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Archive for April, 2010

Encrypt your files quick n’ dirty

April 23rd, 2010 by

Encrypt a file can be useful when we want to keep sensitive information but do not trust the site is being stored.

GnuPG allows to quickly and easily create encrypted files without the use of public keys or complicated procedures, just run the following at a Linux terminal:

$ gpg -c test.txt _
Enter Password:
Repeat Password:
$ _

After you have run the command gpg -c, this will leave intact the original file and create another file called “test.gpg” in the same directory. This second file is the place where you want to prune without fear that information may be disclosed. You can then proceed to remove the original if needed.

To retrieve the contents of the file, perform the following process on the encrypted file:

$ gpg  test.gpg _
Enter Password:
Repeat Password:
$ _

GnuPG will automatically detect that it is an encrypted file, and request the key that first used.

Hope its useful 😉

osc 0.126

April 22nd, 2010 by

Hi,

I just submitted the new osc 0.126 release to the openSUSE:Tools
project. The new packages should be available soon at
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools

(user visible) Changes:
0.126

  • – added VM autosetup to osc. This requires appropriate OBS version and build script version.
  • – enhanced QEMU cross build support with ‘armv4l’ ‘armv5el’ ‘armv6el’ ‘armv7el’ ‘armv8el’ ‘mips’ ‘mips64’ ‘ppc’ ‘ppc64’ ‘sh4’ arch strings now supported on x86 host
  • – suggest git, svn, … if indicated, after oscerr.NoWorkingCopy
  • – “osc cat” & “osc ls” now auto-expands through link.
  • – fixed “osc add” after “osc delete”.
  • – fix “osc patchinfo” command (crashed before)
  • – fixed SSL proxy support
  • – fixed meta attribute create and set calls
  • – osc remotebuildlog supports a buildlogurl
  • – Allow –prefer-pkgs to parse repodata
  • – new “osc build –no-service” option to skip source service update
  • – fix linktobranch apiurl usage
  • – “maintained package” search is telling relevant projects now
  • * requires OBS 1.7.2 or 2.0
  • – added “osc chroot” command
  • – fixed #547005 (“osc co could show download progress”)
  • – added “–interactive” option to “osc request”
  • – store commit message so it doesn’t get lost on failure
  • – added “–cpio-bulk-download” and “–download-api-only” options to “osc build”
  • – added “osc localbuildlog” command
  • – added “–build-uid uid:gid|caller” option to “osc build” to specify abuild id in chroot
  • – verify files using rpm bindings and keys supplied by buildservice
  • – added “–exclude-target-project <prj>” option to “osc rq list”
  • – added “–message” option to “osc branch”
  • – added “osc config” command to set/get/delete a config option
  • – added “–binary” and “–baseproject” options to “osc search”
  • – added “-o/–offline” and “-l/–preload” options to osc build
  • – osc build -l standard i586 foo.spec (to cache all dependencies)
  • – osc build -o standard i586 foo.spec (to build without contacting the api)

Thanks to everyone who contributed to osc!

Novell Client on openSUSE 11.2

April 20th, 2010 by

This has been covered on a couple of forums out there, but I’ve yet to find a decent comprehensive post. This is for 32bit systems, it’s easily modified for 64bit setups.

First off, search your favorite RPM repo for binutils-2.19-9.3. I like to use http://rpm.pbone.net, but at the time of writing, they happen to be down.

Get a copy of the Novell Client ISO from http://download.novell.com and mount it:

sudo mount -o loop novell-client-2.0-sp2-sle11-i586.iso /mnt

Extract the files from the RPM:

rpm2cpio binutils-2.19-9.3.i586.rpm | cpio -idv

This should create a “usr” directory in your present working directory. Go ahead and copy it’s contents to your filesystem:

sudo cp -R usr/* /usr/

Change directories to wherever you mounted your ISO (in this case “/mnt”) and run the installer:

cd /mnt && sudo ./ncl_install

As the packages attempt to install, you’ll be given options and warnings concerning libbfd and several other packages. Choose option “2” for everything (“Break dependencies”). Don’t worry about actually breaking anything, just roll with option 2.

Lastly, issue ldconfig as root and reboot:

sudo /sbin/ldconfig
sudo /sbin/reboot

That should get you up and running. You can run “ncl_tray” directly from the command line, or create a shortcut to the client. If you’re having connection issues, make sure that openSLP is configured.

The only issues I’ve had so far is the inability to browse trees, which turned out to be a DNS problem on my end. Occasionally I get warnings on login about novfs kernel modules not being properly loaded, but this appears to be benign.

Check your WPA2 Enterprise setup

April 20th, 2010 by

Do you have to enter user name and password to establish a link with
your wireless network? If so chances are good that WPA2 Enterprise
with EAP-TTLS or PEAP are used. Sounds familiar? Better check your
setup then. An attacker might easily impersonate your access point
and steal your password if the client you are using isn’t configured
properly.
You are likely vulnerable if you’ve disabled certificate checks
or you’ve checked some button to use a public CA but didn’t specify
any “Subject” or “Common Name” that has to match. NetworkManager for
example doesn’t even allow to enter the latter.
Read more in the paper I’ve written.

Only a few days for the FLISOL in Venezuela

April 19th, 2010 by

Venezuelan Linux community is finishing all the preparations for the April 24, the day that all Latin America celebrate the FLISOL, Latin American Festival of  Free Software Installation.

Through the sponsorship of Novell, the collaboration of ambassadors from other distributions, and GoSVe, the user group from Venezuela openSUSE, our distro will be present in all the sites of the great event of free software in the region, giving away DVD’s, LiveCD’s, stickers, t-shirts, and more.

In the city of Merida, we will be giving talks and demonstrations of our distribution and giving away all the material of that will be common in all the sites and stuffed animals for those that choose to “free” their computers and install openSUSE Linux.

Next to come: A lot of pictures 😉

FLISOL Mérida 2010

Kraft 0.40 for KDE 4 Released

April 18th, 2010 by

Kraft LogoI am very happy to announce the new stable version 0.40 of the KDE office software Kraft. After eleven month of porting work, Kraft 0.40 is the first version which is based on the KDE 4 software platform. Huge changes on the codebase of Kraft happened to benefit from the new technology of KDE 4 and after long long hours of work, we’re there 🙂

Basically the new version equals the last KDE 3 version feature wise beside some changes which aim to make Kraft even more convenient to explore for unexperienced users. We got much feedback that the setup with MySQL was to complicated for people who just want to do a quick test. So we had to do something about that. The alternative was the clever run-mysql-as-the-user method just like Akonadi does it, but still the dependency on MySQL remains with that solution. So I went for SQLite, because its seemed so easy. Well, SQLite did not convince me completely yet, but it is working for Kraft.

There is also a new setup assistant which starts automatically on first start of Kraft. It takes the database details and creates and populates the database layer automatically. It also lets the user pick his own address from the list of ddresses of the Akonadi based kaddressbook. Well, the new Akonadi based Addressbook was challenging me a bit. Some functionality which the old addressbook API offered is not yet implemented in the new one, so I had to go some extra rounds to for example get query on address UID done. I still have proper feedback for the PIM Group on my todo…

We also are happy to annouce a new project homepage available under http://www.volle-kraft-voraus.de. It is a new technology base to provide better documentation over the long term.

I am very happy to be part of the KDE family. It is great how KDE proves again and again that it makes application development so easy and fun. I am really wondering myself what I did the last eleven month 😉 Frankly I am happy to have porting finished now. I am now looking forward to our KDE Finance Group Sprint next week in Frankfurt. I guess after that I will have tons of ideas and motivations to move on feature wise.

Weekly Kernel Review with openSUSE Flavor: 15th Week

April 16th, 2010 by

Guest Blog from:  Rares Aioanei <suse.listen@gmail.com>

Hi everyone, and welcome to this week’s edition of the kernel news – OpenSUSE style! The news are as follows :
-Ryusuke Konishi pushed some trivial fixes to the NILFS2 tree (mostly fixing of typos)
-Masami Hiramatsu posted a patch regarding perf-probe. In his own words, “This series improves data structure accessing.
In this version, I added ‘removing x*()’patches.”
-Chris Mason posted some improvements in the btrfs-unstable tree, among others fixing an oops and other impovements.
-Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.34-rc4 kernel : “It’s been two weeks rather than the usual one, because we’ve been hunting
a really annoying VM regression that not a lot of people seem to have
seen, but I didn’t want to release an -rc4 with it. So we had the choice
of either reverting all the anon-vma scalability improvements, or finding
out exactly what caused the regression and fixing it.”
This rc also contains various bugfixes and changes regarding drivers – a new network driver (cxbg4) and updates to radeon and nouveau.
Kerneltrap : http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/2.6.34-rc4_Hunting_A_Really_Annoying_VM_Regression
H-Online : http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-2-6-34-Part-1-Network-Support-975937.html
and lwn.net : http://lwn.net/Articles/383199/rss
-Also, Luis R. Rodriguez announced an updated wireless tree in regard of the release of 2.6.34-rc4 (backported).
See it here : http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6-stable/v2.6.34/compat-wireless-2.6.34-rc4.tar.bz2
-David Miller posted various fixes in the networking- and sparc trees.
-Michal Simek wrote to celebrate one year of Linux on the Microblaze (Tuesday, the 13th of April 2010)
-And some news from the opensuse-kernel team :
Jiri Kosina noticed that commit 5246824c7ea3313c8e4f42f9b19d9e6f0b51861a introduced CONFIG_DEBUG_BLOCK_EXT_DEVT as set on master kernels
(non-{debug,trace} kernels). The problem has been solved and now this option is disabled on master kernels.
This has a related fix upstream introduced by Rafael J. Wysocki.
-Steven Rostedt announced the release of trace-cmd version 1.0
-Trond Myklebust announced fixes for the nfs tree.
-Jean Delvare posted fixes for the hwmon (hardware monitoring) tree for the upcoming 2.6.34 kernel
-Ingo Molnar posted fixes for the perf tree including build fixes on Debian and others.
-Douglas Gilbert announced sdparm 1.05 as of 15.04.
-Stephen Rothwell announced that Thursday’s linux-next (next-20100415) will be the last until the 27th of April, when he’ll return from his vacation.
-Dmitry Torokhov posted updates for the input tree for -rc4.
-Also Thomas Gleixner mailed some updates for x86-fixes.
-Fixes to the Firewire tree, along with documentation updates, were pushed by Stefan Richter.
-John W. Linville posted a pull request for the wireless tree intended for
2.6.34 .
-Also, patches of mmotm have been released against 2.6.34-rc4 .
-Guilt v0.33 is available as of 16.04.2010 .
-Patches for bkl/ioctl, sound (for -rc5), watchdog have been released .

That’s it for this week, see ya!

oSC09 videos

April 16th, 2010 by

Well it’s been almost seven months since our inaugural conference, and there were a load of videos taken. The problem was that our usual VT gurus have been unavailable to do any of the editing etc. So the raw video has languished on the servers waiting for some kind soul to help edit them.

After multiple calls for help and nudges from the marketing team, I decided to see if I could slot it in anywhere (yay me, I’m such a hero :-P) Thankfully I had some brilliant help from SankarP who refreshed my memory on how to edit video, thanks chief!

Currently only Day 1 of the conference is available, you can view online (flash) or download (ogg) the talks from the openSUSE TV channel on BlipTV. I am working on getting a channel on YouTube to enable a wider reach, as some people have bandwidth issues with Blip. You can also subscribe to the feeds in multiple formats – rss, miro, itunes.

If anyone has any openSUSE related video that they would like put on the channel, then please let me know 🙂

Conference in FLISOL Nicaragua 2010

April 13th, 2010 by

The folks of the openSUSE Community in Nicaragua, are preparing a great event in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, in Central America.

Now we have a schedule for that special day:

Sede Hora Tema Ponente
Granada 09:00 am – 09:40 am Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with gnome, basic Aplicacions Denis Torres
Granada 09:50 am – 10:30 am Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with KDE, basic Aplicacionss Adolfo Fitoria
Granada 10:40 am – 11:20 am Openoffice.org Carlos Leal
Granada 11:30 am – 12:10 pm Multimedia Aplication Jose Angel Bonilla
Granada 01:00 pm – 01:40 am Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with gnome, basic Aplicacions Denis Torres
Granada 01:50 am – 02:30 am Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with KDE, basic Aplicacions Adolfo Fitoria
Granada 02:40 pm – 03:20 pm
Openoffice.org
Carlos Leal
Granada 03:30 pm – 04:00 pm Multimedia Aplication Jose Angel Bonilla

And we just recieve the package from novell 😉

Call for testing: unzip feature

April 7th, 2010 by

Hello Planet!

Have you ever faced a bug like this bnc#540598 ?

When you create  zip archive with non-English filenames and try to unpack it on openSUSE, filenames within archive become unreadable. It can irritate, isn’t it?

It seems as if we found a solution for Russian language. We tested it and it works for us.

It would be helpful if some of you could test your local language. And check whether core functionality still works 😉

Here is a list of  languages that are potentially affected by this bug: Ukrainian,Belorussian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, French, German,Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish,Slovenian, Swedish.

So it is worth to test them in the first place.

The reproducer is pretty simple:

  • create zip archive on windows with file named in you local language
  • transfer archive to openSUSE system
  • unpack it
  • see if filenames are readable

What needs to be tested:

  • if this bug applicable to you language
  • if core functionality of unzip still works

Please share your experience by commenting on bug.

Package to test located in Lazy_Kent home project

Thanks in advance