Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: February 16, 2004

1.  Gentoo News

• Gentoo growing in popularity

Gentoo growing in popularity

According to this article on InternetNews, Netcraft's January survey counted over 24,000 Gentoo installations on active web servers, showing almost 20% growth over 6 months. Also, as we've reported in the past, Gentoo has been getting more and more recognition from various sources recently - while Gentoo Linux did not win the award, it was a finalist for a Product Excellence Award at LWE 2004, and has been featured in publications like Linux Journal and Linux Weekly News. Here's a shout out to all the developers and community members who keep making Gentoo great.

2.  Gentoo Security

XFree86 Font Information File Buffer Overflow

Exploitation of a buffer overflow in the XFree86 Project Inc.'s XFree86 X Window System allows local attackers to gain root privileges.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

Monkeyd Denial of Service vulnerability

A bug in get_real_string() function allows for a Denial of Service attack to be launched against the webserver.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

Gallery 1.4.1 and below remote exploit vulnerability

The Gallery developers have discovered a potentially serious security flaw in Gallery 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 1.3.3, 1.4 and 1.4.1 which can allow a remote exploit of your webserver.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

3.  Heard in the Community

Web Forums

Switching for Developers

Moving on from Windows to a bright new future in Linux is becoming a trend not only among desktop users, but also for software developers who grew up using Visual Studio and other Microsoft tools to code applications for the Windows platform. Curious about the possibilities in cross-platform design or outright ready to switch entirely, many of them try to find their way around POSIXish operating systems now. But are there ways to leverage all that knowledge they accumulated before? Sure there are:

• Converting Windows/VStudio6 SDL Project to Linux/KDevelop3

gentoo-user

Using 2.6 Kernels During The Install

Some Gentoo users have elected to try and use the new 2.6 kernels from the initial install. A few problems remain, one being that devfs is depreciated in 2.6. Read here for some helpful links to get things up and running with its replacement, udev.

2.6 vs 2.4 Speed Issues

Also this week, some users have been trying the 2.6 series and experiencing wildly varying results in regard to speed. Check out some of the rather lengthy and interesting threads here and here.

4.  Gentoo International

Reminders: International Linux Shows With Gentoo Involvement

Belgium: FOSDEM, 21/22 February 2004.

Germany: Chemnitzer Linuxtag, 6/7 March 2004

Germany: GLUGHH Website; Next Meeting

Congratulations, the Hamburg-based Gentooists have set up their own website now! Content, desing and future plans will certainly be discussed at the next meeting of the GLUGHH, which is going to take place on Sunday, 22 February, 19:00 hours at the Schachcafé as usual.

5.  Bugzilla

Summary

• Statistics
• Closed Bug Ranking
• New Bug Rankings

Statistics

The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 06 February 2004 and 12 February 2004, activity on the site has resulted in:

• 775 new bugs during this period
• 533 bugs closed or resolved during this period
• 24 previously closed bugs were reopened this period

Of the 5046 currently open bugs: 128 are labeled 'blocker', 192 are labeled 'critical', and 363 are labeled 'major'.

Closed Bug Rankings

The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are:

• Portage Team, with 104 closed bugs
• Gentoo KDE Team, with 38 closed bugs
• Core System Packages Team, with 28 closed bugs
• Jeremy Huddleston, with 26 closed bugs
• Sven Vermeulen, with 17 closed bugs
• Gentoo Games, with 17 closed bugs

New Bug Rankings

The developers and teams who have been assigned the most new bugs during this period are:

• Core System Packages Team, with 34 new bugs
• Portage Utilities Team, with 28 new bugs
• AMD64 Porting Team, with 23 new bugs
• Mobile Herd, with 20 new bugs
• x86 Kernel Team, with 16 new bugs

6.  Tips and Tricks

Using RCS

This week's tip shows you how to use of RCS to keep track of changes in configuration files. To get RCS and its related tools, install app-text/rcs from Portage. To get started with RCS, try putting /etc/make.conf under revision control.

# cd /etc
# mkdir RCS

(Put make.conf under revision control)
# ci -i make.conf
RCS/make.conf,v  <--  make.conf
enter description, terminated with single '.' or end of file:
NOTE: This is NOT the log message!
>> make.conf - custom settings for portage
>> .
initial revision: 1.1
done

(The file is now in RCS, so put it back in /etc for reading)
# co make.conf

Notice that make.conf is now under revision control and is read-only. To edit the file, you need to perform the following steps:

(Checkout the file with locking enabled)
# co -l make.conf
RCS/make.conf,v  -->  make.conf
revision 1.1 (locked)
done
(Edit the file)
# ${EDITOR} make.conf

(Check the file back in and unlock it.)
# ci -u make.conf
RCS/make.conf,v  <--  make.conf
new revision: 1.2; previous revision: 1.1
enter log message, terminated with single '.' or end of file:
>> changed DISTDIR to use a drive with more space
>> .
done

This can be a tedious process so it's better to put all the commands in a script to do it automatically.

#!/bin/sh
# Script to edit files under revision control

[[ -f "RCS/$1,v" ]] && co -l $1
${EDITOR} $1
[[ -f "RCS/$1,v" ]] && ci -u $1

For more information on using RCS see man 1 rcsintro.

7.  Moves, Adds, and Changes

Moves

The following developers recently left the Gentoo team:

• none this week

Adds

The following developers recently joined the Gentoo Linux team:

• Chris Aniszczyk (zx) - java
• Andrei Barbu (teval) - lisp, scheme
• Peter Bienstman (pbienst) - app-sci
• Tom Gall (tgall) - gentoo-ppc

Changes

The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo Linux project:

• none this week

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