Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: April 19th, 2004Transition to NFP organization Daniel Robbins, chief architect of Gentoo Linux is now heading an effort to make a transition to a NFP (not-for-profit) organization. The gentoo-nfp mailing list has been set up and discussion is already underway; the list has been archived, and is open to subscription: those interested should send a mail to gentoo-nfp-subscribe@gentoo.org. Daniel is targeting the end of April for finalizing the NFP effort, and has submitted a detailed proposal to the mailing list, which has been discussed and clarified there. In the proposal, Gentoo Foundation, Inc. will hold the intellectual property of the project. It'll have a board of trustees, and will be an open membership trade association. The initial board of trustees will serve for a year, after which a new one will be elected. The Gentoo Store will pay for the establishment of this not-for-profit, as well as for the Gentoo Foundation's legal fees in applying for 501(c)(6) federal association status, which is expected to take around $5000. In addition, Daniel will retain royalty-free rights to use of the "Gentoo" trademark and the "G" logo, allowing him to continue him to run the Gentoo Store if he wants, in order to support his family and attempt to pay some of the $20,000 in debt he accumulated during his tenure as Chief Architect. CVS Server and Client Vulnerabilities There are two vulnerabilities in CVS; one in the server and one in the client. These vulnerabilities allow the reading and writing of arbitrary files on both client and server. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Multiple format string vulnerabilities in cadaver There are multiple format string vulnerabilities in the neon library used in cadaver, possibly leading to execution of arbitrary code when connected to a malicious server. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement XChat 2.0.x SOCKS5 Vulnerability XChat is vulnerable to a stack overflow that may allow a remote attacker to run arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Multiple new security vulnerabilities in monit Two new vulnerabilities have been found in the HTTP interface of monit, possibly leading to denial of service or execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement 3. Featured Developer of the Week
This week we are featuring Lance Albertson (aka ramereth), who is doing general system administration and monitoring for Gentoo. This involves managing monitoring tools for the Infrastructure Project, such as Nagios server and implementation, Catci graphs, and whateverelse they come up with. He also helps with general system administration using cfengine and other tools. Furthermore, he helps infrastructure team in setting up new servers, when such need arises. He is making his first steps in ebuild maintenance by helping out with WOLK Kernel and various ebuilds, which belong to netmon herd. Apart from all this Lance is taking part in Gentoo server project, throwing ideas and suggesting strategies. Lance considers himself to be new to Linux, as his first serious experience with this OS started in January 2001. His first distro was Mandrake, on which he applied a so called "let's install everything strategy". However, he admits that he got bored with it and switched to Debian, which was a suggestion of his boss. Lance came across Gentoo sometimes in 2002, seeing his friend building it on a dual Pentium Pro box. In the beginning he found the idea to be "nuts" but 6 months later decided to give it a try (it was version 1.2 at a time), and as he says "fell in love instantly". ramereth started his way to becoming a dev on #gentoo-server channel on freenode, where he was spending some time. That was when Kurt Lieber asked him if he wanted to help Gentoo with Nagios implementation. He is most proud of the project he did once for the school. That was an irc- like server/client with xml-based message format. The commands where based on IRC standard, so one could join the channel become an op, kick/ban people etc. Moreover he was using flashes for the client which made it even more interesting. Even though he had a few known bugs, he still got a straight 'A' on it. There are about 15 computers in his house, including x86/SPARC/PPC/Alpha, and all those he ever used run Gentoo. Lance prefers Gnome desktop and first things he runs are evolution, gaim and xterms. cfengine, irssi, screen, nagios and cacti are among his favorite tools. Lance was attending a school school at Kansas State University, from which he graduated in May 2003 with a degree in Agricultural Technology Management with minors in Agronomy and Computer Science. Now he is working for RHS Inc., doing technical documentation and IT security. Apart from that he is also doing full- time farming with his family. Driving semi truck, combine and various tracktors is also on list of his skills. When he doesn't work and doesn't do anything for Gentoo, Lance enjoys playing trumpet in jazz ensembles. He has been in the top big band jazz ensemble at k- state for several years plus was in the latin jazz combo. Also he likes playing racquetball, poker and hanging out with his friends. Now he lives in his own house in a small community Hiawatha, which is in northeast of Kansas. Though he considers his life to "laid back" it's quite easy to get away from it, cause Hiawatha is just two hours from Kansas City. And he does actually go there quite often! His favorite quote is "Where ever you go, there you are". When I asked Lance to give me a sentence about Gentoo, he said: "Gentoo is the solution to total control." Gentooified coLinux In a bid to add yet another way to run Gentoo under impossible circumstances, Danish Gentoo user janlaur has volunteered a Howto on running Gentoo Linux as a native Windows thread, using coLinux (and involving a complete Gentoo installation contained in a 2 GB image file to be downloaded at some point). Anyone patient enough to try this, check the thread in the Documentation, Tips & Tricks section: New Finnish Forum The Great Scandinavian Unification that the Forums saw about a year ago was intended to create a lively atmosphere among the nordic faction of Gentooism, mostly under the impression that Swedish was sort of a lingua franca for most of the region and looked like a good common denominator at first. But now the Finnish users, linguistically very different from, err, most of the planet's other humanoids, have achieved critical mass and decided they deserve a forum in their own language. Pleased to announce jaska and Mikessu as the new forum's inaugural moderators, tervetuloa 'n all that: Linux Partiton Resizing Utilities There are plenty of commercial partition-resizing utilities on the market. But what about Linux ones? Here's a thread that talks about commercial and free utilities for all your resizing needs. Ebuild overflow? Some capable Gentoo users have noticed that user-contributed ebuilds have not been making their way into Portage on a timely basis. It comes down to developer overload, so if you've got some free time... become a Gentoo Package maintainer! Italy: Si Tacuisses, Philosophos Mansisses? Richard Stallman in Milano Tomorrow, Tuesday 20 April, Gentooists in Northern Italy will flock to Santo Ricardo's (of the Church of Emacs) appearance at the philosophical faculty of Milano university. RMS will give a speech and participate in a panel discussion in the course of the "Liberty Week" organised by the Italian branch of the (originally South American) Hipatia movement and the Free Software Foundation. To those who've expressed their intention to go in this forum thread: We'd appreciate photographic proof for the next GWN issue, ragazzi... Germany: Rhein-Main GUM Meets Again, 30 April Notorious university student hangout "Kamin" (Kapuzinerstr. 8, no homepage) in Mainz will see yet another Gentoo User Meeting for people in the greater Wiesbaden/Mainz/Taunusstein area, on 30 April, 19:00. The usual suspects are being invited via email, says coordinator Birnbaumtruhe, but everybody else in the region is equally welcome to join in the fun. Post your "me, too" messages to this thread in the German Gentoo forum (also contains details on how to get to the venue). Germany: Ruhrgebiet GUM 5 May The Ruhr region is slowly moving towards a regular monthly schedule for the meetings of its Gentoo User Group. After the last meeting on 7 April, the next one is already set for Wednesday, 5 May. Details are pretty much as usual: Gasthof Harlos, 19:00 hours, coordination thread at the forums. The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 10 April 2004 and 16 April 2004, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 5615 currently open bugs: 122 are labeled 'blocker', 187 are labeled 'critical', and 455 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:
Tips and Tricks is on hiatus this week. The following developers recently left the Gentoo team:
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo Linux team:
The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo Linux project:
Interested in contributing to the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter? Send us an email. Please send us your feedback and help make the GWN better. 11. GWN Subscription Information To subscribe to the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, send a blank email to gentoo-gwn-subscribe@gentoo.org. To unsubscribe to the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, send a blank email to gentoo-gwn-unsubscribe@gentoo.org from the email address you are subscribed under. The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter is also available in the following languages:
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