remember to print the codes or write them down because in my experience they are not emailed to you.

OK, at this point we should have all of the requirements, now we can get to work…

Installation and Configuration

Let’s unpack the VMware archive that we downloaded and run the VMware installer.

tar xf VMware-server-1.0.6-*.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

The Last Step

If you attempt to run vmware at this point you might notice that it spits out some nasty errors and complains at you. There is one more thing we need to setup.

Basically VMware is missing and complaining about some cairo libraries and gcc. So, the simple fix for this is to point to them by using a symbolic link:

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.2.3/libgcc_s.so /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0

At this point you should be able to launch vmware and enjoy some virtualization goodness.  Enjoy!

Related

• Compiz-Check and EnvyNG Configuration Tips : Ubuntu 8.04
• Install VMware Server 1.0.5 on Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy”
• Extended Display on the MacBook (with xorg.conf) : Ubuntu 8.04
• Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy” Rocks My Servers Socks!
• This Site Will Be Upgrading To Ubuntu 8.04 Server Today
• Upgrade To Ubuntu 8.04
• Upgrade Ubuntu 6.06 to Ubuntu 8.04
• How To Upgrade Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 8.04
• Upgrading From Beta To RC And Beyond…
• Announcing the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

Those who remember my ancient quest for the perfect IRC solution might be interested in ancient quest for the perfect IRC solution might be interested in these posts by Aaron Toponce explaining how to couple a remote irssi session with GUI notification. I’m still quite happy with my current Bip + Xchat combination, but I’ve always lusted after the 1337ness of irssi. Icecap looks intriguing, but my first instinct tells me that their solution is over-engineered.

LotD: Ubuntu theme for Symbian S60v3 (works on my Nokia N95)

©2008 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence.

.

ShareThis

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

Little did I know, that on my birthday just 3 days ago, the Das Keyboard crew released version 3 of their fabulous tactile keyboard. Major highlights? 2 USB 2.0 ports on the right side of the keyboard, blue LEDs, glossy finish, and the ability to purchase a Das Keyboard with inscriptions on the keys (using a stylish font, I must say).

It keeps all the aspects of version 2 that I love. The clickity-clack of the key snap, the mechanical switches, and no inscriptions. The Das Keyboard is by far the most enjoyable keyboard I have ever typed on. I can only imagine that version 3 is just as enjoyable.

Sign me up. I want one!

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 5 months ago | Share

Referenced CVEs: CVE-2008-1502Description:  =========================================================== Ubuntu Security Notice USN-658-1 October 23, 2008 moodle vulnerability CVE-2008-1502 =========================================================== A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases: Ubuntu 7.10 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS This advisory also applies to the corresponding versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu. The problem can be corrected by upgrading your system to the following package versions: Ubuntu 7.10: moodle 1.8.2-1ubuntu2.1 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS: moodle 1.8.2-1ubuntu4.1 In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes. Details follow: Lukasz Pilorz discovered that the HTML filtering used in Moodle was not strict enough. A remote attacker could send malicious requests to Moodle and execute arbitrary code as the web server user.
[usn ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 38 d ago | Share

I've been working, in my spare time, on a really fun Django project. It's allowed me to play with some of the Django toys that I haven't really gotten around to playing with recently. One of the things I've been doing is building my app with good tools, and one of things I've been doing in building my tools is using custom django management commands.

Out of this process came a tool that I thought might be beneficial to share with others: django-fabric. Fabric is a command line tool similar to the popular development tool Capistrano. However, it's more lightweight, uses python, and doesn't assume anything about your environment (language, vcs, etc.). I've been using it so much recently that I built a django command for it.

To use it, download, install, and add to your INSTALLED_APPS. Create a fabfile, which is just a python file with your deployment instructions in them. You'll need to add that file (by name) as settings.FABFILE. Then, manage.py fab <command>. For more information, see the Fabric documentation.

For Ubuntu users, Fabric can be installed by adding my PPA repository and installing from there. I'll be adding the django-fabric packange there too, once I get it to a stable point.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 53 d ago | Share

Two weeks ago, an idea struck me while I was extensively cleaning my room. Of course I had to turn off the computer and my modem since I was rearranging everything totally (I need to setup my internet connection and router in the other room one of these days…). I suddenly got the urge to try not to go online, or even open the computer for 24 hours. Knowing my attachment (read: addiction) to IRC, I believe it would be quite a challenge. And so I went through with it. From 09:00 to 09:00 of the next day, I, abruptly and without warning (sorry, online friends), disappeared from the Web.

And I’m glad I took that personal challenge. I’ve been able to give myself, for a full 24-hours, some time to think about my life, where it has been, and where it’s headed, as well as my goals. It came at an opportune time (just after a very hectic first quarter and right before going back to school) to think and reflect. And I actually enjoyed that feeling of being offline, specially from IRC (though I really missed my friends). That 24-hour, computer-free plan turned into (almost) a week without IRC, though I still needed to check my mail and RSS feeds… maybe next time I can try doing without those as well.

It was a great experience. I wish I could have spent a few days in a some sort of nature retreat like a forest or mountain (not the beach :P). I think every hacker should have a sort of “retreat” like this once in a while, to recharge and refocus and avoid burning themselves out. You may not be churning code in those few days, but it’s time well invested. Important, but not urgent, as Stephen Covey would say. Besides, you can also be productive at that time. Not only was I able to gain some perspective in my life, I was able to also able to think about what free software tools I wish I had at my disposal, or the KDE stuff that I want to do. I was also able to analyze how I spent, or rather, procrastinated, my time each day and where the time all goes (IRC and RSS… I love you and hate you at the same time.). Hopefully that realization would help me spend my time better in the future. Hopefully…

But for now, it’s back to the connected and disturbed life.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

I spent the other night with my friend Elfine, trying to figure out how to get her EeePC on the school's wireless. I did it! If you run sudo route del default, just before starting VPNC, it'll work. It turns out the EeePC doesn't replace the default route—instead, it adds a second default route, which simply doesn't work. Delete the default route before starting the VPN, and it won't get all

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

Dear Lazyweb,

Does anyone have any graphs / charts / data comparing each distribution and the amount of commits their respective members did upstream for a project (ie like gnome)? I have seen the kernel ones with Redhat and Novell taking the lead in contributions, didn’t know if their were similar ones for any user space projects?

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

I have been using the 64 bit version of kubuntu since dapper, and have always refrained from installing proprietary 32 bit applications such as skype, Adobe reader and even the Amazon mp3 downloader. Flash has always been an issue too. Today though, I was forced to get adobe reader working (it has nice booklet printing options that I can not find in any other program). After a bit of googling I can across getlibs a simple application to download required 32 bit libraries for 32 bit binaries. You simply install the 32 bit deb with –force-architecture and then run “sudo getlibs executable.” Then try running the program. If it still fails, you may may have to run getlibs against the executable again (probably because the program depends on a library later in the program). So far I have installed Adobe reader, firefox-2 i386 for flash and skype. All three work flawlessly. Getlibs has alot more options, such as the ability to install compatibility libraries by library name.

I think it would awesome integrated into GDebi, of course with a educational warning about looking for a 64-bit version first. This would make it far easier for users to transition to future of 64-bit linux.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

A couple of years ago when I got this phone, I had a long play, working out what I could do with it. One of the things I ‘accomplished’ was connecting to the internet, using the motorola phone tools disc provided on a windows xp machine.

Now though I wanted to do the same, but with no windows install, I wasn’t holding my breath.

It was amazed at how surprisingly “simple” it was though…

I plugged the phone in with a usb cable, (made sure it was set to data/fax in its settings rather than memory card) then checked it was recognised in dmesg. Next, I…

sudo apt-get install wvdial

sudo wvdialconf

And finally edited /etc/wvdial.conf, adding “Stupid Mode = 1″ to the end, the wap phone number, user and password as appropriate.

To start up a connection, all I had to do was

sudo wvdial

Sure, wap is really slow, but with with minutes going to waste on my cheapo contract, I like to make the most of it!

P.s. Apologies for the poor gimping.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Ubuntu VM builder

soren has been working on fixing bugs in vm-builder. He also added support for EC2.

ACTION: soren to write a blog post about vm-builder once it’s available in the archive

ACTION: sommer to update the virtualization section of the server guide once vm-builder is available in the archive

Review ServerGuide for Intrepid

Koon offered to draft a section about tomcat for the Ubuntu Server Guide.

ACTION: mathiaz to review the ldap section of the server guide

ACTION: kirkland to review the RAID section of the server guide

ACTION: Koon to draft a section about tomcat for the Server Guide.

Boot Support for Degraded RAID

kirkland added a question to the installer covering the topic of booting from a RAID array. If / or /boot is installed on an md device a question is asked about setting BOOT_DEGRADED to true or false. He also wrote a call for testing on his blog.

Tomcat6 server stack support

Koon reported that a new tomcat task is available at installation time. The number of dependencies is now reasonable. He has also been working on fixing tomcat5.5 in universe.

landscape-client in Ubuntu

mathiaz worked on splitting the landscape-client package into two. There are two blockers for Alpha6: a Pre-Depends on python-gobject and promotion of update-motd to main. He’s got a fix the first while kirkland is working on the latter.

Drupal install script

tarvid mentioned the script he wrote to install multiple instances of drupal. mathiaz suggested he comments on the Web Framework specification.

nagios3 in main

mathiaz inquired about the status of nagios3. Although its MIR had been accepted the package was never moved to main in hardy. In intrepid nagios2 disappeared while nagios3 entered universe. Koon is working on getting nagios3 promoted to main.

ACTION: Koon to ask an archive admin to promote nagios3 to main.

vsftpd 2.0.7

Adri2000 asked if a FF exception was needed for getting vsftpd 2.0.7 in intrepid. It wasn’t clear whether it was a bug-fix-only upstream release. mathiaz advised to ask for a FF exception, then work on an updated package and seek for sponsoring.

Mail server improvements

ScottK mentioned that clamav and spamassassin had been promoted to main and were available on the -server iso. clamav has also been updated to the latest version and may ship with an apparmor profile in Intrepid. He is also considering some refactoring of the amavisd-new configuration.

mathiaz asked if these packages would be added to the mail server task. ScottK said that may require some discussions.

ACTION: ScottK-laptop to start a discussion on ubuntu-server@ about adding spamassassin, clamav and amavisd-new to the mail-server task.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, September 23th at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 75 d ago | Share

Well, things have finally calmed down regarding the OpenSSL problems. Not that it’s necessarily bad to see that many posts and news. One can actually think it’s a good things problem are addressed and discussed, but I was starting to get tired of reading nothing more than a bunch of complaints.

News flash: Shit happens!

I actually had a big text about the package maintainer, the severity of the problem, etc, etc, etc written, but it’s better to just be quiet, since I can’t do it any better.

Exploitation

After reading so much about it, I was intrigued on how super-easy-because-of-the-32,767-possible-outcomes to crack attack would work, and hdm (from Metaploit) answered them on a great paper:

http://metasploit.com/users/hdm/tools/debian-openssl/

The keys were generated and made available:

http://sugar.metasploit.com/debian_ssh_dsa_1024_x86.tar.bz2
http://sugar.metasploit.com/debian_ssh_rsa_2048_x86.tar.bz2

And a script to use them has been published to Metasploit:

http://milw0rm.com/exploits/5622

After giving it a try on a unpatched virtual machine, I understood the real severity of the problem.

Copyright © 2008 Tiago 'gouki' Faria
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.

View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 6 months ago | Share

Referenced CVEs: CVE-2008-2812, CVE-2008-2931, CVE-2008-3272, CVE-2008-3275Description:  =========================================================== Ubuntu Security Notice USN-637-1 August 25, 2008 linux, linux-source-2.6.15/20/22 vulnerabilities CVE-2008-2812, CVE-2008-2931, CVE-2008-3272, CVE-2008-3275 =========================================================== A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Ubuntu 7.04 Ubuntu 7.10 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS This advisory also applies to the corresponding versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu. The problem can be corrected by upgrading your system to the following package versions: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS: linux-image-2.6.15-52-386 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-686 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-amd64-generic 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-amd64-k8 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-amd64-server 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-amd64-xeon 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-hppa32 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-hppa32-smp 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-hppa64 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-hppa64-smp 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-itanium 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-itanium-smp 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-k7 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-mckinley 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-mckinley-smp 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-powerpc 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-powerpc-smp 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-powerpc64-smp 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-server 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-server-bigiron 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-sparc64 2.6.15-52.71 linux-image-2.6.15-52-sparc64-smp 2.6.15-52.71 Ubuntu 7.04: linux-image-2.6.20-17-386 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-generic 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-hppa32 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-hppa64 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-itanium 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-lowlatency 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-mckinley 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-powerpc 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-powerpc-smp 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-powerpc64-smp 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-server 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-server-bigiron 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-sparc64 2.6.20-17.39 linux-image-2.6.20-17-sparc64-smp 2.6.20-17.39 Ubuntu 7.10: linux-image-2.6.22-15-386 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-cell 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-generic 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-hppa32 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-hppa64 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-itanium 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-lpia 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-lpiacompat 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-mckinley 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-powerpc 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-powerpc-smp 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-powerpc64-smp 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-rt 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-server 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-sparc64 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-sparc64-smp 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-ume 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-virtual 2.6.22-15.58 linux-image-2.6.22-15-xen 2.6.22-15.58 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS: linux-image-2.6.24-19-386 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-generic 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-hppa32 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-hppa64 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-itanium 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-lpia 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-lpiacompat 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-mckinley 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-openvz 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-powerpc 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-powerpc-smp 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-powerpc64-smp 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-rt 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-server 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-sparc64 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-sparc64-smp 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-virtual 2.6.24-19.41 linux-image-2.6.24-19-xen 2.6.24-19.41 After a standard system upgrade you need to reboot your computer to effect the necessary changes. Details follow: It was discovered that there were multiple NULL-pointer function dereferences in the Linux kernel terminal handling code. A local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code as root, or crash the system, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-2812) The do_change_type routine did not correctly validation administrative users. A local attacker could exploit this to block mount points or cause private mounts to be shared, leading to denial of service or a possible loss of privacy. (CVE-2008-2931) Tobias Klein discovered that the OSS interface through ALSA did not correctly validate the device number. A local attacker could exploit this to access sensitive kernel memory, leading to a denial of service or a loss of privacy. (CVE-2008-3272) Zoltan Sogor discovered that new directory entries could be added to already deleted directories. A local attacker could exploit this, filling up available memory and disk space, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-3275) In certain situations, the fix for CVE-2008-0598 from USN-623-1 was causing infinite loops in the writev syscall. This update corrects the mistake. We apologize for the inconvenience.
[usn ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us| Updated 3 months ago | Share