Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: June 14, 2004

Yuji Carlos Kosugi  Editor
AJ Armstrong  Contributor
Brian Downey  Contributor
Kurt Lieber  Contributor
David Narayan  Contributor
Ulrich Plate  Contributor
Sven Vermeulen  Contributor
Simon Holm Thagersen  Danish Translation
Jesper Brodersen  Danish Translation
Arne Mejlholm  Danish Translation
Hendrik Eeckhaut  Dutch Translation
Jorn Eilander  Dutch Translation
Bernard Kerckenaere  Dutch Translation
Peter ter Borg  Dutch Translation
Jochen Maes  Dutch Translation
Roderick Goessen  Dutch Translation
Gerard van den Berg  Dutch Translation
Matthieu Montaudouin  French Translation
Xavier Neys  French Translation
Martin Prieto  French Translation
Antoine Raillon  French Translation
Sebastien Cevey  French Translation
Jean-Christophe Choisy  French Translation
Thomas Raschbacher German Translation
Steffen Lassahn German Translation
Matthias F. Brandstetter German Translation
Lukas Domagala German Translation
Tobias Scherbaum German Translation
Daniel Gerholdt German Translation
Marc Herren German Translation
Tobias Matzat German Translation
Marco Mascherpa  Italian Translation
Claudio Merloni  Italian Translation
Stefano Lucidi  Italian Translation
Katuyuki Konno  Japanese Translation
Hiroyuki Takeda  Japanese Translation
Masato Hatakeyama  Japanese Translation
Masayoshi Nakamura  Japanese Translation
Yasunori Fukudome  Japanese Translation
Tomoyuki Sakurai  Japanese Translation
Lukasz Strzygowski  Polish Translation
Karol Goralski  Polish Translation
Atila "Jedi" Bohlke Vasconcelos  Portuguese (Brazil) Translation
Eduardo Belloti  Portuguese (Brazil) Translation
João Rafael Moraes Nicola  Portuguese (Brazil) Translation
Marcelo Gonçalves de Azambuja  Portuguese (Brazil) Translation
Otavio Rodolfo Piske  Portuguese (Brazil) Translation
Pablo N. Hess -- NatuNobilis  Portuguese (Brazil) Translation
Pedro de Medeiros  Portuguese (Brazil) Translation
Ventura Barbeiro  Portuguese (Brazil) Translation
Bruno Ferreira  Portuguese (Portugal) Translation
Gustavo Felisberto  Portuguese (Portugal) Translation
José Costa  Portuguese (Portugal) Translation
Luis Medina  Portuguese (Portugal) Translation
Ricardo Loureiro  Portuguese (Portugal) Translation
Aleksandr Martyncev  Russian Translator
Sergey Galkin  Russian Translator
Sergey Kuleshov  Russian Translator
Alex Spirin  Russian Translator
Denis Zaletov  Russian Translator
Lanark  Spanish Translation
Fernando J. Pereda  Spanish Translation
Lluis Peinado Cifuentes  Spanish Translation
Zephryn Xirdal T  Spanish Translation
Guillermo Juarez  Spanish Translation
Jesús García Crespo  Spanish Translation
Carlos Castillo  Spanish Translation
Julio Castillo  Spanish Translation
Sergio Gómez  Spanish Translation
Aycan Irican  Turkish Translation
Bugra Cakir  Turkish Translation
Cagil Seker  Turkish Translation
Emre Kazdagli  Turkish Translation
Evrim Ulu  Turkish Translation
Gursel Kaynak  Turkish Translation

Updated 14 June 2004

1.  Gentoo News

Gentoo Not-For-Profit Paperwork complete

The paperwork for the Gentoo Not-For-Profit entity was approved by the State of New Mexico today. This means that as of today, the Gentoo Foundation is an official Not-For-Profit Corporation in the United States. The process of becoming a Federally-recognized not-for-profit entity, which will take about six months for approval, can now begin. Sven Vermeulen has been tasked with drafting a charter for the newly approved Gentoo Foundation. Assets of Gentoo Technologies, Inc. such as the gentoo.org domain, can now be transferred to the Gentoo Foundation. We're glad to see all the hard work that has been put into this process giving some positive results and would like to thank Daniel Robbins and all of the trustees for their hard work.

Ways to get involved: Introducing webapps-request@gentoo.org

Developer Stuart Herbert has created a new bugzilla user (webapps-request@gentoo.org), to which he is assigning all bugs about new packages. Some of these bugs are requests for ebuilds. Some of the bugs include ebuilds that need testing (and maybe fixing).

If you want to get involved with Gentoo, and can spare the time, this would be a great way - especially if you know any of the packages involved. This will free up some time for the developers to concentrate on real bugs reported against packages already in Portage.

If you want to be notified when new bugs are added to the webapps-request list, you can setup a watch in your Bugzilla account. Simply go to this page and in the "Users to watch:" box, type in 'webapps-request@gentoo.org'.

2.  Gentoo Security

Mailman: Member password disclosure vulnerability

Mailman contains a bug allowing 3rd parties to retrieve member passwords.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

Apache: Buffer overflow in mod_ssl

A bug in mod_ssl may allow a remote attacker to execute remote code when Apache is configured a certain way.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

CVS: additional DoS and arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities

Several serious new vulnerabilities have been found in CVS, which may allow an attacker to remotely compromise a CVS server.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

Subversion: Remote heap overflow

Subversion is vulnerable to a remote Denial of Service that may be exploitable to execute arbitrary code on the server running svnserve.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

3.  Heard in the Community

Web Forums

Linux Memory Management

A concise and very useful tutorial about memory management in Linux has made its way into the Documentation, Tips & Tricks section, paying special attention to things peculiar in 2.6 kernels:

gentoo-user

Deadlocking Kernels

A vulnerability that apparently affects all x86 2.4 and 2.6 series kernels was shared on gentoo-user here with exploit code in tow.

The GWN and RSS

This thread covered reading the GWN via an RSS feed, as well as preferred applications to do so.

4.  Gentoo International

Germany: LPI 101 Certification in German at the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe

The German branch of the Linux Professional Institute has announced that they will offer certification in German for the first time at the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe this year. For 30 Euros, visitors to the fair (and some of the German devs at the Gentoo booth are known to go as well) can sit for the LPI 101 in German or English, or the LPI 201 in English only, on 24 to 26 June 2004. Details here..

5.  Bugzilla

Summary

Statistics

The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 04 June 2004 and 10 June 2004, activity on the site has resulted in:

Of the 6461 currently open bugs: 131 are labeled 'blocker', 189 are labeled 'critical', and 524 are labeled 'major'.

Closed Bug Rankings

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

New Bug Rankings

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

6.  Tips and Tricks

Protecting files with noclobber

This tip is for people who have ever hosed important files by using > when they meant to use >>. Add the following line to .bashrc: set -o noclobber. The noclobber option prevents you from overwriting existing files with the > operator.

Code Listing 6.1

% program > file2
bash: file2: cannot overwrite existing file

In some cases you may really want to overwrite the file. In this case, instead of turning noclobber off, you can use >| to force the file to be written.

Code Listing 6.2

% program >| file2 

7.  Moves, Adds, and Changes

Moves

The following developers recently left the Gentoo team:

Adds

The following developers recently joined the Gentoo Linux team:

Changes

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

8.  Contribute to GWN

Interested in contributing to the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter? Send us an email.

9.  GWN Feedback

Please send us your feedback and help make the GWN better.

10.  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.

11.  Other Languages

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter is also available in the following languages: