Figure 2.1: Chris PeBenito
Gentoo Documentation Project looking for more translators
the Gentoo Documentation Project (GDP) is looking for more translators to aid the current translation efforts. As documentation is actively maintained and updated, keeping the translations up to date is important but timeconsuming if not enough translators are available.
To improve the translation efforts, the GDP is looking for additional translators for several languages. If you are interested to join the translation team, please contact the translation lead.
| Language | Lead | Language | Lead |
| Polish | albino@onomato.net | German | Tobias Scherbaum |
| Danish | Jesper Brodersen | Indonesian | Erwin |
| Portuguese | Ricardo Loureiro | Traditional Chinese | Benny Chuang |
| Russian | Sergey Kuleshov | French | Xavier Neys |
If you are interested in joining a non-listed translation team, or start a translation team for a not (yet :) supported language, please contact Sergey Kuleshov.
Praise for Gentoo in Linux Weekly News
distrowatch"The Success of Gentoo"D.M.D. Ljungmark2. Featured Developer of the Week
Chris PeBenito
Figure 2.1: Chris PeBenito |
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This week, we are featuring Chris PeBenito (pebenito), the lead for the SELinux sub-project for Hardened Gentoo, as well as the lead for the recently re-initialized Embedded Gentoo project. He has been responsible for maintaining the SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) userland utilities and patches, sys-kernel/selinux-sources, and SELinux policies. He also manages the SELinux demo machine. Finally, he has recently taken a lead role in re-activating the dormant Embedded Gentoo project and is currently hard at work recruiting help, organizing sub-projects and discussing priorities. Interested parties are invited to hang out on the gentoo-embedded IRC channel and subscribe to the mailing list.
Chris first started using Linux with Slackware in 1997. He later switched to Red Hat, and was considering Sorcerer because it was source-based when he heard about Gentoo's packaging system and decided to try it. After taking note of the noticeably better performance on his P200 MMX server, he was sold. Earlier this year, Chris responded to a request for help from Joshua Brindle(method) by reading and digesting the NSA's white paper on SELinux and then helping to get the packages in order. He was named a developer and handed responsibility for the sub-project. One of the brightest experiences from that has been the SELinux demo server demonstrating its stability during an early slashdotting. He offers a cookie to anyone who can crack (not DoS) it.
Chris usually works on a dual p3-450 workstation, and tests on a pair of SELinux servers: a K6-2/400 and a G3/500 clone. He enjoys listening to and playing music, and has played soprano and bass clarinet for many years. His favorite quote is from the Buddha: "As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds"
Chris is currently a Master's candidate and Research Assistant in Computer Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His primary research and career interests lie in embedded systems and hardware design. He expects to be completing his studies next spring. He describes Gentoo as "polymorphic; from the same portage tree you can get an embedded system, a desktop or a server. What will we come up with next?"
Quote from http://www.ethereal.com/appnotes/enpa-sa-00011.html:
Potential security issues have been discovered in the following protocol dissectors:
Impact:
It may be possible to make Ethereal crash or run arbitrary code by injecting a purposefully malformed packet onto the wire, or by convincing someone to read a malformed packet trace file.
A bug in the getgrouplist function can cause a buffer overflow if the size of the group list is too small to hold all the user's groups. This overflow can cause segmentation faults in user applications. This vulnerability exists only when an administrator has placed a user in a number of groups larger than that expected by an application.
There is a bug in the part of libnids code responsible for TCP reassembly. The flaw probably allows remote code execution.
phpSysInfo contains two vulnerabilities which could allow local files to be read or arbitrary PHP code to be executed, under the privileges of the web server process.
The following new security bugs were posted this week:
Gnome 2.5 Hits the Ground Running
Sudden flurry of activity at the Desktop Environment section of the forum. After KDE 3.2, Keith Packard's new X server and other excitements of the past weeks, Gnome friends finally have had an opportunity to retaliate. Gnome 2.5 was released on Saturday, and the corresponding Forum thread is mightily pleased, albeit fiddling with minor issues concerning things that build less well than others... For the user who doesn't mind a bit of risk, breakmygentoo.net has unofficial ebuilds (if you find bugs in these, please send them to breakmygentoo.net, not to bugzilla.gentoo.org).
Undelete in Linux
Windows has had various "undelete" software available for years. Once in a great while, we all wish we had one for our favorite OS. Does it exist? Readthis thread to find out.
New USE flag
With its continual strive to increase the amount of choice users have in Gentoo it's not suprising that new USE flags are being proposed all the time. Here is the most recent one: accessibility. Check it out.
Web-based Portage
Our favorite package maintenence suite has a new frontend in development. Benjamin Judas is working on the construction of a new web based frontend for portage. Have a look here and here for the first announcements.
Japan: 2nd Gentoo Appearance at the Internet Week 2003 in Yokohama
The "BSD/Linux Day" is an all-day event, traditionally embedded in the annual gathering of Internauts in Japan, the Internet Week at Yokohama's Pacifico Conference Centre. In what amounts to a fledgling tradition of its own, Gentoo is going to be represented by GentooJP activists, just like last year. This time Mamoru Komachi will give an introduction to Gentoo Linux during the first session of the day, and on top of the presentation (and the rather interesting conference program), Gentooists on the Japanese mailing list have been busy organising some apres-speech gathering, possibly with drinks and whatever else one does in Yokohama after dark. This annual Japan Unix Society meeting is going to be held on December 2nd, from 9:00 to 17:00, and has a price tag of 3000 JPY per person, subject to rebates available for JUS members and students. You may want to send an email to the Japanese Gentoo mailing list to announce your intentions of showing up...
The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 21 November 2003 and 27 November 2003, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 4248 currently open bugs: 92 are labeled 'blocker', 185 are labeled 'critical', and 314 are labeled 'major'.
The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are:
The developers and teams who have been assigned the most new bugs during this period are:
ANSI Escape Sequences: Colors
This week's tip shows the colors available as ANSI escape sequences. These can be used to beautify terminal prompts, text, or anything else that understands ANSI escape sequences.
ANSI escape sequences are non-printed text that is interpreted to change the format of some text. In this example, we will specifically look at the use of escape sequences to specify colors. In the standard Gentoo /etc/profile, there are some examples of these colors already being used to change the color of parts of the terminal prompt. For example, the pathname appears in blue and parts of the bash prompt show up in red or green depending on whether you are root or a normal user.
Non-printable ANSI escape sequences are always enclosed \[\033[ and \]. Colors must be followed by a m. Using the example from /etc/profile, we can see that the color code for green is 32, the code for blue is 34, and the code for red is 31.
Code Listing 7.1: PS1 from /etc/profile |
(root user) export PS1='\[\033[01;31m\]\h \[\033[01;34m\]\W \$ \[\033[00m\]' red blue (normal user) export PS1='\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h \[\033[01;34m\]\W \$ \[\033[00m\]' green blue |
The next part is the 1 preceding the actual color code. This indicates whether or not the color should be bold or not (0 for normal, 1 for bold). So if you wanted a normal green instead of a bold green, you would use 00;32m instead of 01;32m.
Note: This does not work with all colors. See the list at the bottom for a list of what's available in bold. |
For background colors you would 4x instead of 3x. So to have the background blue instead of the text, you could use 00;44m instead of 01;34m.
Here is a list of colors and their escape sequences.
Code Listing 7.2 |
Black 0;30 Dark Gray 1;30
Red 0;31 Bold Red 1;31
Green 0;32 Bold Green 1;32
Yellow 0;33 Bold Yellow 1;33
Blue 0;34 Bold Blue 1;34
Purple 0;35 Bold Purple 1;35
Cyan 0;36 Bold Cyan 1;36
Light Gray 0;37 White 1;37
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Note: ANSI sequence 0;33 is listed as Brown in the BASH-Prompt HOWTO, but it seems more of a mustard yellow. Strictly speaking, the bold version of it is indeed yellow - therefore I've listed it as yellow. |
Also, if you're scared of these escape sequences but want to add color to shell scripts, check out app-misc/color.
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