Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: June 27th, 2005Gentoo developer wins award for home entertainment system Congratulations to Gentoo developer Pieter van den Abeele who went to the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando, Florida -- and away with the "Best of Show" award for his home media entertainment center based on a hardware design prototype by Gentoo-sponsor Genesi's, the maker of the Open Desktop Workstation. Features worth highlighting include a THX-certified 7.1 audio system, a 256M ATI graphics card, SATA hard disk capacity measured in terabytes, full-screen video conferencing support with Altivec optimized audio codecs, a dual TV tuner, Vacuum Fluorescent Display for system messages, fast DVD writer, smartcard support to protect recordings, for authentication and encryption, and infrared support so you can run your media center from a remote control just like any old VCR. More details about the show, including video and audio streams can be found at Pieter's blogsite.
Gentoo at the German LinuxTag 2005 in Karlsruhe "Linux everywhere", the motto of this year's LinuxTag, held particularly true again for the Gentoo team when PPC developer Lars Weiler was once again invited to install Gentoo Linux on a machine at the close-by HP booth in the same exhibition hall. After a Quad-Opteron installation, Pylon this year bootstrapped Gentoo Linux on a sleek Dual Intel Itanium 2 server, featuring 1.6GHz processors, 4GB RAM and two 73GB Ultra320-SCSI disks, of which 36GB were set aside for the Gentoo installation. The machine had a gigabit network card, but no graphics or input devices: serial console and later ssh were the only ways in. From a chroot environment in an installed SuSE Linux, a flawless stage1 installation was done, including a 2.6.12 kernel that -- interestingly enough -- needed almost no variation from the default config settings. Trying for an ia64 install CD and a catalyst demonstration, fiddling around with the elilo bootloader and some interesting observations kept Lars busy and happy for a day.
While the total number of visitors to the LinuxTag was somewhat diminished by the introduction of an entrance fee to be paid by all visitors, the Gentoo booth was as popular as ever. Portability was indeed the main focus of this year's Gentoo presence, with PPC, MIPS and x86 architectures on display at the Gentoo stand, and another HPPA host in the same hall at the Linux Portability stand - a 66MHz HP 735 running KDE 3.3.2... 60 T-Shirts were sold, 15 developers and helpers from Germany took care of visitors at the Gentoo booth, backed up by Robin Johnson visiting from Canada.
After the show, the unofficial localized Gentoo XLiveCD that has become sort of a traditional treat for visitors at IT fairs with a Gentoo representation manned by the German NFP "Friends of Gentoo e.V." has been made available. Everyone who couldn't buy one of the 120 CDs that went over the table at the booth in Karlsruhe can now download the image from the Fizzlewizzle server or via Bittorrent. x86 is uploaded, the PPC version will follow in a bit.
Developer accounts on donated AMD64 machine now available Several new development systems are being brought online this week! Named pitr, dustpuppy and poseidon,the bulk of the hardware was generously donated by AMD last month. Other donations from various developers and the Gentoo Foundation have facilitated the purchase of parts essential to setting up the boxes, including power supplies and hard disks. Specifications for the three new machines are:
Two of the systems will be deployed for Gentoo/AMD64 testing/development activities, while the third is destined to become a dedicated release engineering platform. Their deployment is neatly timed to coincide with the release cycle for Gentoo 2005.1 - where their significant processing power will contribute towards the construction of stages, hopefully dramatically reducing catalyst build times! Splitting one source package into many binaries Since most other Linux distros have split packages for binaries and headers, why isn't this done in Gentoo? Where does it help and what problems does it cause? Read on to find out Glibc, non-glibc and external libs As Gentoo/BSD is maturing some problems with the handling of the different libcs become more pronounced. How does one handle the extra libraries needed on BSD systems to get all glibc function? Bring a tent, enough beverages and food to last for two days, and join the happy Gentoo campers at the first German Gentoo summer camp. From 13 to 14 August 2005, German and other European Gentooists are meeting on a campsite in Wissen, close to Siegen and Koblenz in the Westerwald forest region. Bring a laptop if you like, too, but the camp is mainly targeting real life interaction: just for fun, for getting to know each other and spending a nice weekend a la campagne. Computing -- if at all -- is going to be limited to whatever is stored on the campers' disks, as there will be no internet connectivity. Prices are very moderate at 5 EUR per night, please register at organiser Slick's website (link in German). Sumo Computer, known for their Gentoo-driven Kuro-Box, has now taken an Asus Pundit-R Booksize Barebones system and added a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 Prescott processor, a GB of memory, 400 GB worth of SATA disk space and a DVD/CD-RW drive -- and again ships the small box with Gentoo Linux preinstalled, says the press release posted on eMediaWire. 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:
cpio: Directory traversal vulnerability cpio contains a flaw which may allow a specially crafted cpio archive to extract files to an arbitrary directory. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement SpamAssassin 3, Vipul's Razor: Denial of Service vulnerability SpamAssassin and Vipul's Razor are vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack when handling certain malformed messages. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement A flaw in Tor may allow the disclosure of arbitrary memory portions. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement SquirrelMail: Several XSS vulnerabilities Squirrelmail is vulnerable to several cross-site scripting vulnerabilities which could lead to a compromise of webmail accounts. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Cacti: Several vulnerabilities Cacti is vulnerable to several SQL injection and file inclusion vulnerabilities. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Trac: File upload vulnerability Trac may allow remote attackers to upload files, possibly leading to the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement sudo: Arbitrary command execution A vulnerability in sudo may allow local users to elevate privileges. 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 19 June 2005 and 26 June 2005, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 8396 currently open bugs: 106 are labeled 'blocker', 208 are labeled 'critical', and 597 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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