March 2009
2 posts
Fedora Weekly News #166
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
Orphans are Purged
It sounded[1] like Dickensian cruelty when Jesse Keating announced that he would be purging the orphans. All that it meant however was that those packages which were not blocked and had no owners would be “[…]...
There is no FWN#165
Unfortunately I was sick for FWN#165 so no Developments column for that week.
February 2009
10 posts
Fedora Weekly News #164
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
—- Fedora 11 Mass Rebuild —-
Some complications resulting from the inconsistent application of Fedora Packaging Guidelines were manifested when the mass rebuild discussed last week(FWN#163[1]) gained[2] a more concrete shape. Jesse...
FedoraWeeklyNews#163
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
—- FLOSS Multimedia Codec Support —-
Inspired by previous discussions on whether Fedora should distribute FLOSS content[1]Martin Sourada tried[2] to start a discussion about the poor support of FLOSS multimedia. Martin noted:...
FedoraWeeklyNews#162
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
—- Fedora 11 Alpha Released —-
Jesse Keating announced[1] the availability of Fedora 11 Alpha on 2009-02-05. His beautiful poetry was accompanied by a suggestion to read the Release Notes[2].
One change which drew[3] extensive...
FedoraWeeklyNews#161
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
— Fedora 11 Alpha May Be Delayed —-
Jesse Keating reported[1] that the Fedora 11 Alpha release date might slip due to some anaconda bugs which manifested themselves late in his testing on some architectures. A later post suggested[2]...
FedoraWeeklyNews#160
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
—- NFS Mounts and Caching DNS Nameserver Problem —-
An update on problems with NFS mounts was posted[1] by Warren Togami. It was decided that nfs-utils will revert to its pre 2009-01-14 behavior.
[1]...
Fedora Weekly News #159
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
—- The Possible Future of Comps ? —-
Seth Vidal reported[1] that one outcome of the recent FUDCon[2] had been an initiative to overhaul the comps.xml file. This file is part of the metadata used to define group membership of...
Fedora Weekly News #158
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
—- Default ssh-agent Dialog Pop-up —-
Confusion abounded when user “nodata” reported[1] that running ssh-add from the command-line popped up a gnome dialog requesting his private SSH key. “nodata” disliked...
Fedora Weekly News #157
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
—- Nautilus Spatial-mode Flamewar —-
The tired, old topic of whether nautilus should use “spatial-mode” as a default was re-opened[1] by MarkG85 in the form of a request for list subscribers to “vote” on the...
Fedora Weekly News #156
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
—- Fedora 11: OSS and PulseAudio Conflict Resolved by CUSE ? —-
A thread[1] from November led Warren Togami to suggest[2] a plan to use CUSE[3] as part of a strategy to deprecate the near obsolete Open Sound System (OSS) which...
Bespin - Cloud-based IDE
Hmmm…. very nice. However I still can’t view the Vimeo introduction because it’s in some god-awful Flash wrapper. I’d much rather Mozilla could do something about that:
http://vimeo.com/3195079
December 2008
3 posts
Fedora Weekly News#155 - Development
=== The PATH to CAPP Audits ===
Some tough questioning about the purpose and usefulness of the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (CC)[1] was dished out to the maintainers of shadow-utils (the family of secure utilities for manipulating user accounts and passwords) when it appeared that the need to audit specific behaviors was causing some awkward constraints in OS...
4 tags
Comprehensive SELinux guide for Fedora 10
Murray McAllister has produced a very useful “Security-Enhanced Linux User Guide for Fedora 10”. This integrates a lot of information which was scattered around. Essential reading for anyone running a modern system.
1. http://docs.fedoraproject.org/selinux-user-guide/f10/en-US/ .
Fedora Weekly News#154 - Development
== Developments == In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized. Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley === Python Bump to 2.6 in Rawhide === The success of Fedora’s dogged persistence in pursuing an “upstream all possible patches” methodology was anecdotally highlighted during a thread in which Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams...
November 2008
6 posts
6 tags
Fedora Weekly News #153 Developments
== Developments == In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized. Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley === More and Wider Testing === In a thoughtful post Callum Lerwick suggested[1] that Fedora testing coverage could be improved in several inter-related areas. These included making Bugzilla easier to use; adding per-package rollbacks to ...
Small Sample-size Cross Validation and...
25 years of conventional evaluation of data analysis proves worthless in practice
Nice paper from Isaksson & Gustafsson at Uppsala which appears to demonstrate the unreliability of bootstrapping and cross-validation when the ratio of sample size to natural variation is too low. The problem is that it’s difficult to know what the natural variation is when you’ve got a small sample...
3 tags
Fedora Weekly News#152 - Developments
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
Features Policy Modified
The latest FESCo discussions (2008-11-12) clarified[1] the Features[2] process. The changes make explicit the need for testing to be complete one week prior to the final freeze. Failure to meet that condition can result...
4 tags
Non-dictionary attack on WPA-TKIP
Martin Beck and Erik Tews present[1] an attack on WPA-TKIP. Seems to depend on 802.11e QoS features to implement a chopchop attack. A re-keying interval of < 120s is suggested as a counter-measure.
The way chopchop attacks work is to “chop” off the last byte of a packet and iterate adding each of the 256 possible values for the packet back on and attempting to get the AP to...
Fedora Weekly News #151 - Developments
Developments 1.2.1 Security Exceptions to the Mass ACL Opening 1.2.2 Who Moved My Bug ? 1.2.3 HOWTO: Get an SELinux Policy Change 1.2.4 Comps Czar Appointed to Encourage Modifications 1.2.5 LiveConnect Feature Approved for Fedora 10
== Developments == In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized. Contributing Writer: Oisin...
Fedora Weekly News#150
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
1.3 Developments
1.3.1 Resume from Suspend Problems with Intel i945
1.3.2 Moving X from VT7 to VT1
1.3.3 Fedora 11: POSIX File Capabilities
1.3.4 Purging Unnecessary .la Files
Resume from Suspend Problems with Intel i945
Peter Robinson solicited[1] experiences with problems on netbooks in resuming from suspend from those using the latest...
October 2008
4 posts
Fedora Weekly News #149 Developments
1 Developments
1.1 Splitting Up R
1.2 Flinging Poo at libtool-2.2
1.3 Livna Migration to RPM Fusion
1.4 Sbin Sanity Stays
1.5 Packaging Webmin: Should it go in /opt ?
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
Splitting Up R
Tom Callaway alerted[1] the list that he intended to...
Fedora Weekly News #148: Developments
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
OpenOffice and go-oo
The controversy swirling around the OpenOffice.org “fork” named “go-oo” popped up[1] along with a request for information about why “[…] Fedora ships a relatively stock (stock + 98 patches)...
Fedora Weekly News #147 - Development News
Developments
Coverage of the Fedora developer discussions
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
Unsigned Rawhide Packages an Attack Vector ?
Rahul Sundaram noticed[1] that when using PackageKit to obtain updates from the rawhide repository a warning for each package was displayed as they are all unsigned. He asked “[it] is just plain annoying. Can’t we do something nice about...
Fedora Weekly News#146
Fedora Project development news by Oisin Feeley[1]
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OisinFeeley
— PATH:/sbin Tab Confusion — Some time ago (2008-04-23) it was proposed[1] by Tom Callaway to append /sbin\ and /usr/sbin to the path of non-root users. The rationale was to make it easier for non-root users to use tools which are traditionally perceived as “administration”...
September 2008
6 posts
Fedora Weekly News#145 - Developments
— Default Deactivation of Services — Christoph Höger initiated[1] this week’s mammoth thread with a request to disable four services currently activated by default: sendmail, ip6tables, isdn and setroubleshootd. Christoph invited the list to “go on and punish me” after supplying some brief reasons for the deactivations. [1]...
Fedora Weekly News#144 - Developments
Developments
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
=== Removal of non-X Consoles (continued) ===
The furore over the future removal of text-mode consoles (see FWN#144 “Non-X System Consoles to be Removed”[1]) continued throughout the week. The original thread saw some support for the idea expressed[2] by Nicolas Mailhot on the basis that “[…] non-X-console input is a mess...
Fedora Weekly News #143 - Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
External Repositories and the New Keys
As a result of the re-signing all the packages with a new key as a security precaution[1] some problems with packages from third-party repositories were reported[2] by Callum Lerwick. The specific example was an update...
Nice citation of FWN Development
Thanks to Marco for pointing out a nice citation of my FWN column in Emily Ratliff’s Open Source Security blog at the start of this year.
The Fedora Weekly News Issue 114 (dated Dec. 31, 2007) describes three “SELinux Rants” along with the response from the Fedora community. Choice quote: “…suggested that rather than blame SELinux for complexity it was better to realize that it was...
Fedora Weekly News #142
1 Developments
1.1 Getting Back on our Feet
1.2 Removing Packages with Long-standing FTBFS Failures
1.3 MinGW on Fedora
1.4 Dependency Loops Considered Harmful?
1.5 Fedora Security Tools Spin
Getting Back on our Feet
On 05-09-2008 Jesse Keating posted[1] the good news that “[…] we have done a successful compose of all the existing[,] and as of yesterday[,] pending updates for...
Fedora Weekly News #141
1.3 Developments
1.3.1 Approaches to a Minimal Fedora
1.3.2 Using PackageKit Without NetworkManager-Controlled Interfaces
1.3.3 Git-1.6.0 Commands to be Moved Out of PATH
1.3.4 Resurrecting Multi-Key Signatures in RPM
1.3.5 Intrusion Recovery Slow and Steady
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing...
August 2008
6 posts
Fedora Weekly News #140
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
Mysterious Fedora Compromise
The mysterious unavailability of much of the FedoraProject infrastructure (see FWN#139 “General Outage of Fedora Infrastructure”[1]) continued to provoke speculation during the week. Some light was shed[2]...
Fedora Weekly News #139
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
FlashPlayer 10 Symlink Provokes Proprietary Support Argument
A formal request to remove the “miniature libcurl.so.3 library” was made[1] by Josh Boyer. This had been created in order to support the latest version[2] of Adobe’s...
Fedora Weekly News #138
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
Solving the Unsynchronized Release of Package Dependencies
A problem often experienced by users of “add-on” packages[1] is that dependency resolution will fail during a simple yum update when the official Fedora repositories release...
Fedora Weekly News #137
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
How Maintainers Can Help Reduce XULRunner Breakage
The recent breakage of many packages which depend on xulrunner (see FWN#136 “XULRunner Security Update Breakage Stimulates Bodhi Discussion”[1]) was addressed[2] in a post by Will...
Fedora Weekly News #136
Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
Erratum: FWN#133 “Shark” is a JIT not a VM
Gary Benson kindly corrected an error in FWN#133 “Java, So Many Free Choices”[1] which reported on the work being done by Red Hat engineers to expand the availability of a FOSS...
Fedora Weekly News #135
Development
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
Kerneloops for SELinux
The last furore[1] over SELinux contained a positive contribution from StewartAdam, who proposed[2] to improve the interaction between users and SELinux by means of a “kerneloops-like plugin [which] would allow for...
July 2008
3 posts
Fedora Weekly News #134
Coverage of the @fedora-devel list of the Fedora Project. A weekly summary of the people, personalities and debates behind the production of one of the best GNU/Linux operating systems by Oisin Feeley.
New RPM Sparks Exploded Source Debate
The announcement[1] of a sparkling new alpha-version of RPM by PanuMatilainen was greeted with congratulations and applause and later some passionate...
Fedora Weekly News now looking for writers
We’re looking to expand our news coverage and there are a couple of specific positions open for beat writers http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN
We’re always looking for new writers interested in creating timely reports of relevance to the FedoraProject.
FWN#133 Development beat
SELinux Eats Babies, Confines Wives, Gives Birth
JonMasters plunged[1] his head into the lion’s mouth with a request to “re-add” the option to disable SELinux (or change to permissive mode) during or shortly after installation of the OS. His reasons included the apparent random breaking of currently working applications due to policy changes and the lack of support via gnome-vfs...
April 2008
1 post
Innate probabilistic inference
It’s been commonly assumed (by statisticians and developmental psychologists) that statistical reasoning is a completely learned, non-innate trait. Pop evolutionary psychology explanations focus on the immediate benefits to early hunters from being able to deal with problems such as predicting the intersecting arcs of thrown objects (a complex mathematical problem only relatively recently...
February 2008
11 posts
FWN#121 Development Beat
Fedora Weekly News #121 Development Beat Coverage of the development process behind Fedora GNU/Linux by Oisin Feeley based on the @fedora-devel mailing list. === Evolution Of Mail Client Preferences === A long thread over the selection of ”evolution” as the default MUA in Fedora was started[1] by JensPetersen. After carefully donning a figurative asbestos suit Jens noted that...
A5/1 Now Affordably Crackable
The use of FPGA-generated rainbow tables to crack previously “economically unfeasible” targets has seen another target tumble to the floor: A5/1 a stream cipher which is the most common encryption scheme used in GSM cellular phone networks. The theoretical crack has been known for approximately a decade[1] but at this year’s BlackHat DC[2] “SteveX” and Dave Hulton...
Disk encryption subverted by memory remanence
Ed Felten and others report[1] that because DRAM retains information even after power is unavailable for refresh it is possible to capture encryption keys and other information by cold-rebooting. Each DRAM cell is essentially a capacitor which encodes a single bit through either being charged or not. Charge slowly leaks away without a refresh and more modern memory (c. 2006) decays more rapidly...
Fedora Weekly News#120 Development Beat
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley 1. Source File Audit 2. Multiuser Noise And Fury 3. Separate /usr An Anachronism? 4. Git Is Not Git, Git Is A Metapackage 5. Kernel-2.6.25 Rawhide Booting Problem 6. Firefox 3 (Minefield) Zoomed Screen Size 7. LOCALE Vs. LANGUAGE === Source File Audit === The results of another run of...
Pimm blog on the Warda-Han-Proteomics scandal →
Pimm is up to its usual high level of content, this time providing coverage of an apparent plagiarism scandal over at _Proteomics_, there is also some commentary in the _Pharyngula_ blog
Fedora Weekly News #119 -- Development Beat
== Developments == In this section, we cover the problems/solutions, people/personalities, and ups/downs of the endless discussions on Fedora Developments. http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley === Baracuda To Replace VNC ? === A query as to the status of the replacement of ”vnc” by ”baracuda” (note the single...
Red Hat's "Liberation" Fonts As Metric Equivalents... →
Good post at the Linuxhelp blog about what it means to have the Liberation fonts. There’s also a related discussion covered in the FWN #118 Firefox 3 Liberation Fonts.
Fedora Weekly News #118 - Development Beat
== Developments == In this section, we cover the problems/solutions, people/personalities, and ups/downs of the endless discussions on Fedora Developments. http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley === Net-install ISO Already Exists As ”rescuecd.iso” === MichaelDeHaan reported[1] on a discussion at FUDCon on the use of Debian-style...
Rik van Riel slides on 2.2,2.4 and 2.5 memory...
http://www.surriel.com/lectures/mmtour.html