Linux

  • Bryan Lunduke says: “Linux sucks”

    Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Tech

    I’m indebted to Linux.com for alerting me to the video below.

    Bryan Lunduke is social media marketing manager at SUSE (the first Linux distribution your correspondent used daily. Ed.), as well as a writer and commentator.

    The talk was delivered at LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington on Saturday 26th April 2014.

    Lunduke takes a good-humoured critical aim at some of the things that make Linux annoying, the development process which is likened to ‘herding millions of cats’, the large amount of forking that goes on, the age of the X.Org display server and the insistence of some distributions, particularly Fedora and Ubuntu on developing their own alternatives – Wayland and Mir respectively – for what is essentially something old, trusted and reliable, like X.Org.

    Fedora and Ubuntu/Canonical come in for plenty of gentle ribbing from Lunduke.

    About halfway through, Lunduke then turns the criticism completely on its head by stating that all the annoyances are actually what make Linux great and why we users love it. Furthermore, he points out that we can criticise our operating system of choice – and have it criticised – without acrimony; at this point Lunduke mentions something about Mac users… 🙂

    Anyway, the video itself is 45 minutes long, but well worth it. I hope you watch it all the way through and enjoy it (you should do if you you’re more than just content with running Linux as an operating system. Ed.). I certainly did.

  • LibreOffice 4.3 bug hunting session announced

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The first bug hunting session for LibreOffice 4.3 will take place from 23rd to 25th May 2014, The Document Foundation blog announced yesterday. This will coincide with the availability of the first beta of the new major release.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    Those wishing to contribute and participating in the bug hunting session can find details on The Document Foundation wiki./ The wiki also has a list of new features and improvements for LibreOffice 4.3 to check for bugs and regression.

    Participants will need to have a PC with Windows, MacOS or Linux and LibreOffice 4.3 Beta 1.

    Filing bug reports will be extremely easy thanks to the help of experienced volunteers who will be available via the QA mailing list (libreoffice-qa@lists.freedesktop.org) and IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/#libreoffice-qa).

    A second LibreOffice 4.3 bug hunting session will be organised immediately after the release of LibreOffice 4.3 Release Candidate 1 in mid-June.

  • OPW’s success partly to blame for GNOME expenditure freeze

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Gnome logoAccording to German IT news site Heise, the financial cushion of the Gnome Foundation -non-profit organisation that furthers the goals of the GNOME Project, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use – has declined so sharply that the organisation has frozen part of its expenditure. The success of the Gnome Outreach Program for Women (OPW) is said to be partly to blame for this situation (posts passim).

    The situation was explained in an email to Foundation members over the weekend.

    Dear Foundation members,

    Due to a shortfall in the budget, the Foundation board voted on 2014-04-08 to freeze all expenditure which is not essential to the running of the Foundation. This freeze affects sponsorship expenses
    which are unpaid at this time, but it does not affect the funds which we hold for other organisations.

    By keeping our expenditures to a minimum while we regain some delayed revenue, we aim to have things back to normal within a few months. All Foundation members who expect to receive reimbursements within the next three months have already been informed of the issue and most have responded positively. The board will prioritise these pending reimbursements over other expenses.

    The issue has been caused by a number of factors. These include increased administrative overheads in the last few years due to the increased turnover which has been caused by to the Outreach Program
    for Women (OPW), and the associated payments going out while the associated income has been slow to come in.

    The board expects that you may have some questions or would like to know more details about the problem, please read https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/CurrentBudgetFAQ and contact the board at board-list gnome org if you have any further questions.

  • Debian Installer Jessie Alpha 1 release

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoThe first alpha of the installation media for Debian 8 (codenamed Jessie) GNU/Linux comes with the lightweight Xfce desktop as standard. The reloading of firmware is not working in this initial version.

    The Debian installer team has released an initial alpha for Debian 8 (Jessie). The standard images for testing the Jessie installation are supplied with the Xfce desktop as standard. However, it is currently uncertain whether this will be retain for the actual Debian 8 release as the developers want to discuss the standard desktop once more in August. If necessary, the decision taken then will be considered once again, which is possible since the main development phase doesn’t end until 5th November; this “freeze” is typically followed by a stabilisation phase lasting several months before the distribution is finally released.

    However, some of the features introduced with the alpha might not be altered any further. Thus there is no alpha version for Itanium (IA-64) processors because the Debian Project will not be supporting this processor architecture in future. In addition, the IBM S390 architecture has been replaced with the S390x architecture.

    The AMD64 edition of the first alpha of Jessie takes up three DVDs and uses a kernel which is based on Linux 3.13. Amongst this releases known problems is a bug that missing firmware files cannot be reloaded.

    I’m already running Jessie on one of my machines, but did an upgrade on an existing machine, rather than a fresh install, and am finding it very reliable and stable. Read about my experience.

  • Bloggers under attack as pingback abused

    Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Open Source, Tech

    WordPress logoWordPress’ pingback function can be abused to mount a denial of service (DoS) attack on blogs without their owners noticing, Germany’s Heise IT website reports. It is unlikely that the problem will be remedied with an update.

    Security company Sucuri reports on an attack on one WordPress installation in which more than 162,000 other WordPress sites were misused as a DDoS platform. In this instance the attacker used the software’s pingback function in order to cripple the target website. With a pingback, one WordPress site can notify another that it has quoted its blog post.

    The attack works in such a manner that an attacker searches for a legitimate blog which has pingback activated (currently the default configuration for new WordPress installations) and then simulate a pingback from the victim’s site. The victim’s blog then queries the victim for the post which was quoted in the faked pingback. If the attacker does this with many sites, the flood of traffic is difficult for the target site to black as the queries look completely legitimate and originate from trustworthy sources.

    In the attack observed by Sucuri randomly generated URLs were quoted in the fake pingbacks for the victim’s ostensible posts. This results in WordPress’ caching mechanism does not take effect and the web server is so overloaded since the database must attempt to deliver the supposed posts for each request. Of course, in reality the server just serves up 404 error pages, since there are no pages for the random URLs. Nevertheless, if there are many such requests, this is sufficient to cripple the WordPress installation’s database. On Unix and Linux systems such an attack can be launched very simply by using the curl command on the command line.

    As the attack is misusing the ordinary working of the pingback function, it cannot be assumed that WordPress developers are going to do something about the problem. Site owners can prevent their blog being miused in this way by deactivating their installation’s pingback functions. Sucuri itself is proposing source code for a WordPress plug-in which should block the attacks, as follows:

    add_filter( ‘xmlrpc_methods’, function( $methods ) {
    unset( $methods[‘pingback.ping’] );
    return $methods;
    } );

    Use Sicuri’s WordPress DDoS Scanner to check if your site is being used for launching such attacks on other websites.

  • Addio XP

    Steve WoodsBristol, Linux, Open Source, Tech

    It’s not just the Bristol & Bath Linux User Group (LUG) that’s organising an event to mark the end support for Microsoft’s superannuated Windows XP operating system (posts passim).

    In Italy a consortium of the Perugia GNU/Linux User Group, LibreUmbria, the Perugia Centro di Competenza Open Source and Girl Geek Life is also organising a half-day event to inform people that they don’t need to buy a new computer to have a modern, secure operating system again; all that’s needed is a change to a free and open source Linux operating system and its vast range of software.

    publicity for Perugia GNU/LUG's XP event
    Addio XP, ciao software libero!

    The Perugia event takes place at Perugia University on Saturday, 5th April 2014 from 9.00 am to 1.00 pm. Full details can be found at http://xpaddio.perugiagnulug.org/.

    Windows XP Zombie Edition
    Install Linux: don’t end up with an operating system that should died years ago!

    Support for XP (and MS Office 2003 too. Ed.) ends on 8th April 2014.

  • Upgrading Debian from stable to testing

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoI’ve been using Debian GNU/Linux for many years and have been very pleased with its stability, reliability and security.

    Yesterday I decided to do something I’ve never done before: upgrade a production machine from Debian stable (codename ‘wheezy’) to Debian testing (codename ‘jessie’). See this guide for an explanation of Debian versions and releases.

    Anyway, after installing the apt-listbugs package which a Bristol Wireless colleague recommended, I then proceeded with the upgrade via the command line.

    The sequence of commands to perform the upgrade itself is very easy.

    # cp /etc/apt/sources.list{,.bak}
    # sed -i -e ‘s/ \(stable\|wheezy\)/ testing/ig’ /etc/apt/sources.list
    # apt-get update
    # apt-get –download-only dist-upgrade
    # apt-get dist-upgrade

    The first command backs up the software sources list, whilst the second edits the sources list to replace release versions. After that, the actual fun begins, downloading updated package information, downloading the packages themselves and then installing them.

    All told, it went very smoothly. The laptop rebooted normally after the upgrade and brought up the GUI. The only major problem was that I lost the functionality of the Broadcom wireless network card; this was resolved by reinstalling the card’s firmware – a 2 minute job. The upgrade also resulted in 2 packages being broken. The command (as root) for fixing this problem is apt-get -f install.

    In total, the upgrade took about 2 hours and I now have a machine running a more modern version of Debian on the same machine and have kept all my previous personal settings, which is a definite plus compared with a clean install where one has to spend hours reinstalling software packages not included in the ISO disc image and tweaking.

  • Canaries save money with open source

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    Canary Islands coat of armsCanary Islands news site La Provincia reports that the autonomous government of the Canaries is saving €400,000 per year by backing the use of free and open source operating systems and software and avoiding paying licences to multinational companies for the use of programs and their updates. Apparently the autonomous government annual IT costs have reduced from €1,006,500 to €750,000. Roberto Moreno, the general director for telecommunications and new technologies explains that the migration from proprietary to free and open source software means the government is ridding itself of dependency on one vendor because, in this case “the owner is the one who buys it and can make the changes and modifications needed with his own resources and personnel, which is always much cheaper” than being beholden to an outside company.

    Moreno, who is a professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), states that the objective is shown by the current legislature’s wishes to introduce these changes to reduce expenditure, given the current economic crisis and the lack of funds in the region’s coffers.

    The next step planned by the Canaries government is to replace the ubiquitous MS Office suite currently used with a free and open source alternative, which is most likely to be Apache OpenOffice. That change will involve some 30,000 desktops and will save the public purse a fair few euros more.

  • Romania’s Ministry of Education endorses open source

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    Romania coat of armsJust a few days after it was reported that scores of donated Linux laptops were languishing unused in Romania’s schools (posts passim), the country’s Ministry of Education is urging the schools to consider switching to free and open source operating systems and software, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. The Ministry confirmed this will help the schools to avoid legal problems from using unlicensed proprietary software.

    The new policy follows the expiry of an agreement between the Ministry and Microsoft. The Ministry is now urging schools to switch to open source alternatives, revert to earlier versions or buy new licences.

    The Ministry itself is no stranger to free and open source, using Linux and the Nginx web server. Furthermore, it has also published a recommended list (PDF, Romanian) of free and open source software for use in schools, which includes Edubuntu, the educational remix of Ubuntu Linux, desktop applications based on the Gnome window manager and other free and open source favourites, such as the LibreOffice productivity suite, Gimp graphics package and Scribus desktop publishing software.

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