Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 13 March 2006Gentoo store: 2006.0 release media available Official 2006.0 CD releases have hit the Gentoo store this week! Five USD from every CD sale goes to the Gentoo Foundation, presenting a clever way to financially support the development of Gentoo Linux through purchasing the release media directly from the project. It's increasingly difficult to keep track of the multitude of international activities in and around the Gentoo project. Developers, power users and enthusiasts around the globe organize Gentoo-related events, hold classes at their universities, and man Gentoo booths at trade fairs and conferences. To keep up with what's going on internationally, the GWN team is actively looking for Gentoo user groups, associations, clubs or study circles that represent users or developers in their own town or country. If you're running a Gentoo-related website, a forum, a monthly user meeting or other events, please submit a short description of your activities and your contact details to our feedback address so we can start setting up a Gentoo community directory. Thanks a lot in advance! glibc 2.4 glibc 2.4 officially hit the Portage tree. Forum users were surprised to see that it got straight into ~arch instead of being hard masked first. However, they did quite a lot of tests, like rebuilding the toolchain and all seemed to go well. Some of them even tried it with GCC 4.1 and experienced no problems. Nevertheless, they did find some minor issues when building nptl-only applications: Gentoo-based Xgl LiveCD Forum veteran taskara just released a custom Gentoo LiveCD that provides Xgl support. Users who tried it are rather pleased with that kind of 3D hardware support on a LiveCD. Links and torrents are inside the thread, and of course you can discuss it right there: India: Open-source event in Calicut this weekend Gentoo developer Shyam Mani will give an introductory talk about Gentoo during the FOSS.NITC event at the National Institute of Technology in Calicut (Kerela) on 18 and 19 March. Together with fellow Gentoo enthusiast Ashish V, he plans to hold a Gentoo BoF (Birds of a Feather) session as well sometime during the event. Check the event schedule for details. Germany: Gentoo user meeting in Leipzig On Friday, 17 March 2006, a group of Gentooists from the Leipzig and Halle area in Saxony will meet for an evening at the Stuk (Studentenkeller). This first Leipzig GUM will start at 19:00, and if you're interested in attending, please tell the organizers via their Forum thread. As in 2005, the Linuxtage in Chemnitz (4 and 5 March 2006) were not only visited by Gentoo developers, but you could also visit them at their booth for a little chat. You could see an SGI Octane constantly compile stuff, but at the end of the second day, finally xorg was running. Of course devotional objects such as stickers or a DVD with the 2006.0 release plus some extra goodies like stage archives and a lot of source packages could be purchased at the stand. Tobias Scherbaum also gave a speech about Gentoo.
Linux Magazin (4/2006, in German) The April edition of Germany's Linux Magazin dedicates its cover story and half a dozen in-depth articles inside the printed magazine to virtualization in all its forms. One article features Gentoo developer Benedikt Böhm and the vserver project for Linux, based on the vserver-sources and utilities provided in Gentoo. The magazine is available at news stands in German-speaking countries. Opensourcejahrbuch (March 2006) Last week we published a reference to an interview with Bill Hilf, Microsoft's open-source lab director speaking about Gentoo Linux and Daniel Robbins, among other things. Now the English version of that article is available, along with the announcement of the 2006 edition of the Open-Source Jahrbuch that can be downloaded for free, or purchased in print for a moderate fee. With the English edition of the Opensourcejahrbuch not entirely translated yet, a Wiki for contributed translations of individual articles has been set up. Iproute2 instead of ifconfig/route For many, ifconfig and route are still the preferred commands for configuring a network through the command line. However, in modern network environments, ifconfig has its drawbacks. And as you would expect from a Free Software community, improved packages have been developed. iproute2 is one of them and is getting increasingly popular. The default command to work with iproute2 is ip. Clean, simple to remember and extremely powerful. But its power is well described in many documents, including the iproute2 document and the Guide to IP Layer Network Administration with Linux. In this short introduction, we'll stay with the simplest basics that most people use just to show you how easy it is to "migrate" from ifconfig (sys-apps/net-tools) to ip (sys-apps/iproute2). To configure a host to use IP address 192.168.0.102, netmask 255.255.255.0 and default gateway 192.168.0.1, the "old" commands were:
Using iproute2, this becomes:
The syntax isn't all that difficult, is it? Let's take a look at our current routing table. With route you would run route -n:
With ip, you ask it to show the routes:
You might find this output strange; however, it gives a lot of useful information. For instance, scope link means that the network is reachable while proto kernel informs us that the kernel has added this routing as part of bringing the interface up. Using ip within Gentoo isn't difficult either. The Gentoo sys-apps/baselayout package supports both formats (ifconfig and ip):
That's it for now; have fun with Gentoo ! The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:
The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo project:
IMAP Proxy: Format string vulnerabilities Format string vulnerabilities in IMAP Proxy may lead to the execution of arbitrary code when connected to malicious IMAP servers. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement zoo: Stack-based buffer overflow A stack-based buffer overflow in zoo may be exploited to execute arbitrary code through malicious ZOO archives. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement A malicious tar archive could trigger a Buffer overflow in GNU tar, potentially resulting in the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement flex: Potential insecure code generation flex might generate code with a buffer overflow, making applications using such scanners vulnerable to the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement GnuPG: Incorrect signature verification GnuPG may erroneously report a modified or unsigned message has a valid digital signature. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement SquirrelMail: Cross-site scripting and IMAP command injection SquirrelMail is vulnerable to several cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and IMAP command injection. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Cube: Multiple vulnerabilities Cube is vulnerable to a buffer overflow, invalid memory access and remote client crashes, possibly leading to a Denial of Service or remote code execution. 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 05 March 2006 and 12 March 2006, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 9683 currently open bugs: 62 are labeled 'blocker', 155 are labeled 'critical', and 539 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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