Archive for the ‘Distribution Specific’ Category.
November 19, 2009, 2:56 pm
A hotly debated topic this week has been a decision made with the latest release of Fedora. The 12th release has made it so that local users can install signed packages from the repositories, without root access.
You can read all the nerd-rage here:
Fedora 12 allows any user to install software on a machine without the root password. Drama on the mailing list.
Oddly enough they didn’t see this important enough to include on the release notes. Some will argue this is not much of an issue, well I would ask you to consider this security breach of the Fedora signing servers a little more than a year ago:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-August/msg00012.html
With that taken into consideration, this is a pretty big deal.
Jeff Garzik’s replies seem to be the most eloquent arguments for reverting to the F11 security posture, in case anyone here thinks this change is a good thing:
Now for what this blog usually does, which is gives more solutions than commentary, here is how you fix your Fedora 12’s broken security model:
Simply run:
pklalockdown –lockdown org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install
This will re-enable the old (better) behavior for installing signed packages with a known key. Once this is done your Fedora 12 will no longer be on par with Windows98, enjoy.
October 27, 2009, 9:11 am
Sometimes when I’ve been messing around on Ubuntu my number pad will quit working. The number lock is on, I can see the indicator right there. Toggling the num lock on and off doesn’t fix things. I found that holding 8, 2, 4, or 6 moves the cursor on the screen though.
This is an Accessibility option that gets turned on to control the cursor with the number pad. For some reason unknown to me Ubuntu chooses to turn on what it calls “Mouse Keys”.
Continue reading ‘Fix: Number Pad Will Not Work in Ubuntu’ »
October 27, 2009, 7:18 am
Ubuntu 9.04 disabled the semi-crucial keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, that used to force the X graphical server to restart, and made it wonky to re-enable. Luckily, Ubuntu 9.10, due out in nine days, has a single setting to restore it.
Go to System->Preferences->Keyboard settings, then head to the Layouts tab under Keyboard settings, click the “Key sequence to kill the X server” option to expand it, then check “Control + Alt + Backspace” to set it.
Also see: Ctrl+Alt+Backspace Disabled in Most Distributions [FIX]
October 26, 2009, 6:53 pm
The next Ubuntu release (9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope”) will see the first set of changes introduced by Canonical’s Desktop Experience Team: The much-discussed notify-osd notification system, and the indicator applet.
The idea came up to allow both developers and users to be able to choose between the “Ubuntuized” and a more “upstream-like” GNOME experience. Martin Pitt (maintainer) has called that “stracciatella GNOME session”, after the favourite kind of ice cream which is mostly vanilla (GNOME), but with some brown chocolate chips (Ubuntu modifications) in it.
To enable this feature simply run the following:
apt-get install gnome-stracciatella-session
and select the “GNOME (without Ubuntu specific components)” session in gdm.
In Jaunty or Karmic, this will suppress the messaging indicator and flip back to the classical GNOME notification-daemon again. Martin Pitt plans to keep stracciatella-session up to date with new developments in future Ubuntu releases as well.
October 22, 2009, 11:53 pm
Ubuntu 9.04 introduces a change to the handling of package updates, launching update-manager directly instead of displaying a notification icon in the GNOME panel. Users will still be notified of security updates on a daily basis, but for updates that are not security-related, users will only be prompted once a week.Users who wish to continue receiving update notifications in the previous manner can restore the earlier behavior using the following command:
gconftool -s –type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
October 21, 2009, 3:00 pm
For those who use Ubuntu’s inclusion of Tomboy notes, the easiest way to synchronize and share your notes automatically with all your Ubuntu computers is by using your Ubuntu One account rather than WebDAV or SSH. Ubuntu One is a Dropbox type of service by Canonical.
Continue reading ‘Sync Tomboy Notes with UbuntuOne’ »
October 19, 2009, 3:00 pm
Simply run the command:
sudo modprobe -r pcspkr
or you can set it as a persistent change by adding the module to your system driver blacklist, available at:
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
simply append the line “blacklist pcspkr” for that driver to be disregarded at every boot.
October 16, 2009, 10:15 am
Tor is a free software implementation of second-generation onion routing – a system which claims to enable its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet. Its primary goal is to protect its users against traffic analysis attacks. The Tor Project’s home page has a great simplified write up about how Tor actually works here: http://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en
Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor became an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project in late 2004, and the EFF supported Tor financially until November 2005. Tor software is now developed by the Tor Project, which since December 2006 is a research/education non-profit organization based in the United States of America that receives a diverse base of financial support.
Getting Tor working both as a client and as a server is no sweat on Arch Linux and below are the steps.
Continue reading ‘Installing Tor Server and Client on Arch Linux’ »
October 15, 2009, 8:00 am
Most of you know that you need to save your iptables changes using service iptables save before rebooting on Redhat, or else you’lllose all your rules. I brought up the setting IPTABLES_SAVE_ON_STOP to “yes” in /etc/sysconfig/iptables-config. There’s some pretty cool settings in there . Read on for details.
Continue reading ‘/etc/sysconfig/iptables-config in RHEL/CentOS’ »
October 13, 2009, 1:40 pm
After testing this on a couple of emerges I am quite confident it works AS LONG AS YOU HAVE ENOUGH RAM – enough is 768M or more, although may be okay on 512M with a minimal desktop or X-less server. Tested on three machines with (768M, 1G, and 3G of RAM). The emerge of xorg-server went from 1.5 hours to about 20 minutes on an athlon-xp, for example.
Portage uses /var/tmp/portage (by default) as it’s working directory, everything is built in there before it gets merged to /. So, why not stick /var/tmp/portage in RAM? It’s a tmp directory after all, saves all that I/O bottleneck…
Interested? Okay, here’s what you have to do…
Continue reading ‘Speed up Emerge by compiling in RAM with tmpfs’ »
