Figure 1.1: Left: Lars Weiler (Gentoo), right: Cedric Milesi (HP Grenoble), center: Proliant DL 585 and 16 cluster nodes below
First Installation of Gentoo Linux on a Quadruple Opteron
There are offers simply impossible to turn down. When Gentoo developer Lars Weiler (Pylon) was approached to try an installation on the finest machine displayed at the Hewlett-Packard booth during the German LinuxTag, the HP staff really didn't have to ask him twice. A Proliant DL 585 featuring four 2.2 GHz AMD64 CPUs with 1 MB of L2 Cache each and a total of 16 GB of RAM was sitting at the HP stand, and the RedHat environment already installed served as the base of a chroot installation of Gentoo Linux - the first installation ever on this type of machine, and the first time anyone got a 2.6 kernel to run on it. In spite of the warnings in the hardware manual, Pylon managed to install a 2.6.7 kernel, bootstrapped a stage1 install in 25 minutes and was done with a complete stage3 installation after another 45 minutes. The HP staff was so pleased with the fact that they had Gentoo running on their quadruple Opteron beast, they took over and set up the management software for 16 other Opteron cluster machines in the same rack, fiddled a little with Povray rendering, and merrily ran Gentoo Linux for the remaining two days of the LinuxTag.
Figure 1.1: Left: Lars Weiler (Gentoo), right: Cedric Milesi (HP Grenoble), center: Proliant DL 585 and 16 cluster nodes below |
|
Figure 1.2: 6 minutes to compile Qt... |
 |
Gentoo Present at the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe
With more than 20,000 visitors the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe is by far the most important Linux and Open Source show in Europe, and the statistics at the Gentoo booth matched the record figures of the event as a whole.During the four days of the event, 15 developers and other Gentoo activists shared in manning the booth. On top of the obligatory x86 PCs, six architectures running Gentoo Linux were on display this year, including an SGI Indy, an Xbox, several Macintosh laptops, an HP PA/RISC machine, a DEC Alpha and a Sparc Ultra 10. It was also the first occasion to register as a member of the Gentoo e.V., the German not-for-profit association set up a few weeks ago.
Figure 1.3: Not just a football team: German, Swiss and Austrian Gentooistas in front of their LinuxTag booth |
 |
Left to right: cybersystem, dakjo, darktemplaaa, Pylon, ian!, wschlich, zypher, amne (kneeling), beejay, dertobi123, stkn, tantive, dj-submerge
Infrastructure
The Infrastructure project team reports that they have received two new servers from the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. These are dual Xeon machines with 1 GB of RAM each, which will provide new homes for the forums as well as bugzilla and packages.gentoo.org. The infrastructure team is also working on developing and deploying some new survey software which will help gather better information about Gentoo users, how they use the distro, and what they would like to see. There has been a new server added to the rsync.gentoo.org rotation.
Security
The Security team was pleased to report that they have set records for the number of GLSAs released for each of the last three months, and seem well on the way to setting another one this month. This is a strong indication that the processes for identifying, documenting and fixing security bugs are in place and working well. Thierry Carrez, Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen and KrispyKringle were specifically identified as having done "yeoman's duty in keeping our security bugs under control".
Releng
The Release Engineering project informed us that Chris Gianelloni will be serving as the the Release QA manager, and that Roger Miliker has joined the team. Testing for the 2004.2 release is well underway, and test releases of the new LiveCDs are available on the Gentoo mirrors under the path /experimental/x86/livecd. Bugs on the test releases, as always, should be reported at bugs.gentoo.org. The catalyst tool for building LiveCDs has been updated significantly, including better support for distcc and the option of using an overlay for the portage snapshot. New versions should appear in portage soon.
Apache 1.3: Buffer overflow in mod_proxy
A bug in mod_proxy may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code when Apache is configured a certain way.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
IPsec-Tools: authentication bug in racoon
racoon provided as part of IPsec-Tools fails do proper authentication.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
gzip: Insecure creation of temporary files
gzip contain a bug potentially allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary commands.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
giFT-FastTrack: remote denial of service attack
There is a vulnerability where a carefully crafted signal sent to the giFT-FastTrack plugin will cause the giFT daemon to crash.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
FreeS/WAN, Openswan, strongSwan: Vulnerabilities in certificate handling
FreeS/WAN, Openswan, strongSwan and Super-FreeS/WAN contain two bugs when authenticating PKCS#7 certificates. This could allow an attacker to authenticate with a fake certificate.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
4. Featured Developer of the Week
Marius Mauch
Our featured developer for this week is Marius Mauch (genone), a member of the portage developers group. He is not tied to any specific sub-project, but works as needed on areas ranging from portage and its associated tools through developer and user support, bugzilla maintenance and ebuild maintenance in app-portage and others such as sylpheed-claws and gambas.
Marius has been using Linux since Suse 6.1 in 1998, although he was introduced to it somewhat earlier when a friend lent him a boot disk to repair a failed Windows install. He remained a Suse user through version 7.1 and tried Red Hat 7.3 and 8.0 - the latter he describes as "one big bug". A few Slashdot postings about Gentoo encouraged him to try it under VMWare in the Summer of 2002. That fall, he installed Gentoo on one of his desktops. Marius promptly began tweaking portage on his new system. After he contributed a number of patches to portage and several new ebuilds, he was invited to join the Gentoo team as a developer last September. When asked to identify work he had been particularly pleased with, he mentioned the modifications to the GLSA framework outlined in GLSA 14, an update to portage to permit security upgrades to be identified and emerged.
Marius uses a fairly prosaic Athon-XP 2600+ desktop, as well as a P2 266 that has been converted for use as a router/server and an aging P3 Celeron 1133 Laptop. He is currently using XFCE4 on the Desktop and Gnome on the Laptop, but isn't particularly partisan about any WM. In addition to Sylpheed-Claws, he usually starts gaim, xchat, firefox and xmms or motv shortly after booting a machine.
Marius lives in Germany, where he is studying Computer Science at the University of Bremen. He enjoys role-playing (although he has little opportunity to do so at the moment) as well as biking and watching Football. He is particularly pleased that Werder Bremen won the double this year. He confesses to having recently renewed a video-game addiction for which he is not seeking treatment. He is a Babylon 5 fan, offering a line from the character G'Kar as a favorite: "No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand." Marius concluded by saying that "Gentoo is like a Vorlon: mysterious but very powerful."
GNUstep Guerilla
GNUstep, the notoriously underestimated project, is not just the umptienth funny way of managing your desktop. What's more interesting is the development environment it provides for compiling Mac OS X (Cocoa) applications for use on an x86 Linux platform. To reflect the progress that GNUstep has made over the past few months, Forum user fafhrd seems to have found his calling: Unconvinced by the current state of the GNUstep ebuilds in Portage, he decided to write some of his own, ended up posting a dozen new bugs and getting feedback from a number of people adventurous enough to try them out:
Yahoo Changes Affect Gentoo Users
Earlier this week, Yahoo changed the protocol used in their Instant Messaging client. Two popular message clients, Kopete and GAIM, were both affected.
Installing Gentoo from Knoppix?
The Alternative Gentoo Installation guide provides instructions on installing Gentoo from a Knoppix CD. However, one list member was having some troubles. Check out this thread to read up on som extra tips!
Italy: MOCA Hacker Camp in Pescara, 20-22 August 2004
Italian geeks have known Metro Olografix as an organisation of mailbox admins and bulletin board system hackers from the Fido realm who got together ten years ago in an effort to fight against police intervention in running their BBSs. To commemorate the anniversay, the Metro Olografix Camp (MOCA) will be organised during the third weekend in August, in the city of Pescara. The MOCA is a hacker camp designed after the famous Chaos Computer Club summer camps in Germany, with workshops and friendliness and sports for nerds. Gentoo developer Luca Barbato currently drumming up a posse to join him at the camp knows what he's talking about - he's already been to the CCC camps... You don't want to miss this, the MOCA site is set in one of the most spectacular landscapes of Italy, underneath the Abruzzian hills and right on the Adriatic waterfront. If you haven't planned your summer holiday yet, here's the perfect place. Check the Italian forum thread for details.
Central Europe: Gentoo User Map Revisited
About a year ago, German Gentoo developers came up with the idea of representing users as little red dots on a map of the country. Unfortunately, the old site disappeared along with the entries of everybody who had already entered their location data. Now the interactive map of the geographical Gentoo user distribution in and around Germany has been brought back, stable and easily usable, and on a server that's unlikely to disappear any time soon. If you're a Gentoo user within the area covered on this map (which is much larger than Germany, including all of the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland, together with most of Belgium, Poland, and Slovakia, and parts of Italy and France), make yourself visible here. Even if you don't know a word of German, the instructions should be fairly easy to follow: Just enter your coordinates, name and email address.
Finding recent files with ls and 'FlAt'
A quick way to find recently changed files is to pass the -FlAt flags to ls. Combined with head, this command can give you a quick overview of recently modified files in a directory. The -F option distinguishes certain types of files and directories by adding extra characters (such as '/' for directories, '*' for executables, etc.). The -t option sorts the entries by the date they were last modified. Piping the output to head shows (by default) only 10 entries.
Code Listing 7.1 |
# ls -FlAt | head |
For more information, see man ls.
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: