Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: March 21st, 2005Additions to the documentation collection Sven Vermeulen, Forum moderator Ioannis Aslanidis and reviewer Hartwig Brandl have collated a guide on how to interpret the error codes of the GRUB bootloader, based on an impressive 16-page-thread in the Gentoo Forums. Other recent additions to the Gentoo documentation include:
Many other parts of the documentation have been revised and enhanced over the past few weeks, check for changes in the Documentation Project's status updates of additions and changes to the growing resource. Acrobat Reader 7 for Linux released? Among the usual whoopies and yeehas that greet the arrival of software everybody has been eagerly waiting for, the new release of acroread has its difficulties. The thread provides a workaround for using the plugin in Firefox, but doesn't have an answer to the lack of Asian fonts. Yet... Turned out this seems to have been a preliminary release only after all. Reasons for Gentoo/FreeBSD Curious about what Portage can offer compared to FreeBSD's native ports system, Gentoo Linux user and GWN translator Matthias F. Brandstetter asked on the gentoo-bsd mailing list: "What's the purpose of Gentoo/FreeBSD, or what should it be?" Gentoo developer Grant Goodyear pointed out that he prefers the simple bash syntax of ebuilds over FreeBSD's (ab)use of make. Other answers pointed to USE flags and Portage's handling of config files:
Summary of PPC meeting Lars Weiler summarizes the last PPC team meeting, where many things were discussed:
Xen in portage? Mike Frysinger asks if any developers are interested in getting the Xen virtualization system into the Portage tree. giflib and ungiflib hell Chris White starts a discussion on the libgif / libungif packages since they provide similar features, but libungif is deprecated. This resolved to the removal of libungif from portage. Japan: Open Source Conference 2005 Looking for an impromptu vacation spot to spend the Easter weekend? Tokyo is particularly nice at this time of the year, and it has the annual Open Source Conference on Friday 25 and Saturday 26 March 2005. Presentation tracks will be focussing on fonts and Japanese input methods this year, Ruby and XOOPS, a database seminar and an Openoffice.org corner are among the other highlights of this event which also includes an exhibition space for Japanese open-source projects, to be held at the Japan Electronics College in Okubo, a north-western district of Tokyo. GentooJP will be present on Saturday morning from 10:00 to 12:50 with a "Gentoo Linux Installfest", a live demonstration of the 2005.0 release being installed on virgin hardware, which obviously beats cherry-blossom viewing in public appeal -- partly because on that latitude they're not quite in full bloom by then, you'd have to fly down south to Kyushu for that... Seating at the Installfest is limited to 40 people, please register for the Gentoo installation event if you plan on attending (all links in Japanese only).
Netcraft Ltd., a well-known Internet services company that, among other things, provides research data and analysis on many aspects of the Internet, recently analyzed the growth of Linux distributions in their web server survey. According to the results, Gentoo Linux "continues to roughly double each year, albeit from a low base". In the past six months the number of websites that run on Gentoo Linux has increased by 45.1 percent, to a total of 63,160. Tom Chance's account of a Gentoo Linux installation has been published on the Newsforge website. He describes the way Gentoo works, not just in technical terms, but also what's most appealing to him as a Gentoo user: "I appreciate the simple, solid package and configuration management systems that keep out of my way; I appreciate the helpful documentation; I find the user forums indispensable; and I appreciate the community approach enshrined in Gentoo's social contract." 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:
Ringtone Tools: Buffer overflow vulnerability The Ringtone Tools utilities contain a buffer overflow vulnerability, potentially leading to the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement MySQL: Multiple vulnerabilities MySQL contains several vulnerabilities potentially leading to the overwriting of local files or to the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement curl: NTLM response buffer overflow curl is vulnerable to a buffer overflow which could lead to the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Grip contains a buffer overflow that can be triggered by a large CDDB response, potentially allowing the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement KDE is vulnerable to a local Denial of Service attack. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement rxvt-unicode is vulnerable to a buffer overflow that could lead to the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement LTris is vulnerable to a buffer overflow which could lead to the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement OpenSLP: Multiple buffer overflows Multiple buffer overflows have been found in OpenSLP, which could lead to the remote execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Sylpheed, Sylpheed-claws: Message reply overflow Sylpheed and Sylpheed-claws contain a vulnerability that can be triggered when replying to specially crafted messages. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 13 March 2005 and 20 March 2005, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 8324 currently open bugs: 93 are labeled 'blocker', 233 are labeled 'critical', and 604 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:
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