Figure 2.1: Gentoo LiveCD/DVD image asking for smartcard authentication
Shyam Mani's excellent "USB Guide" for Gentoo Linux is among the highlighted additions to the ever-growing collection of in-house documentation, which also includes a paper on configuring Fluxbox this month. Complementing the existing Gnome and KDE documentation, this new Fluxbox window manager configuration aide was written by Jonathan Smith.
Meanwhile, an announcement in the "Gentoo on Sparc" section of the Gentoo Forums points to recently added documentation for Gentoo Linux on Sun hardware. Ciaran McCreesh, Todd Sunderlin and Colin Morey have written the guides that should improve both installation and usability of Gentoo Linux on Sparcs:
2005.0 aftermath releng meeting
On Thursday 14 April the Gentoo Releng Team had a meeting to discuss the good and bad things during the 2005.0 release and find new strategies for the next release. First the good things should be named, like building a CD that works well on a lot of systems and architectures, what was caused by not rushing the release, so that we had time to fix bugs. One part of the release that first went wrong was communication, but with the security-rebuilding communication improved a lot and the different arches worked pretty well together with the Release Management. And now to the bad things: We had that big delay of the release with more than six weeks after the first discussed release date. Then there were some md5sums which were not up to date with the LiveCDs, the announcement of the Release through our PR-team has not been covered well, the Handbook has now several updates which are not in the offline-version on the CD itself and finally the community didn't accepted the pre-orders by the store.
In order to resolve the issues, several strategies have been discussed. So the Release-team will make better use of the devwiki (devwiki means, that it is for developers only), where we will place our documention for the Release and create a Release-checklist, where every arch can note, which step has been passed. Every arch should build a testing LiveCD that will hit the mirrors in the experimental branch, so that users with special hardware can test new improvements and tell us about them in bug-reports. Common profiles and scripts should make the different arche's LiveCDs more similary, so that users can find the same utilities on every kind of LiveCD. And finally we want to do a better PR-work for the next release.
As a last point the next release date has been discussed. We don't want to force it on a special date, as we want to release a LiveCD without major bugs, although the 2005.1 release should be just a refresh of the 2005.0 release with newer software and less bugs. XLiveCDs with the Installer included are in discussion, but not mandatory for the next Release. The release date will be about late July or August.
New official Gentoo IRC channels
Two new Gentoo IRC channels were recently added to the Gentoo IRC channel list:
Luminocity X-LiveDVD for PPC released
Note: It started harmlessly as a development project for automatic X configuration by the Gentoo/PPC team. All they wanted back then was to showcase the new configurator in a couple of X-enabled LiveCDs. But what Pieter Van den Abeele did release last week went more than just slightly beyond the initial scope of the project... |
A Gentoo-based PowerPC Altivec-Optimized LiveDVD with a long feature list has been released last week. It runs on Genesi's PegasosPPC Open Desktop Workstations, and its most unique feature is probably Luminocity, an OpenGL-based experimental window manager technology testbed. The medium allows you to try out Luminocity without having to compile or install any experimental software from the Gnome CVS repository. But the 1.8GB DVD is jock-full of other exciting features, too:
Figure 2.1: Gentoo LiveCD/DVD image asking for smartcard authentication |
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The Luminocity X-LiveDVD is available via bittorrent.
Search sucketh less
Tom Knight spent ample time improving the search function of the Forums, concerning both speed and selection criteria. Apart from getting results faster than before, the default settings of a search now exclude the entire Off The Wall section, the dustbin and all international forums, a feature that had been requested by many users, and since a long time. As an unpleasant side effect, searching for posts by specific users also excluded the same forums -- a few complaints and even fewer hours later, tomk had fixed this issue, too.
Return of the avatars
Avatars not belonging to the default gallery of the forums were recently disabled due to a vulnerability in php. While some users already feared they would never come back, the avatars were actually reinstalled after less than a day.
InternetNews.com (14 April 2005)
Last week InternetNews published an article titled "Non-Commercial Linux Use on The Rise", reporting that "new data released this week from research firm Evans Data indicates non-commercial Linux distribution use has passed the inflection point and is now more widely used by developers than commercial Linux distributions." Counting Gentoo Linux among those worth mentioning as examples for community distributions that have left RedHat and SuSE behind as preferred platforms for development, author Sean Michael Kerner quotes the research firm to explain why Gentoo et al. are more popular with developers than their commercial cousins: "As the general knowledge base of Linux has increased, developers are less reliant on formal models of support.", states the study by Evans Data.
PC Inpact (13 April 2005, in French)
A complete guide to installation and usage of a popular first-person shooter game for Linux, World of Warcraft, has been published by French "mégazine" PC Inpact in an article published last week. Interesting to note: Much of the content of the guide has been taken from the Gentoo Forums, which are credited in the article as one of its major sources.
Bootup with the Gentoo 2005.0 logo
When you boot from the 2005.0 LiveCD you see an awesome Gentoo bootlogo and progress-bar -- and you wish you could impress your friends with it during your usual bootup? Here we go:
Note: splashutils only work on x86 and amd64 architectures perfectly at the moment. Support for ppc is in progress. |
First of all, we need to emerge splashutils and splash-themes-livecd:
Code Listing 5.1: emerge splashutils and splash-themes-livecd |
# emerge splash-themes-livecd splashutils is a dependency of splash-themes-livecd |
Now we have to create an initial boot-disk. You are free to change the resolution to your choice, but choose one that is available as a config file in /etc/splash/livecd-2005.0/:
Code Listing 5.2: Creation of an initrd with the 2005.0-splash |
Be sure that /boot is mounted before you call the command # splash_geninitramfs -v -g /boot/splash-livecd-2005.0-1024x768 \ -r 1024x768 livecd-2005.0 |
Check your kernel-config to make sure that "Initial RAM disk (initrd) support" is built in. You can find the option in "Device Drivers" --> "Block devices" --> "RAM disk support". Furthermore check that you are using an appropriate framebuffer for your video-card ("Graphics Support") or stick with the VESA-framebuffer. Usually splashutils should do the checks during the emerge-progress, but we want to be sure. Now tell your bootloader that it should load the initrd with the 2005.0-splash:
Code Listing 5.3: Configure the bootloader |
# nano -w /boot/grub/menu.lst First change your kernel-boot-line to something like this (depends on your used framebuffer and further kernel-parameters): kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.11-r6 root=/dev/hda3 video=vesafb:1024x768-32@72 splash=silent,theme:livecd-2005.0 quiet CONSOLE=/dev/tty1 You must use more than 8bpp (in this example it is 32, specified by 1024x768-32@72). Add the following line to your kernel-config: initrd /boot/splash-livecd-2005.0-1024x768 |
Now we have that nice bootup-splash installed. Finally we want a permanent Gentoo statusbar at the bottom of our terminal-session, like on the LiveCD. Therefore we have to change the default theme in /etc/splash:
Code Listing 5.4: Change the default splash |
# cd /etc/splash # rm default # ln -s livecd-2005.0 default |
This splash should be started after bootup has finished:
Code Listing 5.5: Add splash to the default runlevel |
# rc-update add splash default
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If you want to finetune the splash-theme, you should have a look at /etc/conf.d/splash. Happy Gentooing!
Thanks to Michael Januszewski for his work on splashutils and Nicholas D. Wolfwood for the 2005.0-theme.
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:
phpMyAdmin: Cross-site scripting vulnerability
phpMyAdmin is vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
Axel: Vulnerability in HTTP redirection handling
A buffer overflow vulnerability has been found in Axel which could lead to the execution of arbitrary code.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
Gld: Remote execution of arbitrary code
Gld contains several serious vulnerabilities, potentially resulting in the execution of arbitrary code as the root user.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
JunkBuster: Multiple vulnerabilities
JunkBuster is vulnerable to a heap corruption vulnerability, and under certain configurations may allow an attacker to modify settings.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
rsnapshot: Local privilege escalation
rsnapshot allows a local user to take ownership of local files, resulting in privilege escalation.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
OpenOffice.Org: DOC document Heap Overflow
OpenOffice.Org is vulnerable to a heap overflow when processing DOC documents, which could lead to arbitrary code execution.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
monkeyd: Multiple vulnerabilities
Format string and Denial of Service vulnerabilities have been discovered in the monkeyd HTTP server, potentially resulting in the execution of arbitrary code.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
Several vulnerabilities were found and fixed in PHP image handling functions, potentially resulting in Denial of Service conditions or the remote execution of arbitrary code.
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 10 April 2005 and 17 April 2005, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 8583 currently open bugs: 90 are labeled 'blocker', 237 are labeled 'critical', and 641 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:
Please send us your feedback and help make the GWN better.
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