Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: May 31, 2004Beta LiveCDs and stages for PPC64 It is our pleasure to announce beta level livecds and stages for ppc64, now available on our mirrors. The hardware supported by gentoo-ppc64 includes PowerMacintosh G5, IBM pSeries, older IBM 64 bit RS/6000s (such as the model 260, 270, F80, H80, see PenguinPPC64 for a complete list) and soon IBM iSeries hardware. Gentoo-ppc64 is the other side of the ppc equation, a 64 bit kernel as well as a 64 bit user space. We are the first linux distribution to offer a 64 bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment. This is a significant and exciting step as there is interest in cluster computing circles, users of java, and more generally those who have needs of large address spaces. It's fairly exciting to be on the forefront and continue to push the capabilities of linux on ppc64 forward. The net-mail/mailwrapper package provides an extremely lightweight wrapper for /usr/sbin/sendmail that allows a user to have more than one mail transfer agent (MTA) installed simultaneously. The way that mailwrapper works is quite elegant: mailwrapper installs a small (7KB) binary as /usr/sbin/sendmail that, when executed, notes the name that it was executed as (MTAs often have several symlinks to /usr/sbin/sendmail), looks up that name in /etc/mailer.conf to find the binary that really should be executed, and then executes that binary. At the moment the exim, nullmailer, postfix, sendmail, and ssmtp MTAs automatically install mailwrapper as a dependency, and the MTA ebuild itself installs an /etc/mailer.conf file that will use the just-installed MTA by default. After numerous requests (well, complaints, actually), the mailwrapper package will become an optional dependency of the various mail transfer agents in portage that will be enabled by the mailwrapper USE flag. Also, the default location of of the mailer.conf file is going to change from /etc/mailer.conf to the more sensible /etc/mail/mailer.conf. These two changes, taken together, mean that upgrading exim, nullmailer, postfix, sendmail, or ssmtp will not be entirely clean. If you decide to keep mailwrapper by adding "mailwrapper" to your USE flags, then the upgrade will install a new mailer.conf file in /etc/mail that will be used by an upgraded mailwrapper package. Thus, any customizations that you had in the old /etc/mailer.conf file will now be ignored until you add them to the new /etc/mail/mailer.conf file. Once that's done you can remove the now-useless /etc/mailer.conf file. On the other hand, if you decide that you don't want mailwrapper, and thus you have *not* added "mailwrapper" to your USE flags, then when you upgrade your MTA the MTA package will install its own /usr/sbin/sendmail executable, thereby breaking the mailwrapper package if it had been installed. Since you neither need nor want it, just "emerge -C mailwrapper" to remove the now-broken package. Gentoo/BSD seeking interested developers Gentoo/BSD isn't dead - but development has been rather slow lately, so we're looking for people interested in helping out. For those of you who don't know, Gentoo/BSD, still in its infancy, is an effort to provide a fully capable BSD operating system with Gentoo design sensibilities with the ultimate goal of allowing users to choose any combination of Linux or *BSD kernels, *BSD or GNU libc, and *BSD or GNU userland tools. For more information, see the Gentoo/BSD project page. If you're interested in helping out, join the gentoo-bsd@gentoo.org mailing list and send us an email to let us know you're interested. Opera telnet URI handler file creation/truncation vulnerability A vulnerability exists in Opera's telnet URI handler that may allow a remote attacker to overwrite arbitrary files. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Insecure Temporary File Creation In MySQL Two MySQL utilities create temporary files with hardcoded paths, allowing an attacker to use a symlink to trick MySQL into overwriting important data. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Midnight Commander: Multiple vulnerabilities Multiple security issues have been discovered in Midnight Commander including several buffer overflows and string format vulnerabilities. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Apache 1.3: Multiple vulnerabilities Several security vulnerabilites have been fixed in the latest release of Apache 1.3. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Heimdal: Kerberos 4 buffer overflow in kadmin A possible buffer overflow in the Kerberos 4 component of Heimdal has been discovered. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement MPlayer, xine-lib: vulnerabilities in RTSP stream handling Multiple vulnerabilities, including remotely exploitable buffer overflows, have been found in code common to MPlayer and the xine library. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Germany: Local Ebuild Overlay Christian Hartmann announced an addition to the German gentoo.de infrastructure, an automated Portage overlay chock-full of German ebuilds,mostly containing localised versions of mainstream packages such as Openoffice and TeX. The entire tree can be loaded to a local overlay by simply adding a host entry to the gensync routine. A thorough explanation of the process is documented at the gentoo.de website (in German). France: Demonstration Against Software Patents Gentooists in France went and participated in a Parisian demonstration on 29 May, protesting the recent decisions on software patenting in general and the French legislation in particular. Unrest about the LEN (link in French), a new law on "Trust in the digital economy" that keeps web hosting providers and the open source developer community in France extremely unhappy, brought about a thousand demonstrators to the streets on a lovely Pentecoste Saturday. Here are photos of Gentooists who went along, from Place Colonel Fabien via Canal St. Martin all the way to the Bastille, symbol of the French revolution:
The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 21 May 2004 and 27 May 2004, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 6224 currently open bugs: 134 are labeled 'blocker', 192 are labeled 'critical', and 503 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:
Implementing a command line thesaurus Many people make use of dict to lookup word definitions. (If this is new to you, try dict word). Sometimes what we need instead of a dictionary is a thesaurus. This week's tip demonstrates a script to do just that.
To use this script, name it thes, make it executable, and make sure that it's in your $PATH. Then, run the script followed by the word you're interested in.
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:
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