The Grumpy Editor's hugin experience

The free software community has produced a wealth of tools for the manipulation of image data. For simple changes, such as cropping, resizing, or basic contrast tweaking, any of a number of programs can be used. More complex changes will require falling back to tools like the GIMP, krita, or cinepaint. Anybody who has tried to join together two or more independent images in those tools will have discovered, however, that certain manipulations fall into a class of their own. For that kind of work, hugin would appear to be the only choice. Your editor has long intended to play with hugin; the threat of having some real work to do finally provided the necessary motivation.

The problem with just gluing two images together is simple to understand: lenses distort. Even the best lens will transform light differently toward the edges of the image than it does in the middle. Multiple images also suffer from parallax problems, even if the camera is mounted on a tripod. The result is that two overlapping images will not normally join together in a straightforward way - the pieces simply do not fit. Resolving this problem requires distorting the images in fairly tricky ways. The key to the value of a tool like hugin is not in putting images together; it is, instead, in the process of stretching and remapping those images (along with some other details like exposure matching) so that they can be put together. As an added bonus, the ability to correct lens distortion makes some other interesting applications possible.

The classic use of a tool like hugin, though, is the creation of panoramic images which cover a field larger than the camera can capture. A photographer wanting to create the best panorama should do a number of things to ensure that a set of images can be combined easily: the camera should be mounted on a tripod, and all settings should be manually selected and should be the same for every component image. A camera set for automatic exposure, for example, will vary that exposure as the camera is rotated to take the pictures; that will create differences from one image to the next. Changes in focus or depth of field will also complicate the task of properly stitching the images together.

That said, hugin does an impressive job of joining images which were not taken in optimal conditions. Feed it a set of handheld cellphone photos and you'll get something reasonable out.

To test hugin, your editor took a series of pictures of the continental divide from the eastern Colorado plains. They are not great pictures - it was not a particularly clear day - but they are sufficient to show what hugin can do. The individual images are:

These images present some challenges; among other things, the tripod was not entirely level, so the horizon appears to tilt from one to the next. Putting them together is clearly going to require some complex manipulations. The nice thing is that hugin manages to hide that complexity from the user - most of the time. For beginning users, there is an "assistant" mode which will step through the process relatively easily. There's also a nice set of tutorials which should really be required reading for any new user.

The first step is to bring the images into hugin; that is done with the usual GTK file-chooser dialog. Depending on the distribution being used, there may be an unpleasant surprise once the files have been selected. Your editor, testing the Fedora hugin package, got a dialog containing the following:

Did your editor ever mention that software patents are a pain?

The message goes on to say that hugin remains a useful tool, even without the forbidden algorithm. And, indeed, it does, though the amount of work required is higher. The next step in the process is the assignment of "control points" which tie the images together. The tool presents a pair of images, and the user has the task of identifying points in each which correspond to the same location. The process can be a little painful, depending on the images involved, but it's not that bad, especially if there are a lot of easily-identified, small features to line up. It's just a matter of clicking on one image, adjusting the point, then doing the same thing on the other image. Hugin creates a small, high-resolution window surrounding the selected points which makes it easy to align control points with single-pixel accuracy.

Once a couple of points have been fixed, hugin will do its best to automatically find the corresponding point for a location picked in one image. Often the process works quite well; other times, not quite so well. Sometimes hugin's guess is simply wrong; other times it will conclude that it cannot find a matching point and put up an obnoxious dialog which must be dismissed. In the latter case, it would be better to just pick a nearby point (as it does anyway) and be done with it. Beyond that, though, the process is pretty smooth.

Then, one must go into the "optimize" area. This is where the friendliness of hugin comes closest to falling apart. "Optimizing" is the calculation of a set of parameters describing how the component images are related to each other and how they have been distorted by the camera; it is, essentially, a set of magic algorithms generating magic numbers. A user who doesn't really understand the math behind what hugin is doing (and, remember, we're dealing with photographers here) will have no clue what's happening or how to judge whether the process has worked properly or not. And it doesn't always work properly. The help from the tutorials can make things worse:

How does one know if the optimizer has reduced the field of view in this way? The screen will not actually say that. So the optimizer is the place where a somewhat naive user (your editor, say) is likely to grope around blindly in the hopes of getting something done.

After that, one can pull up the preview window to see what hugin plans to do with the images. The preview, too, can be confusing; mouse clicks on the image shift it around in ways which are entirely predictable (and even useful), but disorienting to a new user. Sometimes the program comes up with bizarre values for the actual area of the image, leading to a mostly black preview with the useful image data crammed into a corner somewhere. Solutions can include redoing the optimization process or going to the "stitcher" window and asking it to recalculate the image size parameters - including a couple of "field of view" numbers which don't have any clear meaning to the uninitiated. Things usually work, but it can be discouraging when they don't.

Once the preview looks good, the stitcher is invoked to create the final image. That process can take a while, but the end results tend to be good. Usually all that's required afterward is a quick cropping pass in a more traditional image editor to come up with something presentable. Here is your editor's final panorama (please note that the larger version is a 9MB image - and that's after reducing it considerably):

Your editor, being a daring sort of person, decided that he wanted to find out just what sort of functionality is being denied to hugin users by the oppressive US software patent regime. As it happens, Fedora users can get around patent-based repression by installing the autopano-sift-C package from the rpmfusion repository and tweaking the program preferences to use the real autopano tool. The difference is striking: with autopano-sift-C installed, the program proceeds immediately from image selection to a preview window; the whole "control points" and "optimization" process just sort of goes away. This package does a great job of finding control points, at least on your editor's sample image set. Software patents have cost Linux users a highly useful tool here; fortunately, users who are not affected by the American software patent regime can still obtain the autopano-sift-C package. Your editor would highly recommend doing so.

Beyond panoramas

Hugin's uses are not limited to the creation of panoramic images. The image distortion logic built into the program can be put to other uses as well. Consider this image from the 2008 Kernel Summit:

Your editor was constrained to take the picture from an off-center point of view - the professional photographer who was hired to do a proper picture had, naturally, taken the best spot. One might be tempted to point out that your editor's picture got out into the world, while the professional's has never really been seen, but your editor would never think of being so petty. What is worth pointing out here is that the off-center perspective, combined with lens distortion, results in a bit of a strange view; look at the visible bend in the beam at the top of the stage opening over the group of assembled kernel hackers. The sides of the opening also appear to not be parallel. It's a fairly classic case of distortion caused by the combination of an off-center perspective and a zoom lens being pushed to its wide-angle extreme.

It turns out that hugin can fix problems like this. To use hugin in this mode, the user feeds a single image to the application. The process of creating control points is now done a little differently; the task is to identify points in the same image which make up a horizontal or vertical line. Your editor indicated that the border around the stage really should be level and plumb, and picked a couple of other lines as well. Hugin then does its magic and comes up with a new image:

The lines have been straightened and the photograph looks more rectilinear in general. It's still not perfect, of course, and not even hugin can make Al Viro smile, but it's a step in the right direction. This technique can be used for fixing up the perspective on any of a number of pictures which are taken from a less-than-optimal location.

In summary: hugin would appear to be unique in the free software community. Despite the occasional glitch, hugin makes the execution of non-trivial image manipulations easy to the point that even your editor can do it; your average professional photographer should have even less trouble. It is an impressive piece of work, even though it has not yet reached its 1.0 release (version 0.8 came out in July). It definitely belongs on any Linux-using photographer's system.

Comments (39 posted)

Netboot.me turns netboot into internetboot

Recent computers support booting over the network by PXE (Preboot eXecuting Environment), an extension to the firmware that allows the computer to boot an operating system from a remote server using a network interface. However, this feature requires the user to setup a PXE boot server with one or more operating system images. A few weeks ago, Nick Johnson released a new service that makes use of PXE to boot into the install program of many popular Linux distributions and FreeBSD, directly over the Internet, and without the need of any local PXE boot server; it is called netboot.me.

Essentially, netboot.me offers a universal boot loader that allows the user to install the most recent version of any of a number of open source operating systems from one single medium. The boot loader makes use of gPXE (GPL PXE); the 1 MB image can be installed on a USB pen drive, floppy disk, or burned onto a CD. From then on, any computer that boots from the image retrieves the current list of available operating systems from the netboot.me website and shows that list in the boot menu. When the user chooses an operating system from the menu, the installer is downloaded over HTTP or FTP and starts running. This currently only works over an Ethernet connection, but WiFi support is in progress via a Google Summer of Code project for implementing 802.11 drivers in gPXE.

Currently the boot menu has installers for:

• FreeBSD 7.2
• Debian Lenny and Debian Testing
• Fedora 11
• openSUSE 11.1
• Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 alpha

It also gives access to some live operating systems and tools that can come in handy. The user can launch live CDs for Tiny Core Linux 2.2, Micro Core Linux 2.2 and MirOS BSD. Other available tools are the GParted Live disk partitioning tool, the Parted Magic 4.4 rescue and partitioning live cd, Memtest86 and Memtest86+ to test system memory, and Hardware Detection Tool, a Syslinux module that displays low-level hardware information.

So on the one hand, this boot loader gives the user the possibility to install some of the most popular Linux distributions and FreeBSD, without the need to first download and burn an installer image. On the other hand, the netboot.me boot loader has a couple of useful diagnostic, partitioning and rescue tools. Users often do not download rescue tools until they need them, at which point it may be too late, so the tools in the netboot.me menu can be a time—and system—saver.

Chainload URLs

Netboot.me refers to each available operating system by what the project calls a "chainload URL", which identifies the operating system image uniquely. For example, the Debian Lenny installer for x86 is located at the chainload URL http://netboot.me/2013. This web page lists the kernel image, the initial ramdisk, and the kernel arguments (vga=normal -- quiet). The details differ slightly among distributions, however: in the Fedora 11 PXE installer, the user has to explicitly enter a URL containing the Fedora installation image, while the openSUSE 11.1 installer already has the repository URL as a kernel argument. The netboot.me website lists the available operating systems in different subcategories.

In fact, the user doesn't even need the boot loader image: most recent computers are perfectly capable of netbooting without a boot disk. This can be used to automatically bootstrap a netboot.me boot loader which netboots the final distribution boot loader over HTTP or FTP. For such a diskless netboot, the user just has to change the settings of his local DHCP server to return the required information to boot over TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol). Because TFTP isn't the most reliable protocol over the Internet, the user can also host his own copy of the bootstrap image on a local TFTP server. Instructions can be found on the Getting started page.

The best part is that netboot.me is hackable and open for contributions. Each user is able to add custom boot configurations to the website, although it unfortunately requires logging in with a Google account. The user then submits the URIs of the kernel image and initial ramdisk, together with any required kernel arguments. Netboot.me is capable of booting any Linux kernel and any other standard boot image, as well as disk images and CD images. To boot this custom configuration from the netboot.me boot disk, the user opens the gPXE command line with CTRL-B right before the netboot.me menu appears, enters autoboot and then chain http://netboot.me/XXXX with the correct chainload URL for the custom configuration.

Security

The security implications of netboot.me need to also be considered. What assurance does a user have that they are really getting the boot loader and OS image that were requested? In general, images on the netboot.me menu originate from either static.netboot.me, in which case Nick Johnson personally downloaded and verified them, or from official distribution web sites such as ubuntu.com. If the user trusts netboot.me and the official sources, the only remaining concern is man-in-the-middle attacks. Johnson calls this a legitimate concern and considers two components that could be secured further: the download of the scripts and menu from netboot.me, and the subsequent download of the boot image from the source. The former can be protected, in principle, by using SSL, which gPXE supports. Unfortunately, Johnson sees two major issues with gPXE's SSL support:

The second component (the download of the boot image) is somewhat simpler: securing it would require adding support for verifying content hashes of downloaded images. Most of this is already in place, actually, so according to Johnson this would be a very simple extension.

Host your own netboot.me

The code for netboot.me is licensed under the BSD license. Most of the server side is Python code which is meant to run on Google App Engine. The boot loader is a modified version of gPXE. One obvious disadvantage of netboot.me is its dependence on Google App Engine. While there aren't any active efforts to decouple netboot.me from the App Engine, Johnson maintains that this ought to be fairly straightforward:

Collaboration

How does netboot.me compare with other solutions? There is Billix, a multiboot USB pen drive with network installations for several Linux distributions. Its approach is different: Billix hosts network install ISOs of the distributions on the USB pen drive, while netboot.me bootstraps the user's computer to grab complete ISOs of the distributions via PXE over the internet.

Another more direct competitor of netboot.me is boot.kernel.org (BKO), which is a Google Summer of Code project for gPXE. Although it seems to be less polished than netboot.me and offers fewer Linux distributions at the moment, it has one advantage: it can be installed easily on a local server. The administrator can download the ISO images, and then all users on the local network then can install the available Linux distributions via PXE. Because the ISOs are stored on the local network, this goes much faster than over the internet with netboot.me. This is not a luxury because the experience with netboot.me regularly gets spoiled by slow downloads of the operating system images.

The projects also have a slightly different focus. BKO is aiming more at live distributions that use iSCSI or HTTPFS for mounting filesystems, while netboot.me is concentrating more on netbooting existing images. According to Johnson, the two projects are keeping an eye out for opportunities to collaborate. As part of that effort, he has already added a menu item in the "Tools" category that loads the boot.kernel.org menu from within the netboot.me menu.

In conclusion

For testing out new distributions—or entire operating systems—it is certainly convenient to be able to boot directly from the internet. But, for system recovery tasks, it could easily be indispensable. Being able to access any number of up-to-date distributions, live CDs, and recovery tools, without having to maintain a library of CDs or other media, is something that users and system administrators alike may find very handy.

Comments (5 posted)

FUD at Best Buy

In many parts of the US, the Best Buy chain is truly the best bricks-and-mortar option for those looking for electronics and related products. That is seen by many as a rather sad state of affairs, but such is life; we can't all live in Akihabara. It is not a place where one normally goes in search of technical expertise. Recent reports that Microsoft has made an attempt to make the situation even worse should not be particularly surprising - or concerning.

Recently, a Best Buy employee encountered some Microsoft training materials aimed at Best Buy sales people. Surprisingly enough, Microsoft would like these sales representatives to believe that Windows is a better operating system than Linux; Microsoft would also be most gratified if those representatives would convince their customers of the same. So it has put together a set of slides full of easy-to-remember sales points and gotten Best Buy to use those slides as training material.

So why is Windows better? Apparently it offers a "richer and more engaging experience." It is, believe it or not, compatible with Windows, which is seen as a good thing. There is, we're told, better support for cameras, iPods, printers, and more. Windows Live stuff is not supported under Linux; neither is World of Warcraft. Best Buy employees are to tell their customers that Linux lacks "authorized support," it takes a lot of time to maintain and it doesn't offer "regular updates." There's no guarantee of security updates; "Linux users are on their own." There are no "step-by-step tutorials" for Linux.

Some of Microsoft's claims have merit: it is almost certainly true that Windows users are more familiar with Windows than with Linux, for example. Others are clearly false. It's amusing to see the return of the "no support" FUD line - though it must be said that the support options available to an end user who buys a Linux-based netbook from Best Buy are limited. The "Geek Squad" is likely to prove a disappointing resource for confused Linux users. There is no mention that World of Warcraft can be run under WINE, but one should also bear in mind that there's probably no end of WoW junkies who have no interest in trying to figure out a Wine installation. Cameras work fine with Linux, as do music players, and printers are getting better all the time. The security claims still come across as laughable. It is clear that Microsoft is clearly playing a little loose with the truth here.

The response on the net has been strong; Microsoft's attempt at Best Buy sales droid indoctrination appears to have touched a sensitive nerve. The Linux community does, indeed, show a high level of sensitivity for this kind of criticism. It has been years since Linux was dismissed as a toy operating system which was not to be taken seriously, but, perhaps, we still have some sensitive toes left from those days.

But think about it: it's a rare corporation which does not attempt to make its products look better than those of its competitors. It's also a rare company which does not stretch the truth occasionally in the process. Lies and FUD are not justified, but they are normal. The fact that these techniques are being turned against Linux at this level is not particularly surprising. It just says that Microsoft sees Linux as a true competitive threat in need of the usual competitive response. Linux is being treated like just another competing product on the market.

Much effort has gone into publicizing and debunking Microsoft's training slides. It is worthwhile to shine light on this kind of activity, and it is worthwhile to correct claims that are not true. But Microsoft's silly training slides are not a cause for great concern, hang-wringing, or outrage. They are just another ham-fisted attempt to fight off an increasingly worrisome competitor. As long as Microsoft keeps its fight on this level, we have little to worry about.

Comments (38 posted)

Attacks against WordPress installations

The WordPress content management system (CMS) has been in the news lately—for reasons the project and its users would probably rather not see—as there have been a rash of attacks against older versions of WordPress. At least one high-profile blogger, Robert Scoble, succumbed to the attack, posting that he no longer felt safe with WordPress. Various others also piled on, but the problem that was being exploited had been fixed in early August; the affected sites just hadn't upgraded.

Keeping up with security updates can be time-consuming, especially for relatively non-technical users who are hosting a CMS site simply to provide themselves a place to blog. One could easily argue that those kinds of users would be best served by using one of the free services available for such things. But, those services tend to have fewer features—often to encourage upgrading to a subscription-based support plan—leaving bloggers who want the latest shiny features to host WordPress (or other similar CMS programs) themselves.

At least for WordPress, many of those shiny features come as plugins to the CMS engine. When security updates are made, changes required for the plugins may very well lag behind. Even if the upgrade wouldn't affect the plugins at all, concerns over that happening led various folks, including Scoble, to wait a while before upgrading:

In the comments on Scoble's blog posting (where the above quote comes from), as well as in a conversation on his FriendFeed, it is clear that numerous other folks have run into similar problems with attacks as well as issues with upgrades. WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg has numerous comments on Scoble's complaints, and his suggestions are fairly obvious: update immediately when there are outstanding security patches and, if that's not possible, consider moving to a managed provider (possibly WordPress.com, the commercial side of WordPress development).

Mullenweg's advice is good, but it would also seem that the WordPress project could be doing more to highlight security issues. The project home page lacks obvious links for security information—though it currently has a link to Mullenweg's How to Keep WordPress Secure posting—and searching for "security" on the site does not bring up any centralized location for that kind of information. It is probably just an oversight, but even the "Security" category on the WordPress blog does not contain the 2.8.3 announcement, which is the release that fixes the problem being exploited.

For a new, or casual, WordPress user, it would certainly seem possible that they might miss these security announcements. The WordPress software will alert the user that there are updates available—and there is an email list for new release notification—but there numerous ways to add content to a WordPress blog without logging into the administrative interface, so the alerts may be missed. It's clear that Mullenweg takes security seriously based on his comments, but that message may not be getting out to the WordPress faithful.

The actual bug that is being exploited is a run-of-the-mill privilege escalation flaw. While the bug itself may be pedestrian, the consequences are not, as Scoble and others found. Scoble's situation was exacerbated by not having any backups (!), but the bigger problem is how to get the system back to a "safe" state after it has been exploited. Depending on how WordPress was installed, the only safe way to restore a cracked system may be to reinstall the entire operating system. These kinds of attacks can leave various back doors behind that stay active even after WordPress itself has been upgraded.

The point is not to pick on WordPress, or even CMS programs in general, but to note a general problem. There is a tension between the fear of upgrading and the fear of an attack, and many users fear the former much more than the latter. WordPress has made great strides in simplifying the upgrade process, but it still has the potential to break things—especially in plugins that are completely outside of the project's control. As it turns out, the privilege escalation vulnerability was related to how certain plugins' administration pages were handled.

Web application security is hard. It is harder still when trying to create a general purpose web application platform, particularly one that allows plugins to fairly arbitrarily change its behavior. This is certainly not the last attack against WordPress or CMS programs that we will see. It is definitely in the best interest of these projects and their users to pay close attention to security issues as they arise.

Comments (12 posted)

WordPress Blog: How to Keep WordPress Secure

Here's an entry on the WordPress Blog on keeping installations secure - a topic WordPress administrators should be especially concerned about at the moment. "Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts."

Comments (2 posted)

Deep packet inspection engine goes open source (ars technica)

Ars technica looks at a free software release of deep packet inspection (DPI) code from ipoque. At least part of the motivation for releasing the code is to allay fears that ipoque's DPI hardware is digging into the actual content, rather than the packet formats and timing, of encrypted traffic, but this release may not succeed in doing that: "The OpenDPI engine, released under the LGPL license, differs from ipoque's commercial scanning engine in its high-priced DPI hardware. The open-source version is much slower and (more importantly) doesn't reveal ipoque's methods for identifying encrypted transmissions. DPI vendors all claim high levels of success at identifying such traffic based on the flow patterns and handshake signatures common to protocols like BitTorrent and Skype, even if they cannot crack the encryption and examine the content of those transmissions."

Comments (24 posted)

Enterprise Linux 5.3 to 5.4 risk report

Red Hat's director of security response, Mark J. Cox, has released another of his risk reports, this one looking at the security updates between RHEL 5.3 and 5.4. He notes that of the nine vulnerabilities of "critical" severity in that time, seven were for Firefox. It is interesting to note that the three NULL pointer vulnerabilities for the kernel were not rated as critical as they were not remotely exploitable. He also points out that three flaws which would have required critical updates, instead required no update—or in one case a low severity update for a denial of service—due to various mitigations (FORTIFY_SOURCE and hardened malloc/free) present in RHEL.

Comments (20 posted)

cmus: temporary file vulnerability

Package(s):	cmus	CVE #(s):	CVE-2008-5375
Created:	September 9, 2009	Updated:	September 9, 2009
Description:	The cmus (C* Music) player suffers from a temporary file vulnerability; 2.2.0-r1 contains the fix.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200909-08 cmus 2009-09-09

Comments (none posted)

cyrus-imapd: buffer overflow

Package(s):	cyrus-imapd	CVE #(s):	CVE-2009-2632
Created:	September 8, 2009	Updated:	October 24, 2011
Description:	From the Debian advisory: It was discovered that the SIEVE component of cyrus-imapd, a highly scalable enterprise mail system, is vulnerable to a buffer overflow when processing SIEVE scripts. Due to incorrect use of the sizeof() operator an attacker is able to pass a negative length to snprintf() calls resulting in large positive values due to integer conversion. This causes a buffer overflow which can be used to elevate privileges to the cyrus system user. An attacker who is able to install SIEVE scripts executed by the server is therefore able to read and modify arbitrary email messages on the system.
Alerts:	Gentoo 201110-16 cyrus-imapd 2011-10-22 Mandriva MDVSA-2009:229-1 cyrus-imapd 2009-12-05 Ubuntu USN-838-1 dovecot 2009-09-28 CentOS CESA-2009:1459 cyrus-imapd 2009-09-25 Debian DSA-1893-1 cyrus-imapd-2.2 2009-09-23 Debian DSA-1892-1 dovecot 2009-09-23 Red Hat RHSA-2009:1459-04 cyrus-imapd 2009-09-23 Mandriva MDVSA-2009:242-1 dovecot 2009-09-22 Mandriva MDVSA-2009:242 dovecot 2009-09-22 Fedora FEDORA-2009-9559 dovecot 2009-09-15 CentOS CESA-2009:1459 cyrus-imapd 2009-10-30 Mandriva MDVSA-2009:229 cyrus-imapd 2009-09-11 Fedora FEDORA-2009-9417 cyrus-imapd 2009-09-09 Fedora FEDORA-2009-9428 cyrus-imapd 2009-09-09 Debian DSA-1881-1 cyrus-imapd-2.2 2009-09-07 SuSE SUSE-SR:2009:016 silc-toolkit, open-iscsi, strongswan,freeswan,openswan, mutt, openldap2, cyrus-imapd, java-1_6_0-openjdk, postgresql, IBMJava2-JRE/java-1_4_2-ibm, wireshark, freeradius, dovecot 2009-10-13

Comments (none posted)

devscripts: missing input sanitation

Package(s):	devscripts	CVE #(s):	CVE-2009-2946
Created:	September 3, 2009	Updated:	October 9, 2009
Description:	From the Debian alert: Raphael Geissert discovered that uscan, a program to check for availability of new source code versions which is part of the devscripts package, runs Perl code downloaded from potentially untrusted sources to implement its URL and version mangling functionality. This update addresses this issue by reimplementing the relevant Perl operators without relying on the Perl interpreter, trying to preserve backwards compatibility as much as possible.
Alerts:	Debian DSA-1878-2 devscripts 2009-09-11 Debian DSA-1878-1 devscripts 2009-09-02 Ubuntu USN-847-2 devscripts 2009-10-09 Ubuntu USN-847-1 devscripts 2009-10-08

Comments (none posted)

gccxml: temporary file vulnerability

Package(s):	gccxml	CVE #(s):	CVE-2008-4957
Created:	September 9, 2009	Updated:	September 9, 2009
Description:	The GCC-XML utility suffers from a temporary file vulnerability.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200909-11 gccxml 2009-09-09

Comments (none posted)

lmbench: temporary file vulnerability

Package(s):	lmbench	CVE #(s):	CVE-2008-4968
Created:	September 9, 2009	Updated:	September 9, 2009
Description:	The lmbench utility contains multiple temporary file vulnerabilities. There does not appear to be a fix available; Gentoo has responded by removing lmbench from its repository entirely.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200909-10 lmbench 2009-09-09

Comments (none posted)

openoffice.org: integer underflow, boundary error

Package(s):	openoffice.org	CVE #(s):	CVE-2009-0200 CVE-2009-0201
Created:	September 4, 2009	Updated:	May 24, 2010
Description:	From the Red Hat advisory: An integer underflow flaw and a boundary error flaw, both possibly leading to a heap-based buffer overflow, were found in the way OpenOffice.org parses certain records in Microsoft Word documents. An attacker could create a specially-crafted Microsoft Word document, which once opened by an unsuspecting user, could cause OpenOffice.org to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running OpenOffice.org.
Alerts:	Gentoo 201408-19 openoffice-bin 2014-08-31 Mandriva MDVSA-2010:105 openoffice.org 2010-05-21 Mandriva MDVSA-2010:091 openoffice.org 2010-05-04 Mandriva MDVSA-2010:056 openoffice.org 2010-03-05 Mandriva MDVSA-2010:035 openoffice.org 2010-02-11 Ubuntu USN-840-1 openoffice.org 2009-10-01 SuSE SUSE-SR:2009:015 OpenOffice_org, OpenOffice_org-math, dnsmasq, gnutls, ia32el, ib-bonding-kmp-rt/kernel-rt, libxml, opera, perl-IO-Socket-SSL, xen 2009-09-15 CentOS CESA-2009:1426 openoffice.org 2009-09-05 CentOS CESA-2009:1426 openoffice.org 2009-09-04 Fedora FEDORA-2009-9256 openoffice.org 2009-09-04 Red Hat RHSA-2009:1426-01 openoffice.org 2009-09-04

Comments (none posted)

pam: authentication bypass

Package(s):	pam	CVE #(s):
Created:	September 9, 2009	Updated:	September 9, 2009
Description:	From the Ubuntu advisory: Russell Senior discovered that the system authentication module selection mechanism for PAM did not safely handle an empty selection. If an administrator had specifically removed the default list of modules or failed to chose a module when operating debconf in a very unlikely non-default configuration, PAM would allow any authentication attempt, which could lead to remote attackers gaining access to a system with arbitrary privileges.
Alerts:	Ubuntu USN-828-1 pam 2009-09-08

Comments (none posted)

qt: man-in-the-middle attack

Package(s):	qt	CVE #(s):	CVE-2009-2700
Created:	September 3, 2009	Updated:	February 3, 2010
Description:	From the National Vulnerability Database entry: "src/network/ssl/qsslcertificate.cpp in Nokia Trolltech Qt 4.x does not properly handle a '\0' character in a domain name in the Subject Alternative Name field of an X.509 certificate, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof arbitrary SSL servers via a crafted certificate issued by a legitimate Certification Authority, a related issue to CVE-2009-2408."
Alerts:	Debian DSA-1988-1 qt4-x11 2010-02-02 SuSE SUSE-SR:2009:019 cups, jetty5, libqt4/dbus-1-qt, opera, puretls/jessie, kdegraphics3-pdf, qemu 2009-11-24 Ubuntu USN-829-1 qt4-x11 2009-09-10 Fedora FEDORA-2009-9232 qt 2009-09-03 Mandriva MDVSA-2009:225 qt4 2009-09-08 Fedora FEDORA-2009-9231 qt 2009-09-03

Comments (none posted)

screenie: temporary file vulnerability

Package(s):	screenie	CVE #(s):	CVE-2008-5371
Created:	September 9, 2009	Updated:	September 9, 2009
Description:	Versions of screenie prior to 1.30.0-r1 contain a temporary file vulnerability.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200909-09 screenie 2009-09-09

Comments (none posted)

silc: several vulnerabilities

Package(s):	silc-client/silc-toolkit	CVE #(s):	CVE-2008-7159 CVE-2008-7160 CVE-2009-3051
Created:	September 4, 2009	Updated:	June 1, 2010
Description:	From the Debian advisory: An incorrect format string in sscanf() used in the ASN1 encoder to scan an OID value could overwrite a neighbouring variable on the stack as the destination data type is smaller than the source type on 64-bit. On 64-bit architectures this could result in unexpected application behaviour or even code execution in some cases (CVE-2008-7159). Various format string vulnerabilities when handling parsed SILC messages allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the rights of the victim running the SILC client via crafted nick names or channel names containing format strings (CVE-2009-3051). An incorrect format string in a sscanf() call used in the HTTP server component of silcd could result in overwriting a neighbouring variable on the stack as the destination data type is smaller than the source type on 64-bit. An attacker could exploit this by using crafted Content-Length header values resulting in unexpected application behaviour or even code execution in some cases (CVE-2008-7160).
Alerts:	Gentoo 201006-07 silc-toolkit 2010-06-01 Mandriva MDVSA-2009:234-2 silc-toolkit 2009-12-05 Mandriva MDVSA-2009:235 silc-toolkit 2009-09-15 Mandriva MDVSA-2009:234-1 silc-toolkit 2009-09-15 Mandriva MDVSA-2009:234 silc-toolkit 2009-09-15 Fedora FEDORA-2009-9342 libsilc 2009-09-06 Fedora FEDORA-2009-9356 libsilc 2009-09-06 Debian DSA-1879-1 silc-client/silc-toolkit 2009-09-04 SuSE SUSE-SR:2009:016 silc-toolkit, open-iscsi, strongswan,freeswan,openswan, mutt, openldap2, cyrus-imapd, java-1_6_0-openjdk, postgresql, IBMJava2-JRE/java-1_4_2-ibm, wireshark, freeradius, dovecot 2009-10-13

Comments (none posted)

tkman: symbolic link vulnerability

Package(s):	tkman	CVE #(s):	CVE-2008-5137
Created:	September 9, 2009	Updated:	September 9, 2009
Description:	Versions of tkman prior to 2.2-r1 suffer from a symbolic link vulnerability.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200909-07 tkman 2009-09-09

Comments (none posted)

xemacs: multiple buffer overflows

Package(s):	xemacs	CVE #(s):	CVE-2009-2688
Created:	September 4, 2009	Updated:	June 3, 2010
Description:	From the Fedora advisory: This update fixes multiple buffer overflows when reading large image files, or maliciously created image files whose headers misrepresent the actual image size.
Alerts:	Gentoo 201006-15 xemacs 2010-06-03 Fedora FEDORA-2009-8993 xemacs 2009-08-25 Fedora FEDORA-2009-8997 xemacs 2009-08-25

Comments (none posted)

Kernel release status

The 2.6.31 kernel is out, released by Linus on September 9. A few of the major features in 2.6.31 include performance counter support, the "fsnotify" notification infrastructure, kernel mode setting for ATI Radeon chipsets, the kmemleak tool, char drivers in user space support, USB 3 support, and much more. As always, see the KernelNewbies 2.6.31 page for a much more exhaustive list.

The last prepatch, 2.6.31-rc9, was released on September 5.

The current stable kernel is 2.6.30.6, released (along with 2.6.27.32 2.6.27.33) on September 8. Both contain a long list of fixes, many of which are in the KVM subsystem.

Comments (6 posted)

Quotes of the week

-- Wesley Felter

-- Andrew Morton (Thanks to Nikanth K)

-- Ingo Molnar

-- Casey Schaufler

Comments (1 posted)

In brief

reflink() for 2.6.32. Joel Becker's announcement of his 2.6.32 ocfs2 merge plans included a mention that the reflink() system call would be merged alongside the ocfs2 changes. A call to reflink() creates a lightweight copy, wherein both files share the same blocks in a copy-on-write mode. The final reflink() API looks like this:

    int reflink(const char *oldpath, const char *newpath, int preserve);
    int reflinkat(int olddirfd, const char *oldpath,
                  int newdirfd, const char *newpath,
      		  int preserve,  int flags);

A call to reflink() causes newpath to look like a copy of oldpath. If preserve is REFLINK_ATTR_PRESERVE, then the entire security state of oldpath will be replicated for the new file; this is a privileged operation. Otherwise (if preserve is REFLINK_ATTR_NONE), newpath will get a new security state as if it were an entirely new file. The reflinkat() form adds the ability to supply the starting directories for relative paths and flags like the other *at() system calls. For more information, see the documentation file at the top of the reflink() patch.

Joel's patch adds reflink() support for the ocfs2 filesystem; it's not clear whether other filesystems will get reflink() support in 2.6.32 or not.

A stable debugfs?. Recurring linux-kernel arguments tend to focus on vitally important issues - like where debugfs should be mounted. The official word is that it belongs on /sys/kernel/debug, but there have been ongoing problems with rogue developers mounting it on unofficial places like /debug instead. Greg Kroah-Hartman defends /sys/kernel/debug by noting that debugfs is for kernel developers only; there's no reason for users to be interested in it.

Except, of course, that there is. The increasing utility of the ftrace framework is making it more interesting beyond kernel development circles. That led Steven Rostedt to make a suggestion:

Steven would like a new virtual filesystem for stable kernel ABIs which is easier to work with than sysfs and which can be mounted in a more typing-friendly location. Responses to the suggestion have been scarce so far; somebody will probably need to post a patch to get a real discussion going.

data=guarded. Chris Mason has posted a new version of the ext3 data=guarded mode patch. The guarded mode works to ensure that data blocks arrive on disk before any metadata changes which reference those blocks. The goal is to provide the performance benefits of the data=writeback mode while avoiding the potential information disclosure (after a crash) problems with that mode. Chris had mentioned in the past that he would like to merge this code for 2.6.32; the latest posting, though, suggests that some work still needs to be done, so it might not be ready in time.

Comments (1 posted)

Some notes from the BFS discussion

As was recently reported here, Con Kolivas recently resurfaced with a new CPU scheduler called "BFS". This scheduler, he said, addresses the problems which ail the mainline CFS scheduler; the biggest of these, it seems, is the prioritization of "scalability" over use on normal desktop systems. BFS was meant to put the focus back on user-level systems and, perhaps, make the case for supporting multiple schedulers in the kernel.

Since then, CFS creator Ingo Molnar has responded with a series of benchmark results comparing the two schedulers. Tests included kernel build times, pipe performance, messaging performance, and an online transaction processing test; graphs were posted showing how each scheduler performed on each test. Ingo's conclusion: "Alas, as it can be seen in the graphs, i can not see any BFS performance improvements, on this box." In fact, the opposite was true: BFS generally performed worse than the mainline scheduler.

Con's answer was best described as "dismissive":

As far as your editor can tell, Con's objections to the results mirror those heard elsewhere: Ingo chose an atypical machine for his tests, and those tests, in any case, do not really measure the performance of a scheduler in a desktop situation. The more cynical observers seem to believe that Ingo is more interested in defending the current scheduler than improving the desktop experience for "normal" users.

The machine chosen was certainly at the high end of the "desktop" scale:

A number of people thought that this box is not a typical desktop Linux system. That may indeed be true - today. But, as Ingo (among others) has pointed out, it's important to be a little ahead of the curve when designing kernel subsystems:

Partly in response to the criticisms, though, Ingo reran his tests on a single quad-core system, the same type of system as Con's box. The end results were just about the same.

The hardware used is irrelevant, though, if the benchmarks are not testing performance characteristics that desktop users care about. The concern here is latency: how long it takes before a runnable process can get its work done. If latencies are too high, audio or video streams will skip, the pointer will lag the mouse, scrolling will be jerky, and Maelstrom players will lose their ships. A number of Ingo's original tests were latency-related, and he added a couple more in the second round. So it looks like the benchmarks at least tried to measure the relevant quantity.

Benchmark results are not the same as a better desktop experience, though, and a number of users are reporting a "smoother" desktop when running with BFS. On the other hand, making significant scheduler changes in response to reports of subjective "feel" is a sure recipe for trouble: if one cannot measure improvement, one not only risks failing to fix any problems, one is also at significant risk of introducing performance regressions for other users. There has to be some sort of relatively objective way to judge scheduler improvements.

The way preferred by the current scheduler maintainers is to identify causes of latencies and fix them. The kernel's infrastructure for the identification of latency problems has improved considerably over the last year or two. One useful tool is latencytop, which collects data on what is delaying applications and presents the results to the user. The ftrace tracing framework is also able to create data on the delay between when a process is awakened and when it actually gets into the CPU; see this post from Frederic Weisbecker for an overview of how these measurements can be taken.

If there are real latency problems remaining in the Linux scheduler - and there are enough "BFS is better" reports to suggest that there are - then using the available tools to describe them seems like the right direction to take. Once the problem is better understood, it will be possible to consider possible remedies. It may well be that the mainline scheduler can be adjusted to make those problems go away. Or, possibly, a more radical sort of approach is necessary. But, without some understanding of the problem - and associated ability to measure it - attempted fixes seem a bit like a risky shot in the dark.

Ingo welcomed Con back to the development community and invited him to help improve the Linux scheduler. This seems unlikely to happen, though. Con's way of working has never meshed well with the kernel development community, and he is showing little sign of wanting to change that situation. That is unfortunate; he is a talented developer who could do a lot to improve Linux for an important user community. The adoption of the current CFS scheduler is a direct result of his earlier work, even if he did not write the code which was actually merged. In general, though, improving Linux requires working with the Linux development community; in the absence of a desire to do that effectively, there will be severe limits on what a developer will be able to accomplish.

(See also: Frans Pop's benchmark tests, which show decidedly mixed results.)

Comments (25 posted)

News from the staging tree

The staging tree has made a lot of progress since it appeared in June 2008. To start with, the tree itself quickly moved into the mainline in October 2008; it also has accumulated more than 40 drivers of various sorts. Staging is an outgrowth of the Linux Driver Project that is meant to collect drivers, and other "standalone" code such as filesystems, that are not yet ready for the mainline. But, it was never meant to be a "dumping ground for dead code", as staging maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman put it in a recent status update. Code that is not being improved, so that it can move into the mainline, will be removed from the tree.

Some of the code that is, at least currently, slated for removal includes some fairly high-profile drivers, including one from Microsoft that was released with great fanfare in July. After a massive cleanup that resulted in more than 200 patches to get the code "into a semi-sane kernel coding style", Kroah-Hartman said that it may have to be removed in six months or so:

Microsoft is certainly not alone in Kroah-Hartman's report—which details the status of the tree for the upcoming 2.6.32 merge window—as several other large companies' drivers are in roughly the same boat. Drivers for Android hardware (staging/android), Intel's Management Engine Interface (MEI) hardware (staging/heci), among others were called out in the report. Both are slated for removal, android for 2.6.32, and heci in 2.6.33 (presumably). The latter provides an excellent example of how not to do Linux driver development:

Kroah-Hartman's lengthy report covers more than just drivers that may be removed; it also looks at those that have made progress, including some that should be moving to the mainline, as well as new drivers that are being added to staging. But the list of drivers that aren't being actively worked on is roughly as long as the other two lists combined, which is clearly suboptimal.

Presumably to see if folks read all the way through, Kroah-Hartman sprinkles a few laughs in an otherwise dry summary. For the me4000 and meilhaus drivers, he notes that there is no reason to continue those drivers "except to watch the RT guys squirm as they try to figure out the byzantine locking and build logic here (which certainly does count for something, cheap entertainment is always good.)"

He also notes several drivers that are in the inactive category, but are quite close to being merge-worthy. He suggests that developers looking for a way to contribute consider drivers such as asus_oled (Asus OLED display), frontier (Frontier digital audio workstation controller), line6 (PODxt Pro audio effects modeler), mimio (Mimio Xi interactive whiteboard), and panel (parallel port LCD/keypad). Each of those should be relatively easy to get into shape for inclusion in the mainline.

There are a fair number of new drivers being added for 2.6.32, including the Microsoft Hyper-V drivers (staging/hv) mentioned earlier, as well as VME bus drivers (staging/vme), the industrial I/O subsystem (staging/iio), and several wireless drivers (VIA vt6655 and vt6656, Realtek rtl8192e, and Ralink 3090). Also, "another COW driver" is being added: the Cowloop copy-on-write pseudo block driver (staging/cowloop).

Two of Evgeniy Polyakov's projects—mistakenly listed in the "new driver" section though they were added in 2.6.30—were also mentioned. The distributed storage (DST) network block device (staging/dst), which Kroah-Hartman notes may be "dead" is a candidate for removal, while the distributed filesystem POHMELFS (staging/pohmelfs) is mostly being worked on out-of-tree. Polyakov agrees that DST is not needed in the mainline, but is wondering about moving POHMELFS out of staging and into fs/. Since there are extensive changes on the way for POHMELFS, it is unlikely to move out of staging for another few kernel releases at least.

There was also praise for the work on various drivers which have been actively worked on over the last few months. Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz was singled out for his work on rt* and rtl* wireless drivers (which put him atop the list of most active 2.6.31 developers), along with Alan Cox for work on the et131x driver for the Agere gigabit Ethernet adapter. Johannes Berg noted that much of Zolnierkiewicz's work on the rt* drivers "will have been in vain" because of the progress being made by the rt2x00 project. But that doesn't faze Zolnierkiewicz:

At least one developer stepped up to work on one of the inactive drivers (asus_oled) in the thread. In addition, Willy Tarreau mentioned that he had heard from another who was working on panel, telling Kroah-Hartman: "This proves that the principle of the staging tree seems to work".

Overall, the staging tree seems to be doing exactly what Kroah-Hartman and others envisioned. Adding staging into the mainline, which raised the profile and availability of those drivers, has led to a fair amount of cleanup work, some of which has resulted in the drivers themselves moving out of staging and into the mainline. Some drivers seem to be falling by the wayside, but one would guess that Kroah-Hartman would welcome them back into the tree should anyone show up to work on them. In the meantime, the code certainly hasn't suffered from whatever fixes various kernel hackers found time to do. Those changes will be waiting for anyone who wants to pick that code back up, even if it is no longer part of staging.

Comments (11 posted)

POSIX v. reality: A position on O_PONIES

Sure, programmers (especially operating systems programmers) love their specifications. Clean, well-defined interfaces are a key element of scalable software development. But what is it about file systems, POSIX, and when file data is guaranteed to hit permanent storage that brings out the POSIX fundamentalist in all of us? The recent fsync()/rename()/O_PONIES controversy was the most heated in recent memory but not out of character for fsync()-related discussions. In this article, we'll explore the relationship between file systems developers, the POSIX file I/O standard, and people who just want to store their data.

In the beginning, there was creat()

Like many practical interfaces (including HTML and TCP/IP), the POSIX file system interface was implemented first and specified second. UNIX was written beginning in 1969; the first release of the POSIX specification for the UNIX file I/O interface (IEEE Standard 1003.1) was released in 1988. Before UNIX, application access to non-volatile storage (e.g., a spinning drum) was a decidedly application- and hardware-specific affair. Record-based file I/O was a common paradigm, growing naturally out of punch cards, and each kind of file was treated differently. The new interface was designed by a few guys (Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et alia) screwing around with their new machine, writing an operating system that would make it easier to, well, write more operating systems.

As we know now, the new I/O interface was a hit. It turned out to be a portable, versatile, simple paradigm that made modular software development much easier. It was by no means perfect, of course: a number of warts revealed themselves over time, not all of which were removed before the interface was codified into the POSIX specification. One example is directory hard links, which permit the creation of a directory cycle - a directory that is a descendant of itself - and its subsequent detachment from the file system hierarchy, resulting in allocated but inaccessible directories and files. Recording the time of the last access time - atime - turns every read into a tiny write. And don't forget the apocryphal quote from Ken Thompson when asked if he'd do anything differently if he were designing UNIX today: "If I had to do it over again? Hmm... I guess I'd spell 'creat' with an 'e'". (That's the creat() system call to create a new file.) But overall, the UNIX file system interface is a huge success.

POSIX file I/O today: Ponies and fsync()

Over time, various more-or-less portable additions have accreted around the standard set of POSIX file I/O interfaces; they have been occasionally standardized and added to the canon - revelations from latter-day prophets. Some examples off the top of my head include pread()/pwrite(), direct I/O, file preallocation, extended attributes, access control lists (ACLs) of every stripe and color, and a vast array of mount-time options. While these additions are often debated and implemented in incompatible forms, in most cases no one is trying to oppose them purely on the basis of not being present in a standard written in 1988. Similarly, there is relatively little debate about refusing to conform to some of the more brain-dead POSIX details, such as the aforementioned directory hard link feature.

Why, then, does the topic of when file system data is guaranteed to be "on disk" suddenly turn file systems developers into pedantic POSIX-quoting fundamentalists? Fundamentally (ha), the problem comes down to this: Waiting for data to actually hit disk before returning from a system call is a losing game for file system performance. As the most extreme example, the original synchronous version of the UNIX file system frequently used only 3-5% of the disk throughput. Nearly every file system performance improvement since then has been primarily the result of saving up writes so that we can allocate and write them out as a group. As file systems developers, we are going to look for every loophole in fsync() and squirm our way through it.

[PULL QUOTE: As file systems developers, we are going to look for every loophole in fsync() and squirm our way through it. END QUOTE] Fortunately for the file systems developers, the POSIX specification is so very minimal that it doesn't even mention the topic of file system behavior after a system crash. After all, the original FFS-style file systems (e.g., ext2) can theoretically lose your entire file system after a crash, and are still POSIX-compliant. Ironically, as file systems developers, we spend 90% of our brain power coming up with ways to quickly recover file system consistency after system crash! No wonder file systems users are irked when we define file system metadata as important enough to keep consistent, but not file data - we take care of our own so well. File systems developers have magnanimously conceded, though, that on return from fsync(), and only from fsync(), and only on a file system with the right mount options, the changes to that file will be available if the system crashes after that point.

At the same time, fsync() is often more expensive than it absolutely needs to be. The easiest way to implement fsync() is to force out every outstanding write to the file system, regardless of whether it is a journaling file system, a COW file system, or a file system with no crash recovery mechanism whatsoever. This is because it is very difficult to map backward from a given file to the dirty file system blocks needing to be written to disk in order to create a consistent file system containing those changes. For example, the block containing the bitmap for newly allocated file data blocks may also have been changed by a later allocation for a different file, which then requires that we also write out the indirect blocks pointing to the data for that second file, which changes another bitmap block... When you solve the problem of tracing specific dependencies of any particular write, you end up with the complexity of soft updates. No surprise then, that most file systems take the brute force approach, with the result that fsync() commonly takes time proportional to all outstanding writes to the file system.

So, now we have the following situation: fsync() is required to guarantee that file data is on stable storage, but it may perform arbitrarily poorly, depending on what other activity is going on in the file system. Given this situation, application developers came to rely on what is, on the face of it, a completely reasonable assumption: rename() of one file over another will either result in the contents of the old file, or the contents of the new file as of the time of the rename(). This is a subtle and interesting optimization: rather than asking the file system to synchronously write the data, it is instead a request to order the writes to the file system. Ordering writes is far easier for the file system to do efficiently than synchronous writes.

However, the ordering effect of rename() turns out to be a file system specific implementation side effect. It only works when changes to the file data in the file system are ordered with respect to changes in the file system metadata. In ext3/4, this is only true when the file system is mounted with the data=ordered mount option - a name which hopefully makes more sense now! Up until recently, data=ordered was the default journal mode for ext3, which, in turn, was the default file system for Linux; as a result, ext3 data=ordered was all that many Linux application developers had any experience with. During the Great File System Upheaval of 2.6.30, the default journal mode for ext3 changed to data=writeback, which means that file data will get written to disk when the file system feels like it, very likely after the file's metadata specifying where its contents are located has been written to disk. This not only breaks the rename() ordering assumption, but also means that the newly renamed file may contain arbitrary garbage - or a copy of /etc/shadow, making this a security hole as well as a data corruption problem.

Which brings us to the present day fsync/rename/O_PONIES controversy, in which many file systems developers argue that applications should explicitly call fsync() before renaming a file if they want the file's data to be on disk before the rename takes effect - a position which seems bizarre and random until you understand the individual decisions, each perfectly reasonable, that piled up to create the current situation. Personally, as a file systems developer, I think it is counterproductive to replace a performance-friendly implicit ordering request in the form of a rename() with an impossible to optimize fsync(). It may not be POSIX, but the programmer's intent is clear - no one ever, ever wrote "creat(); write(); close(); rename();" and hoped they would get an empty file if the system crashed during the next 5 minutes. That's what truncate() is for. A generalized "O_PONIES do-what-I-want" flag is indeed not possible, but in this case, it is to the file systems developers' benefit to extend the semantics of rename() to imply ordering so that we reduce the number of fsync() calls we have to cope with. (And, I have to note, I did have a real, live pony when I was a kid, so I tend to be on the side of giving programmers ponies when they ask for them.)

My opinion is that POSIX and most other useful standards are helpful clarifications of existing practice, but are not sufficient when we encounter surprising new circumstances. We criticize applications developers for using folk-programming practices ("It seems to work!") and coming to rely on file system-specific side effects, but the bare POSIX specification is clearly insufficient to define useful system behavior. In cases where programmer intent is unambiguous, we should do the right thing, and put the new behavior on the list for the next standards session.

Comments (119 posted)

Boots: a Fedora Remix

Foresight Linux is an offshoot of rPath. It uses Conary for package management, as well as other tools developed by rPath to create bleeding edge desktop distributions. Originally Foresight focused on GNOME, but later branched out to cover KDE and XFCE.

Things were a bit slow at Foresight recently, so Michael K. Johnson posted a "thought exercise" to the foresight-devel mailing list about a possible change for Foresight Linux to incite some discussion.

While Michael's proposal was not meant to be taken too seriously it did spark plenty of discussion, some here on LWN and more on the foresight-devel list, where a few people wondered how this discussion ended up on LWN. That's what we get for following -devel mailing lists.

What did become clear during this discussion was there was very little interest in rebasing Foresight, but there was interest in a Conary import of Fedora RPMs. This led to another proposal, to create "Boots, a Fedora Remix". Boots is a completely separate project, not to be confused with any possible rebase for Foresight. More information is available on this wiki page. The Foresight Council approved Boots as a sub-project on September 4, 2009.

Boots is mostly a binary import of Fedora, with packages modified or rebuilt from source as necessary. For example, PackageKit would be changed to use the Conary backend. There will be a full import of most of Fedora for x86 and x86_64 architectures. There will be no SELinux support or support for other architectures unless volunteers come forth to make it happen. Boots will comply with Fedora trademark guidelines so it will exclude trademark-related packages and use the secondary mark instead. Boots aims to be a good citizen in both the Fedora and Foresight communities.

While Foresight favors a rolling release model, some users have asked for a time-based releases. Some users have also asked for some server packages. While these have been outside of Foresight's scope, Boots will follow the time-based Fedora release schedule and include Fedora's server packages. A new version of Boots will follow each Fedora release and reproduce Fedora, bugs and all, while allowing users a choice of package management systems.

Boots users should note that while the rpm command will be included, using it could break your system. From the wiki: "the rpm command is on the installed system. If you choose to use it to install packages that conflict with Conary, you broke your system, and you get to keep both pieces."

rPath's distribution import tool mirrorball will be used to import Fedora packages into the boots.rpath.org repository. rPath is currently using mirrorball to maintain up-to-date imports of SLES 10, SLES 11, CentOS 5, and Scientific Linux 5 as maintained platforms, as well as Ubuntu Hardy as a proof of concept. Note that these are all server versions. Boots will be the first desktop distribution (after Foresight) to use the Conary package management system.

Boots packages will use the Fedora toolchain to maintain binary compatibility with Fedora. Foresight may or may not use the same toolchain, that is another discussion. Nonetheless, bleeding edge packages in Fedora may be rebuilt for Foresight. In any case Foresight can renew its focus on providing the latest desktop developments and allow Boots to focus on any server package requests and the time-based releases that users have requested.

Comments (1 posted)

Back Track FRHACK Edition v1 alpha1 released

Back Track FRHACK Editon v1 alpha 1 is out. The Edition is an updated/modified version of the latest BackTrack 4 release with updates and additional security- and cracking-oriented tools.

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DesktopBSD 1.7 available

The release of DesktopBSD 1.7 has been announced. "This new release comes with FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p3 as base system and KDE 3.5.10 as desktop environment and includes a large number of pre-installed applications. The easy-to-use graphical installer and utilities allow for a simple installation and configuration process."

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Ubuntu Karmic Alpha 5 released

Ubuntu's Karmic Koala Alpha 5 (Ubuntu 9.10) is available for testing. Images are also available for Ubuntu Server for UEC and EC2, Ubuntu ARM, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Mythbuntu.

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Debian switching to upstart

A recent debian-devel-announce posting describes in detail the problems faced by the current Debian boot system and what is being done to fix them. "Over the last few years, the boot system in Debian has progressively deteriorated due to changes in the Linux kernel which make the kernel more and more event based. For example, the kernel and its drivers no longer block all processing while detecting disks, network interfaces and other hardware, making the once trusty old boot system in Debian increasingly fragile." The solution is dependency-based init script sequencing (well in progress) and an upcoming switch to upstart.

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Bits from the GRUB maintainers

The GRUB maintainers take a look at the current status of GRUB 2 in Debian. "As you may have noticed, upgrades of the GRUB Legacy package (`grub') in unstable have begun using GRUB 2 (`grub-pc' package) as upgrade path. This means that tentatively, GRUB 2 is to be considered the option for Lenny to Squeeze upgrades. It should also become the option for new Squeeze installs. This decision is not final yet!"

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Release Team, BTS, and debian-release@ policy.

The Debian Release Team has decided to make use of the release.debian.org pseudo-package on the BTS. "The Release Team list policy has long been "this is not a discussion list, please go elsewhere". The reason has been that with too much discussion, it's easy to lose track of the release related requests. With the BTS, we hope this will not happen anymore. That's why we're considering relaxing the list policy to enclose matters like Release Goals discussions, arch qualifications, and similar matters."

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Patch Tagging Guidelines (aka DEP3)

Debian has a new standard defining meta-information to integrate on patches. "I just changed the status of this Debian Enhancement Proposal to CANDIDATE, that means that you are all encouraged to make use of it and try it out for real. Hopefully, http://patch-tracker.debian.org will gain support of this format and will allow smarter browsing based on those information." Feedback is requested.

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DebConf10 visa information available

DebConf10 will be held in New York City, USA, exact date to be determined soon. If you think you might need a visa it's not too early to start the process and to make sure your passport is current. Click below for visa information.

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Licensing policy for apps developed by Fedora Infrastructure now in effect

Fedora Infrastructure has been discussing having a consistent set of licenses for applications and scripts we create for Fedora. They have decided that libraries will be licensed under LGPLv2+ and applications will be licensed under GPLv2+.

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Mandriva Linux Community Words: Colin Guthrie

The Official Mandriva Blog has an interview with Colin Guthrie. Colin has been working on Compiz "for the pointless eye candy" and PulseAudio. "I now also look after PulseAudio. This has been a software system I've been pushing for the last couple years. I'm quite passionate about music (can't produce it but I do like appreciating it) and the way the audio system worked on Linux before PulseAudio really annoyed me. Now that is has come along, it has literally revolutionised my view of audio on Linux and while it's not without it's problem on some hardware, I'm fully committed to pushing it as a solution."

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KVM is the feather in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (ars Technica)

ars Technica covers a change in virtualization software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4. "Red Hat announced Wednesday the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, a new major point update of the company's popular commercial Linux distribution. This version introduces official support for KVM and marks an important milestone in Red Hat's gradual transition away from Xen. KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine, is an open source framework that brings native full virtualization to the Linux kernel."

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Wieers: Is 7 years of RHEL support still sufficient ?

Dag Wieers wonders whether seven years of support is enough for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). He looks at the increasing time span between RHEL major releases and notes that the support window may close before customers are ready. "Let me explain what I mean. When Red Hat released RHEL2.1, seven years of support was perfect, seemed more than one would want. RHEL3 came 18 months after RHEL2.1 and after one year of testing RHEL3 and 3rd party integration new systems could be deployed, giving you 6 years of support. Your hardware would usually not outlive the operating system support."

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Interview with Eric Hameleers: Why You Should Try Slackware (Linux Magazine)

Linux Magazine interviews Eric Hameleers about his work with Slackware. "To me, Slackware's philosophy has a different angle that sets it apart from all the others. To this day, Slackware has an extremely lean design, intended to make you experience Linux the way the software authors intended. This is accomplished by applying patches as little as possible - preferably for stability or compatibility reasons only. Slackware's package manager (yes, it has one, pkgtools!) stays out of your way by not forcing dependency resolution. And the clean, well-documented system scripts (written in bash instead of ruby) allow for a large degree of control over how your system functions. Slackware does not try to assume or anticipate."

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 319

The DistroWatch Weekly for September 7, 2009 is out. "Continuing with our series of first looks at small and minimalist distributions, Caitlyn Martin tries xPUD, a 50 MB live CD with an unusual user interface, suitable for netbooks and web kiosks. Is xPUD ready for prime time? Or does the version number of 0.9 indicate that the distro still needs some polishing before it can be considered a competitor to Moblin and similar projects? Read on to find out. In the news section, the new Slackware Linux 13.0 maintains much interest in the Linux user community, Lubuntu announces the first testing release of its lightweight distribution that combines Ubuntu with LXDE, Debian prepares to replace the old SysVInit start-up system with the more modern upstart, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 arrives with a new virtualisation option and many new kernel patches. Also in the news, fans of BSD on the desktop will be thrilled to learn that DesktopBSD is back with a new release, while Mandriva developer Colin Guthrie tells us about his recent work on Compiz and PulseAudio. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com August 2009 donation is the Linux MultiMedia Studio (LMMS) project. Happy reading!"

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Fedora Weekly News 192

The Fedora Weekly News for September 6, 2009 is out. "Our issue kicks off with announcements, including news that major segments of fedoraproject.org and the Fedora Project infrastructure now support IPv6, and details of a new licensing policy for apps developed by the Fedora infrastructure team. News from Planet Fedora is back in this issue, covering interesting posts and commentary from the Fedora blogosphere. In marketing news, coverage of the major marketing deliverables for releases, and how Fedora Ambassadors can assist with F12 marketing, along with an exciting proposal for a Fedora special issue of Linux Pro Magazine that is being considered. In Ambassador news, details on the upcoming Utah Open Source Conference and a report from a free software workshop at KLN Madurai. In Quality Assurance news, updates from recent Test Days and Fit and Finish test days, along with all the week's news of team meetings. The Translation beat provides us with various Transifex-related updates coming soon. In Design news, a request for a logo for a Fedora Chilean event. Our issue completes with a variety of virtualization-related news, including new Fedora 12 features, and future developments to the Xen dom0 kernels. Enjoy FWN 192!"

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The Mint Newsletter - issue 92

This issue of the Mint Newsletter covers the status of the Fluxbox edition and much more.

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OpenSUSE Weekly News/87

This issues of the OpenSUSE Weekly News covers Keynote Update: Lenz Grimmer to Keynote openSUSE Conference, Masim Sugianto: Indonesian openSUSE Event : Zimbra Community Training, Pavol Rusnak: New RPM in openSUSE Factory, Unixmen/M.Zinoune: Usefull extensions for openoffice, Andrew Wafaa: Guide To Goblin and more.

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #158

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for September 5, 2009 is out. "In this issue we cover: Karmic Koala Alpha 5 released, New Ubuntu TechBoard for 2009, Jono Bacon: Three Years At Canonical, Canonical adds Advanced Ubuntu Service and Support, Ubuntu Stats, Ubuntu LoCo News, Karmic gets another cloud tool: Tahoe-LAFS, Ubuntu Forums Tutorial of the week & Report Abuse Icon, Ubuntu Developer Week Summaries, Help Fill in the Ubuntu IRC channels, Ubuntu Podcast Quickie #11, Ubuntu-UK podcast: The Android Invasion, and much, much more!"

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ROSE Blog Interviews: Meike Reichle, Debian Developer (Linux Magazine)

Linux Magazine's ROSE weblog has an interview with Debian developer Meike Reichle. The interview covers a number of topics including Reichle's thoughts on why more women should get involved in free software development and how the community operates. She also has some advice on finding employment: "So, if you have some time (for instance if you are still in school or at a college or university), the best way to get such a job is surely to make a name for yourself in the community first. The best way to get into an Open Source company is if there's no need for introduction. If that is not a choice, I would recommend visiting a couple of Open Source events and personally introduce yourself to prospective employers."

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Zenwalk Linux 6.2 Released (ZDNet UK)

J.A. Watson takes a look at the latest Zenwalk release. "First, you need to be aware that although there are at least four different versions of the Zenwalk distribution (Standard, Core, Live and Gnome), at this point only the Standard Edition has been updated to the 6.2 release. Don't get confused - the LiveCD is not the 6.2 release (yet), and the Standard Edition is an installation CD, not a LiveCD, so the only thing you can do is download and install it, you can't just "try it out" yet."

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Developing applications "Quickly"

Quickly is a new utility to simplify Linux application development by bootstrapping repetitive project setup, user interface, packaging, and release chores. It targets both new application developers and those who simply want to speed up recurring tasks. Quickly is a product of the Ubuntu project, but is flexible enough to be used in other distributions and for other types of tasks — the real power of Quickly lies in the templates that automate different aspects of project configuration and maintenance.

An application built using Quickly has no dependency on Quickly itself, said developer Didier Roche, "there is no Quickly runtime or base class library." The goal, he said, is to speed up the process for regular developers and help new developers get past the barrier of deciding which tools and approaches to use.

Canonical's Rick Spencer came up with the initial idea for Quickly after a series of false starts with missing documentation — including the deprecated tool libglade that did not point him towards its replacement gtkbuilder — and packaging guides that were so generalized that they provided little concrete help:

The latest version of Quickly is 0.2.2 and is packaged only for Ubuntu 9.10, in which it is slated to be part of the official release. The authors note, however, that it could easily be packaged for Ubuntu 9.04 or for other distributions. Quickly is a command-line only tool that developers can use to execute discrete steps of the form:

    quickly command [options]

It has commands that create a new project, start an editing session, package it, make a public release, and so on.

Most of these commands are defined in a template tailored to a specific scenario; running "quickly commands" will list the built-in commands and those associated with each installed template. So far, the only released template is ubuntu-project, which automates working with Ubuntu-compatible code (using Bazaar for version control, Debian packaging, and Launchpad.net Personal Package Archives (PPA) for releases).

In addition, the ubuntu-project template makes what Roche called "opinionated choices" for the tools and technologies used by the new application: using Python for the language, PyGTK for the user interface, Glade for the UI design, Gedit for the editor, and Desktop CouchDB for (optional) data storage. Using the template's project creation routines to start a new project, Quickly creates a subdirectory for the project and set of skeleton files, including necessary Python and Glade files, plus auxiliary icon and licensing files. Quickly also creates Python classes to encapsulate basic windows and dialogs, and a separate Glade file for each class and window. These decisions are designed to make it simple to edit the application with Quickly, even though they might not be the design choices other programmers would make.

Example Quickly usage

The Ubuntu wiki features a basic tutorial on writing code with Quickly, and Roche has started a series of blog entries to document its usage and options. On August 31, Roche and Spencer hosted an IRC talk during Ubuntu Developer Week that delved into further detail.

The process starts by running:

    quickly create ubuntu-project myapp

Quickly then creates a ./myapp directory, and fills it with:

    bin/
    Copyright
    data/
    myapp/
    myapp.desktop.in
    setup.py

The Python files are placed in myapp/myapp, and the Glade files in myapp/data. After that, the developer must cd into the myapp directory. From there, quickly run will launch the new application, quickly edit will open the key Python files in Gedit, and quickly glade will open the UI files with Glade. Because the focus of the ubuntu-project template is on graphical applications, a quickly dialog command is available to create a new dialog window and associated class in Glade and Python.

Running quickly save will save the code to Bazaar, quickly license some_license will add license headers, and quickly package will calculate dependencies and generate a .deb package. Public releases are made with quickly share and quickly release. Both commands require the user to have a working account on Launchpad.net, complete with a PPA. The difference between the two commands is that share does not assign a version number or allow for a change log; release automatically increments version numbers, although they can be overridden.

Quickly design: core and templates

At its core, Roche explained, the quickly tool itself is essentially a parser and command processor. It checks context (for example, whether the working directory is a Quickly project directory), provides command completion, help, and a few low-level hooks, but most of the logic resides in the templates. Templates are written in Python, and although there is no documentation for template writing available yet, interested parties can browse the code used in the ubuntu-project template, which is installed by the package at /usr/share/quickly/templates/ubuntu-project.

Roche said that the Quickly team decided to separate as much of the "intelligence" as possible from the quickly core in order to make it more useful. "If anyone wants to make templates for other platforms, we would gladly merge those into our project," he said, perhaps separating Quickly templates into its own subproject from Quickly Core. "We would love to see, for instance, a fedora-project template, gnome-project one, plasmoid-project, [or a] zeitgeist-plugin."

Quickly even makes it simple to duplicate an existing template in order to customize it; the built-in command:

    quickly quickly template

creates a duplicate. The user can then modify the new template for use with other editors, other version control systems, or make more substantial changes without starting from scratch. "If someone likes the ubuntu-project template but doesn't agree on, let's say, couchdb but prefers gconf, he is able to create his own template based on ubuntu-project with $ quickly quickly ubuntu-project ubuntu-project-with-gconf and then hack in ~/quickly-templates/ubuntu-project-with-gconf/ to tweak what interests him," said Roche.

Quickly's core/template separation means that it is not limited to standalone GUI Linux application development. As the project's Launchpad page states, developers could easily create a template to kick-start creation of a conforming plugin for a specific application, for working with rendering systems like LaTeX, or for non-coding projects like documentation tasks.

As additional templates are written by Quickly users, Roche said, the team will coordinate with template authors to see what shared functionality deserves to be rolled up into built-in commands. Regardless of the task, some operations like file upload are generic enough for reuse. Quickly's Launchpad access is one such example; it began as part of the ubuntu-project template, but is now accessible to other template authors through Quickly's core — abstracting sign-in, reconnections, and other tasks.

Quickly in practice

Quickly is on track to ship with Ubuntu "Karmic Koala" 9.10, though Spencer said he does not know of any official Karmic applications written with Quickly. A few developers have started using the package to build small applications; Jono Bacon blogged about his use of Quickly while working on a tool for managing Amazon Kindle content, and Bryce Harrington has started developing a GUI front-end to Quickly — using Quickly itself.

Roche said that the near-term plans for the ubuntu-project template include adding some important features like GPG and SSH key creation for use with package signing and Launchpad upload. The team is also interested in adding new templates, including an ubuntu-game template that incorporates PyGame, and a gedit-plugin template that would demonstrate Quickly's applicability for application-specific plugin project development.

In the long term, Roche said that Quickly should be able to scale up to large projects in addition to the modest single-developer examples shown so far. It already supports concurrent Bazaar access, but the ubuntu-project template does not support Launchpad's "teams" collaboration feature because it is not accessible via the Launchpadlib library. Nevertheless, he said, the Quickly team is actively working on the issue and hopes to be able to tackle it in the future.

An early review of Quickly at Ars Technica compared it to Rails, which also uses a command-line to automate set-up for non-command-line projects. Readers responded that it also bears similarity to Django and Maven project creation, but it may be a first for desktop applications. Although, as Roche said, nothing about Quickly's core or its templating system limit it to desktop application development. Any repetitive task could be sped up by being adapted into a Quickly template; which templates the world sees depends entirely on who picks up Quickly and experiments with it.

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alsa-lib 1.0.21a released

Version 1.0.21a of alsa-lib has been announced. "I made a quick release 1.0.21a of the alsa-lib package to fix regression for the configuration parsing (makes some device names unavailable)."

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Firebird 1.5.6 release candidate is available

A release candidate for version 1.5.6 of the Firebird DBMS has been announced. "The Firebird Core team invites users who want to continue using Firebird 1.5 to test the release candidate for V.1.5.6. 32-bit kits are available for Linux and Windows now. NOTE :: This will become the LAST sub-release for the V.1.5 series."

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MySQL Community Server 5.1.38 released

Version 5.1.38 of MySQL Community Server has been announced. "MySQL Community Server 5.1.38, a new version of the popular Open Source Database Management System, has been released. MySQL 5.1.38 is recommended for use on production systems."

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The September 6, 2009 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.

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GT portalBase released under GPL

The GT portalBase has been released under GPL. "On its fourth anniversary, GT portalBase has been released under a GPL open source license. GT portalBase is a web based industrial strength platform for business application development based on a postgresql database. It's used to rapidly prototype and develop data entry and reporting applications that work over the internet or a local network. Our vision was to create a product that allowed business analysts to create lean, agile, Just-In-Time (JIT) back offices."

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LADI Session Handler - Preview 1 announced

The Preview 1 release of LADI Session Handler is available. "LADI Session Handler or simply ladish is a session management system for JACK applications on GNU/Linux. Its aim is to allow you to have many different audio programs running at once, to save their setup, close them down and then easily reload the setup at some other time. ladish doesn't deal with any kind of audio or MIDI data itself; it just runs programs, deals with saving/loading (arbitrary) data and connects JACK ports together. It can also be used to move entire sessions between computers, or post sessions on the Internet for download."

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PLplot 5.9.5 has been released

Version 5.9.5 of PLplot, a cross-platform scientific graphics plotting library, has been announced. "This is a development release of PLplot. It represents the ongoing efforts of the community to improve the PLplot plotting package. Development releases in the 5.9.x series will be available every few months. The next full release will be 5.10.0."

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GNOME Journal Issue 16

Issue #16 of the GNOME Journal has been announced. "Issue 16 features three new articles, including a recap of the recent Writing Open Source Conference, an interview with John Palmieri based on his recent GUADEC talk, "Putting the Network back into G(N)OME", and Behind the Scenes with Lucas Rocha (who originally started the Behind the Scenes feature). Issue 17 is currently being planned with a focus on Multimedia - if you would like to contribute an article, please let me know."

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GNOME Software Announcements

The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:

• at-spi 1.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• Brasero 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• buzztard 0.5.0 (new features, bug fixes and code cleanup)
• Cheese 2.27.92 (documentation and translation work)
• Deskbar-Applet 2.27.92 (bug fix and translation work)
• Devhelp 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• EOG Plugins 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• epiphany-extensions 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• Eye of GNOME 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• GCalctool 5.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• GLib 2.21.6 (bug fixes and translation work)
• gnome-applets 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• gnome-games 2.27.92 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• gnome-packagekit 2.27.92 (new feature, bug fixes and translation work)
• GNOME Power Manager 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• gnome-settings-daemon 2.27.92 (new feature, bug fix and translation work)
• GNOME Shell 2.27.2 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
• Gnumeric 1.9.11 (new features and bug fixes)
• gobject-introspection 0.6.5 (build and bug fixes)
• GOK 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• gstreamermm-0.10.5 (build fix)
• GTK+ 2.17.11 (unstable development release)
• gtkmm 2.17.11 (new features and code cleanup)
• gtkmm-documentation 2.17.0 (documentation work)
• libchamplain 0.3.92 (new features and bug fixes)
• mm-common 0.7.3 (new features)
• mousetweaks 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• Mutter 2.27.4 (bug fixes, code cleanup and translation work)
• Orca 2.27.92 (bug fixes and translation work)
• SeaMonkey 1.1.18 (security release)

You can find more new GNOME software releases at gnomefiles.org.

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KDE Software Announcements

The following new KDE software has been announced this week:

• Amarok 2.2 beta 1 (new features and bug fixes)
• Converseen 0.1 (initial release)
• KrossWordPuzzle 0.5 (unspecified)
• SwapChanger 0.1 (initial release)

You can find more new KDE software releases at kde-apps.org.

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Xorg Software Announcements

The following new Xorg software has been announced this week:

• libX11 1.1.6 (bug fix)
• xf86-input-keyboard 1.3.99.1 (new features, bug fixes and code cleanup)
• xf86-input-mouse 1.4.99.1 (new feature, bug fixes and code cleanup)
• xf86-input-synaptics 1.1.99.1 (new features, bug fixes and documentation work)
• xf86-video-ark 0.7.2 (bug fixes, code cleanup and documentation work)
• xf86-video-newport 0.2.3 (new feature and code cleanup)
• xf86-video-rendition 4.2.3 (new feature and code cleanup)
• xf86-video-sunffb 1.2.1 (code cleanup and documentation work)
• xf86-video-tga 1.2.1 (new features and code cleanup
• xf86-video-tseng 1.2.3 (new feature and code cleanup)
• xf86-video-vmware 10.16.8 (bug fixes and code cleanup)
• xf86-video-xgi 1.5.1 (new features, bug fixes and code cleanup)
• xf86-video-xgixp 1.7.99.4 (new features, bug fixes, code cleanup and documentation work)
• xorg-server 1.6.99.900 (new features, bug fixes and code cleanup)

More information can be found on the X.Org Foundation wiki.

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GnuPG 1.4.10 released

Version 1.4.10 of GnuPG has been announced. "We are pleased to announce the availability of a new stable GnuPG-1 release: Version 1.4.10. The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is GNU's tool for secure communication and data storage. It is a complete and free replacement of PGP and can be used to encrypt data and to create digital signatures."

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GnuPG 2.0.13 released

Version 2.0.13 of GnuPG has been announced. "We are pleased to announce the availability of a new stable GnuPG-2 release: Version 2.0.13."

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wxWidgets 2.9.0 released

Version 2.9.0 of the wxWidgets cross-platform GUI toolkit has been announced. "We are pleased to announce the first release in the 2.9 development series. wxWidgets 2.9.0 gives a flavour of what will be provided in the stable wxWidgets 3.0 version next year, and we are interested in your feedback. Enhancements in 2.9 include the removal of the distinction between ANSI and Unicode builds, and a reworked Mac OS X architecture, supporting both 32-bit Carbon and 32-bit/64-bit Cocoa variants (wxOSX/Cocoa at alpha stage)."

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A GIMP 2.8 preview

The gimpusers.com site has a preview of new features in the upcoming GIMP 2.8 release. "It's now possible to group layers into folders in a tree-like way. You can move and show/hide all layers of a group at once so it will finally be possible to create complex layouts without getting lost. The layer sets don't work perfectly, since layer masks don't work yet for example. Nevertheless the basic behaviour works quite well already!" 16-bit image depth is not on the list, unfortunately.

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Wine 1.1.29 announced

Version 1.1.29 of Wine has been announced. Changes include: "- Improved Gecko integration by using Wine's network layers. - Use of external libmpg123 for mp3 decoding. - Support for JPEG and PNG formats in WindowsCodecs. - Many regression test fixes for Win64 and Windows 7. - Various bug fixes."

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Sylph-Searcher 1.2.0 beta 1 released

Version 1.2.0 beta 1 of Sylph-Searcher has been announced, it adds a number of new capabilities. "Sylph-Searcher is a program that enables fast full-text search of messages stored in mailboxes of Sylpheed, or normal MH folders."

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NMM 2.0.0 released

Version 2.0.0 of NMM has been announced. "Motama released the next major version of its Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware (NMM) for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X: NMM 2.0.0 Codename "Seamlessly"."

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xwax 0.6 released

Version 0.6 of xwax has been announced, it includes several new capabilities and some bug fixes. "xwax is open-source vinyl emulation software for Linux. It allows DJs and turntablists to playback digital audio files (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and more), controlled using a normal pair of turntables via timecoded vinyls."

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OpenOffice.org release 2.4.3 is available

Version 2.4.3 of OpenOffice.org has been announced. "The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.4.3, a minor update to the legacy OpenOffice.org 2.x series."

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OpenOffice.org Newsletter

The August, 2009 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is out with the latest OO.o office suite articles and events.

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Frankencamera is open source, runs on Linux (CNet Asia)

Leonard Goh takes a look at Frankencamera. "Photo scientists at Stanford University have conceived what is probably the world's first open-source camera. Their contraption, dubbed the Frankencamera, consists of a Nokia N95 mobile phone camera module, circuit board, a couple of lenses from Canon and Linux for all the open-source goodness."

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Open Source Photo Processing Comes of Age (a digiKam review)

Here's a review of digiKam found on the "An alien's viewpoint" weblog. "Happily, there is now another open source alternative with 16 bit mode editing capabilities which appears to be getting ready to give the big guys a run for their money – digiKam. I have personally only recently discovered digiKam. Well, I had tried it before, but only since I tried its KDE4 edition did I think it was ready for my use. I was actually quite surprised to see how much it has improved and how many features have been included with it."

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DigiKam Digest

The August 31, 2009 issue of the DigiKam Digest has been published. "This week we saw finishing of work on new color management code; updating of libraw to stable 0.8.1 (28 new cameras comparing to previous 0.7.x stable release, API extension and fixes); optimizations in thumbnails display; preparations for 1.0-beta4 (released on 31st August)."

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Thurman: Writing apps for the N900, part 1

Thomas Thurman has posted the first part in a series on writing GTK applications for the N900 device. "Now, there’s two important things you have to consider when porting or building an app on the N900. One of them, which we’ve just mentioned, is that sometimes there are widgets which don’t exist on the desktop, because they work in ways which are better adapted to life on a phone. The other is that there’s a whole ecosystem of programs on the device with which we must play nicely."

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Thurman: Writing apps for the N900, part 2 - packaging

Thomas Thurman continues his series on writing GTK applications for the N900. In this installment, he looks at packaging issues, but also puts to rest some concerns expressed about his previous post: "If you want to write Qt applications, you can write them now under Maemo 5 and they'll run; if you write GTK applications now, they will still run under Maemo 6 when it comes out. The GTK libraries won't stop shipping with Maemo just because Qt becomes the primary toolkit."

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Caml Weekly News

The September 8, 2009 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new articles about the Caml language.

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IcedTea6 1.6 released

Version 1.6 of IcedTea6 has been announced, it includes a new feature, a bunch of security updates and some bug fixes. "The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from OpenJDK7 using Free Software build tools. It also includes the only Free Java plugin and Web Start implementation, and support for additional architectures over and above x86, x86_64 and SPARC via the Zero assembler port."

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Jato 0.0.1 - a simple JIT-only virtual machine for Java

Version 0.0.1 of Jato has been announced. "Jato is a JIT-only virtual machine for Java that can run some simple programs under GNU/Linux on modern 32-bit x86 CPUs. A port to the x86-64 machine architecture is currently being developed. Jato depends on GNU Classpath to provide core Java runtime classes. The VM is licensed under the GPLv2 with the GNU Classpath linking exception which makes embedding Jato to third-party applications possible."

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Distribute 0.6.1 released

Version 0.6.1 of Distribute has been announced, it includes several bug fixes. "Distribute is a friendly fork of the Setuptools project."

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PyBindGen 0.12 released

Version 0.12 of PyBindGen has been announced, it includes new capabilities and bug fixes. "PyBindGen is a Python module that is geared to generating C/C++ code that binds a C/C++ library for Python. It does so without extensive use of either C++ templates or C pre-processor macros. It has modular handling of C/C++ types, and can be easily extended with Python plugins. The generated code is almost as clean as what a human programmer would write."

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Pydev 1.5.0: Pydev Extensions open sourced

Version 1.5.0 of Pydev has been announced. "Today, Aptana is proud to announce that Pydev and Pydev Extensions have become a single plugin, with all the available contents open source (and freely available for anyone) in the 1.5.0 release (it's the same as 1.4.8 but with all the code open source). With that, Aptana believes in providing a better service and growth path for Pydev (which will still be actively maintained by Aptana), enabling anyone to provide contributions to the previously closed source product, while providing its Cloud customers a better service."

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Python Keyring Lib v0.2 released

Version 0.2 of Python Keyring Lib has been announced, it includes bug fixes. "The Python keyring lib provides a easy way to access the system keyring service from python. It can be used in any application that needs safe password storage."

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Sphinx 0.6.3 released

Version 0.6.3 of Sphinx has been announced. "I'm proud to announce the release of Sphinx 0.6.3, which is a bugfix-only release in the 0.6 series. Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation for Python projects (or other documents consisting of multiple reStructuredText source files)."

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TestFixtures 1.6.1 released

Version 1.6.1 of TestFixtures has been announced. "This package is a collection of helpers and mock objects that are useful when writing unit tests or doc tests. This release sees the following changes: - @replace and Replacer.replace can now replace attributes that may not be present, provided the `strict` parameter is passed as False. - should_raise now catches BaseException rather than Exception so raising of SystemExit and KeyboardInterrupt can be tested. "

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Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links

The September 2, 2009 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.

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EFF: National Coalition of Authors Urge Rejection of Google Book Search Deal

A coalition of authors and publishers is urging a federal judge to reject the proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google Book Search, arguing that the sweeping agreement to digitize millions of books ignores critical privacy rights for readers and writers. "The settlement, currently pending approval from a New York federal district court, would end the legal challenges brought by the Authors' Guild over the Google Book Search project. It would give Google the green light to scan and digitize millions of books and allow users to search for and read those books online. However, Google's system could monitor what books users search for, how much of the books they read, and how long they spend on various pages."

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The Open Invention Network acquires 22 more patents

The Open Invention Network has announced the acquisition of 22 software patents formerly owned by Microsoft. "We are pleased to have purchased these patents and view this as a model of successful collaboration among defensive patent organizations that share a common goal of creating freedom of action for practicing entities across Linux and the broader technology sector. The prospect of these patents being placed in the hands of non-practicing entities was a threat that has been averted with these purchases, irrespective of patent quality and whether or not the patents truly read on Linux."

Information on what the patents actually covered remains scarce. Readers wanting a conspiratorial view of the whole thing can find it at Groklaw.

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Canonical adds advanced Ubuntu service and support offering

Canonical has announced a new support service. "Canonical, the founder of the Ubuntu project, announced today an advanced service and support offering that gives large enterprises with complex IT environments a highly-skilled, dedicated Canonical support professional. Premium Service Engineer (PSE), a new level of support for large enterprises, offers a single point of contact for Canonical's large customers - enabling a faster response time and faster issue resolution. PSEs have access to all levels of support, including Canonical's platform engineers."

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Red Hat and HP optimize RHEL virtualization for HP BladeSystem (Reuters)

Reuters reports on a collaboration between Red Hat and HP. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is now available on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers. With this combination, customers can take advantage of an open source, standards-based virtual infrastructure that provides scalability and security capabilities. Additionally, enterprises will be able to leverage management capabilities offered by both companies."

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Drupal's new trademark policy

Drupal would appear to be the latest project which is attempting to assert heavy-handed control through the use of a new trademark policy; complaints from users are beginning to appear. "This policy - as well as the accompanying website - may be changed at any time. You accept that all licenses accorded under this policy are non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sub-licensable, revocable at any time, and subject to changes in policy. Hence, changes in this policy may cause permissions to be revoked or made dependent on additional obligations."

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EU investigates Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun

The EU Commission has issued a press release regarding Oracle's plans to acquire Sun. "The European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation under the EU Merger Regulation into the planned acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, a US database and application software company. The Commission’s initial market investigation indicated that the proposed acquisition would raise serious doubts as to its compatibility with the Single Market because of competition concerns on the market for databases. The decision to open an in-depth inquiry does not prejudge the final result of the investigation. The Commission now has 90 working days, until 19 January 2010, to take a final decision on whether the concentration would significantly impede effective competition within the European Economic Area (EEA) or a substantial part of it." (Found on Groklaw).

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Medical : Sourceforge Project of the Month (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews notes that the application Medical has won an award. "Medical, the Open Source Health and Hospital Information System, has been the winner in SourceForge project of the month. In the latest release, Medical includes a new section on genetics (NCBI / genecards) and family history. It also contains perinatal and puerperium information. Medical is part of the GNU solidario project, a non-profit effort to provide Health and Education to emerging economies with free software."

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Distro Summit 2010: Call for Papers

A call for papers has gone out for the Distro Summit 2010, submissions are due by September 30. "Distro Summit 2010 is a one-day technical conference with a strong focus on collaboration between Free Software distributions. The event is hosted at the linux.conf.au, which will be held in Wellington (New Zealand) on the 18-23 of January, 2010. We are looking for proposals from any Free Software distribution, from the typical full distributions (both linux and non-linux) to the niche market derivatives."

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GitTogether '09 Developer/User Summit

The GitTogether '09 Developer/User Summit takes place on October 27-29, 2009 in Mountain View, CA, proposals are being solicited. "Like last year, this GitTogether immediately follows the Google Summer of Code mentor summit, so some of our end-user groups may already have representatives in the area and might like to attend. We've timed the GitTogether to follow the summit so we can get some users to attend while they are still in the area. Git contributors and users alike are welcome to attend. Admission is free, as everything is being donated by Google, but you will need to arrange for your own travel and lodging."

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PyCon 2010: Call for Proposals

A call for proposals has gone out for PyCon 2010, which takes place on February 17-25, 2010 in Atlanta, GA. "Due date: October 1st, 2009 Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have hundreds of people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some hot button issue you think the community needs to address, or have some package, code or project you simply love talking about? Want to launch your master plan to take over the world with python?"

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The SCALE 8x CFP is open

A call for papers has gone out for SCALE 8x, abstracts are due by December 15. "The Eighth Annual So Cal Linux Expo is coming! It will be February 19th-21st, 2010, and will again be at the Westin LAX. The Call for Papers for the conference is now open. Besides the regular conference tracks, SCALE 8x will include specialty tracks for both developers and beginners."

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Akademy 2010 in Tampere, Finland (KDEDot)

KDE.News has announced Akademy 2010, the date will be late June or early July. "The KDE community is proud to announce the location of next year's Akademy: Tampere, Finland. Akademy is the yearly world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE. After a successful Akademy 2009 on the Canary Islands, as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Akademy heads north to the birthplace of Linux where contributors will enjoy the midnight sun as they spend a week to present, plan and participate in the development of KDE software."

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ELC-E 2009 registration has opened

Registration has opened for ELC-E 2009. "The next Embedded Linux Conference event is upcoming: ELC-E 2009, October 15&16, Grenoble France. I'd like to inform you that registration has opened, and we managed to line up a very exciting program this year!"

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Ninux Day 2009, Rome Italy

Ninux Day 2009 takes place in Rome, Italy on November 27-29, 2009. "The Ninux.org team is glad to announce the first "Ninux Day", the only day that lasts a weekend ;) A weekend surreal time slot on topics about wireless communities. Under the same roof for the first time you'll find hackers, geeks, nerds, engineers, artists, curious and academics."

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Lenz Grimmer to Keynote openSUSE Conference

The openSUSE Conference keynote speaker has been announced. "The openSUSE Project is happy to announce that Lenz Grimmer will be delivering the opening keynote for the first-ever openSUSE Conference. The openSUSE Conference will be held September 17 through September 20 in Nürnberg, Germany."

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PostgreSQL Conference West registration opens

Registration is open for the PostgreSQL Conference West. "Being held at Seattle Central Community College from October 16th 2009 through October 18th 2009, West is set to be the venue for PostgreSQL education, advocacy and technical information transfer."

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Events: September 17, 2009 to November 16, 2009

The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.

Date(s)	Event	Location
September 14 September 18	Django Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
September 15 September 17	International Conference on IT Security Incident Management and IT Forensics	Stuttgart, Germany
September 17 September 18	Internet Security Operations and Intelligence 7	San Diego, CA, USA
September 17 September 20	openSUSE Conference	Nuremberg, Germany
September 18 September 19	BruCON	Brussels, Belgium
September 18 September 20	EuroBSDCon 2009	Cambridge, UK
September 19	Atlanta Linux Fest 2009	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
September 19	Beijing Perl Workshop	Beijing, China
September 19	Software Freedom Day	Worldwide
September 20	SELinux Developer Summit 2009 @ LinuxCon	Portland, Oregon, USA
September 21 September 23	LinuxCon 2009	Portland, OR, USA
September 21 September 25	Ruby on Rails Bootcamp with Charles B. Quinn	Atlanta, USA
September 23 September 25	Linux Plumbers Conference	Portland, Oregon, USA
September 23 September 25	Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection	Saint-Malo, Brittany, France
September 23 September 25	OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2009	Hamburg, Germany
September 23	Bacula Conference 2009	Cologne, Germany
September 24 September 26	Joomla! and Virtue Mart Day Germany	Bad Nauheim, Germany
September 25 September 27	International Conference on Open Source	Taipei, Taiwan
September 25 September 27	Ohio LinuxFest	Columbus, Ohio, USA
September 26 September 27	PyCon India 2009	Bengaluru, India
September 26	Open Source Conference 2009 Okinawa	Ginowan City, Okinawa, Japan
September 26 September 27	Mini-DebConf at ICOS	Taipei, Taiwan
September 28 September 30	Real time Linux workshop	Dresden, Germany
September 28 September 30	X Developers' Conference 2009	Portland, OR, USA
September 28 October 2	Sixteenth Annual Tcl/Tk Conference (2009)	Portland, OR 97232, USA
September 30	HCC!Linux Theme Day	Houten, Netherlands
October 1 October 2	Open World Forum	Paris, France
October 2 October 4	7th International Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics	Mountain View, CA, USA
October 2	LLVM Developers' Meeting	Cupertino, CA, USA
October 2 October 4	Linux Autumn (Jesien Linuksowa) 2009	Huta Szklana, Poland
October 2 October 4	Ubuntu Global Jam	Online, Online
October 2 October 3	Open Source Developers Conference France	Paris, France
October 2	Mozilla Public DevDay/Open Web Camp 2009	Prague, Czech Republic
October 3 October 4	T-DOSE 2009	Eindhoven, The Netherlands
October 3 October 4	EU MozCamp 2009	Prague, Czech Republic
October 7 October 9	Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre	Santiago, Chile
October 8 October 10	Utah Open Source Conference	Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
October 9 October 11	Maemo Summit 2009	Amsterdam, The Netherlands
October 10 October 12	Gnome Boston Summit	Cambridge, MA, USA
October 10	OSDN Conference 2009	Kiev, Ukraine
October 12 October 14	Qt Developer Days	Munich, Germany
October 15 October 16	Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2009	Grenoble, France
October 16 October 17	Pycon Poland 2009	Ustron, Poland
October 16 October 18	Pg Conference West 09	Seattle, WA, USA
October 16 October 18	German Ubuntu conference	Göttingen, Germany
October 18 October 20	2009 Kernel Summit	Tokyo, Japan
October 19 October 22	ZendCon 2009	San Jose, CA, USA
October 21 October 23	Japan Linux Symposium	Tokyo, Japan
October 22 October 24	Décimo Encuentro Linux 2009	Valparaiso, Chile
October 23 October 24	Ontario GNU Linux Fest	Toronto, Ontario, Canada
October 23 October 24	PGCon Brazil 2009	Sao Paulo, Brazil
October 24 October 25	PyTexas	Fort Worth, TX, USA
October 24 October 25	FOSS.my 2009	Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
October 24	Florida Linux Show 2009	Orlando, Florida, USA
October 24	LUG Radio Live	Wolverhampton, UK
October 25	Linux Outlaws and Ubuntu UK Podcast OggCamp	Wolverhampton, UK
October 26 October 28	Techno Forensics and Digital Investigations Conference	Gaithersburg, MD, USA
October 26 October 28	GitTogether '09	Mountain View, CA, USA
October 26 October 28	Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference	Portland, OR, USA
October 27 October 30	Linux-Kongress 2009	Dresden, Germany
October 28 October 30	Hack.lu 2009	Luxembourg
October 28 October 30	no:sql(east).	Atlanta, USA
October 29	NLUUG autumn conference: The Open Web	Ede, The Netherlands
October 30 November 1	YAPC::Brasil 2009	Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
October 31	Linux theme day with ubuntu install party	Ede, Netherlands
November 1 November 6	23rd Large Installation System Administration Conference	Baltimore, MD, USA
November 2 November 6	ApacheCon 2009	Oakland, CA, USA
November 2 November 6	Ubuntu Open Week	Internet, Internet
November 3 November 6	OpenOffice.org Conference	Orvieto, Italy
November 4 November 5	Linux World NL	Utrecht, The Netherlands
November 5	Government Open Source Conference	Washington, DC, USA
November 6 November 8	WineConf 2009	Enschede, Netherlands
November 6 November 10	CHASE 2009	Lahore, Pakistan
November 6 November 7	PGDay.EU 2009	Paris, France
November 7 November 8	OpenFest 2009 - Biggest FOSS conference in Bulgaria	Sofia, Bulgaria
November 7 November 8	OpenRheinRuhr	Bottrop, Germany
November 7 November 8	Kiwi PyCon 2009	Christchurch, New Zealand
November 9 November 13	ACM CCS 2009	Chicago, IL, USA
November 10 November 11	Linux Foundation End User Summit	Jersey City, New Jersey
November 12 November 13	European Conference on Computer Network Defence	Milan, Italy
November 13 November 15	Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit	Göteborg, Sweden
November 14	pyArkansas	Conway, AR, USA

If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.

Third Plasma Summit Lifts KDE Desktop To Higher Grounds (KDEDot)

KDE.News covers the third Plasma developers meeting. "Last week, the third Plasma developers meeting was held in the Swiss Alps. 15 developers from 3 continents came to Randa, Canton Wallis to work on Plasma's code, design new ideas and concepts and to strengthen their bonds as a sub-community within KDE. Topics of this third Plasma sprint, which is named after a plasma fusion reactor, included but were not limited to Plasma on mobile devices, network-enabled Plasma widgets and a richer user interface thanks to a new animation framework. Furthermore deeper integration of web services in the Plasma shell, semantic awareness of Plasma components, secure privilege elevation and polishing of the existing functionality, among many other things, were on the agenda."

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Announcing: Python Open Mike blog

The Python Open Mike blog has been launched. "A new blog, python-open-mike.posterous.com, has been created for open discussion in the Python community. *Anyone* can post to this blog, simply by emailing to post@python-open-mike.posterous.com. Not everyone has, wants, or feels ready for a blog of their own; we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to speak out to the Python community. We hope to broaden discussion in the Python blogosphere by making it even easier for new participants to join in the conversation.."

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