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Archive for June, 2009

Linuxtag 2009 in Berlin

June 29th, 2009 by

I’m back now from attending Linuxtag 2009 in Berlin. On Saturday I gave a presentation about openSUSE 11.2 and we had some good discussions about it.  I demoed WebYaST which will be an exciting addition to openSUSE.  WebYaST allows remote – and also local – administration of your system.  The participants of the talk mentioned also that  “zypper dup” to update from 11.1 to 11.2 is an important addition.

Btw. to learn more about openSUSE 11.2, check this wiki page which is regularly updated.

Adrian took some photos and uploaded them to the gallery.

It was great to see the momentum behind the education project, I talked a bit with Jan (and listened to his excellent talk) and Lars about it.

openSUSE Day (Chile): Awesome.

June 28th, 2009 by

And the day came. After a six hours trip on bus, and a few minutes of sleep I got to Santiago de Chile. Francisco Toha picked me up so we headed to Universidad Andres Bello for the openSUSE Day. Huge building and plenty of room for everyone. The event started almost on time. I followed the first talk, a bit hoping to have a decent internet connection so I could show a live SUSE Studio test drive. OK, that didn’t happen. The internet traffic ratio was too slow like waiting 59 minutes to build an JeOS appliance was nuts so that was definitely the low aspect of the talk.
Again, huge thanks to Zonker for all the support. openSUSE 11.1 DVDs and stickers were cool and all loved it. Also big thanks everyone from Geeko’s, specially Enrique Herrera, Jose Muñoz, and Francisco Toha. Statistic and evaluation have not been finished yet. Anyway, some pictures here:
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GSoC – summary of this week’s meeting

June 26th, 2009 by

The task for this week was to add support to the frontend so that desktop clients like osc can add the oauth specific parameters to the http “Authorization” header. The ruby library was already able to handle this and therefore I only needed to do a very small change in our urllib2 OAuthHandler which is used by osc.

Using the Authorization header has one drawback:
– the current flow looks like the following: a client makes an unauthorized API request, the API sends back a 401 to tell the client that it needs to authenticate. Therefore the response also contains the following http header: ‘WWW-Authenticate: basic realm=”Frontend login” ‘. This indicates that the client should use basic auth to authenticate with the API. The question is how we can tell the client that it could also use oauth? Sending back something like ‘WWW-Authenticate: basic, oauth realm=”Frontend login”‘ will probably break some clients. Fortunately darix had a great idea: the client simply tells the server which auth methods it supports. This can be done by adding a new http header like ‘Accept-Authentication: OpenID; OAuth;q=0.8, digest;q=0.7, Basic;q=0.5″ ‘ to each request (q indicates which method is preferred, see other http headers like ‘Accept-Language’ for the details). If the API needs authorization it looks at this header and picks the “preferred” method from this list and sends back ‘WWW-Authenticate: <preferred_and_supported_method>, realm=”Frontend login”‘ ‘. In case the Accept-Authentication header is omitted the application’s default method is used (in our case basic auth). Another thing which needs to be discussed is how the API should behave if the client only accepts methods which aren’t supported by the API (e.g. should the API send back a 401 or 406?).

Apart from thinking about this the other task for this week(end) is to add an UI for managing oauth tokens etc. The first part of this task is to decide which tasks the UI should support (like revoking tokens, authorize tokens etc.).

The next meeting will be on monday to discuss the first results.

openSUSE Day at the LinuxTag

June 26th, 2009 by

If you’re in Berlin or nearby, be sure to visit LinuxTag this week! LinuxTag runs through Saturday, June 27th. Don’t forget, Saturday is openSUSE Day at LinuxTag! We have great talks in store for everybody at LinuxTag, including presentations on LTSP in openSUSE, Wine on openSUSE, AppArmor, and what’s new in openSUSE 11.2.

Make sure you do not miss Easy-LTSP presentation by Jan Weber tomorrow, I have vested interest in that one 😉

On kontact

June 26th, 2009 by

I will go on holiday next week, so today is my last day in the office. I have decided that the things I have to do today are too many and I should work in the train in my way to the office.

All good, start the computer, of course no internet, so I had to shutdown kontact to stop him crying about not being able to connect.

Being able to easy go to an offline mode  would be a very nice and useful feature to have in kontact, and kde applications in general. Checking that before you want to communicate with some third party that you actually have the phone instead complaining that he is not answer, would be a very good design decision, too.

Now being the holiday season I hope at least one of the kde/kontact developers would get hit by this missing feature and soon we will have it.

Installation: Resizing Windows before proposing Linux partitions

June 25th, 2009 by

While “selling” openSUSE to a friend of mine, I tried to explain him all the steps of the installation and all the configuration options which I had changed. He was not any geek and it was his first time seeing Linux.

While most of the installation did not need much explanations, I definitely spent most of the time on partitioning. Not that initial proposal was not fine, unless one has special requirements, but there is one elementar input, which even newbies may want to set: How to split disk between Windows and Linux. The installation proposal works just fine, but if one needs to keep more or less space for Windows than proposed and does not have any skills, he is doomed – and so would have been he.

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On KDE4.3

June 24th, 2009 by

We are almost one month far away from the kde4.3 release. Yesterday the 4.3 rc1 was tagged and due to excellent work of our colleagues in OBS we have it already.

Personally, I would have liked it to go a little bit further away in terms of usability, we will speak about that later.  This release will mark the break with 3.5. I see no real reason for not using kde 4.3. All the functionality that people were crying after from 3.5 is finally up and running (a lot of time better) in KDE 4.3.

What more would you like then, people may ask.

I would like to be able to give a kde4 desktop to a secretary to use and to a teenager who is into Web2.0.

  • a features consistent kontact, a kalendar that actually can be used in a real life environment, avoiding silly design inconsistencies like you can spell check your popup notes but you cannot do it for your notebooks entries.
  • a kopete that actually supports video/audio features of protocols.
  • a rock solid kblogger may help.
  • a way to synchronize mobile devices.

and the last

  • adding more work on making existing features working perfect rather than adding new ones.

Alin

Stop ssh brute force attack using SuSEfirewall

June 22nd, 2009 by

Edit /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2:

#do not open ssh ports here
FW_SERVICES_EXT_TCP=""
FW_CONFIGURATIONS_EXT=""

#add this rule
FW_SERVICES_ACCEPT_EXT="0.0.0.0/0,tcp,22,,hitcount=3,blockseconds=60,recentname=ssh"

#Restart firewall:
rcSuSEfirewall2 restart

Now attacker will just have three attempts to break in.

SUSE Out Your Tweets!

June 22nd, 2009 by

Thanks to Raul Libório from the openSUSE Marketing Team, you can trick out your Twitter background with your openSUSE Project affiliation (member, ambassador, user). Check out the openSUSE Social Network marketing page to get yours (look under “Sidebars for Twitter”.

You can add the logo itself, or use a program like The GIMP or Inkscape to add the logo to your current background (much like mine, below)

Twitter screenshot

openSUSE Factory: Fixing Packages

June 20th, 2009 by

I’m back now for some days from my two months of parental leave and decided to get reacquainted with the openSUSE Build Service and the osc command line client.

I’ve checked which packages are failing in Factory on x86-64 (via this link) and checked the log files for some low hanging fruits that I could easily fix.

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