Linux Distros Released the Week of 2010-05-16

News

Looks like Btrfs could replace Ext4 as the file system in Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat". The new version will also include GNOME 3.0. The release date for Ubuntu 10.10 is scheduled for 10.10.2010. More info at The H

ComputerWorld had an interesting article about the five best things coming in Fedora 13 which should be released tomorrow. The article covers the following 5 features:

• Professional-level color management
• Better printer driver support
• Improved open-source graphic drivers
• Improved KVM support
• Easier to use and more stable to boot

I'll try to download Fedora 13 tomorrow and let you know how it goes.

New Distribution Releases

Here are some of the Distributions release last week. List taken from DistroWatch

• Arch Linux 2010.05
• Magic Linux 2.5 [English]
• Linux Mint 9
• OpenBSD 4.7
• Scientific Linux 5.5
• SystemRescueCd 1.5.4
• Ultimate Edition 2.6 "Gaming"
• Chakra GNU/Linux Phoix
• Slackware Linux 13.1-rc2

From the list I'm looking forward to trying out Arch and Chakra (I know Chakra is technically Arch, but it does offer a nice Live CD)

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

List taken from DistroWatch

• 2010-05-25: Fedora 13
• 2010-05-28: FreeBSD 8.1-BETA1
• 2010-05-28: Pardus Linux 2009.2 RC

I will be testing out Fedora 13, and Chakra. If I see anything worth mentioning I'll let you know. If you've tried any of the releases above please leave a comment to let me know what you think.

Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 2

Been kind of swamped with work lately that I didn't notice the update to Java that Apple released. There is also a release for 10.5.

The update brings Java up to version 1.6.0_20 and weighs in at 81.7 MB. The update claims to fix the following:

Multiple vulnerabilities in Java 1.6.0_17

Description: Multiple vulnerabilities exist in Java 1.6.0_17, the most serious of which may allow an untrusted Java applet to execute arbitrary code outside the Java sandbox. Visiting a web page containing a maliciously crafted untrusted Java applet may lead to arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the current user. These issues are addressed by updating to Java version 1.6.0_20. Further information is available via the Sun Java website at http://java.sun.com/javase/6/webnotes/ReleaseNotes.html

Visiting a web page containing a maliciously crafted untrusted Java applet may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the current user

Description: An out of bounds memory access issue exists in the handling of mediaLibImage objects. Visiting a web page containing a maliciously crafted untrusted Java applet may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the current user. This issue is addressed by preventing Java applets from using the com.sun.medialib.mlib package. This issue only affects the Mac OS X implementation of Java. Credit to Marc Schoenefeld of University of Bamberg for reporting this issue.

AND

Description: A signedness issue exists in the handling of window drawing. Visiting a web page containing a maliciously crafted untrusted Java applet may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the current user. This issue is addressed through improved bounds checking. This issue only affects the Mac OS X implementation of Java. Credit to Jonathan Bringhurst of Northrop Grumman, and Jeffrey Czerniak for reporting this issue.

For more Information:

• About the Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 2


• About the security content of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 2

Linux kernel 2.6.33 released

Linus Torvalds announced on http://lkml.org the release of Linux Kernel 2.6.33. The new version of the kernel include mostly driver changes which include Nouveau an reverse-engineered open source driver for Nvidia graphics cards).

Linux Kernel Newbies has a nice summary of the changelog.

Como se convierte Hexadecimal a Decimal

Cada posicion de los digitos hexadecimales tiene un valor que es la potencia de 16. Usando las posiciones de derecha a izquierda le damos una potencia empezando de 0, 1, etc. y el resultado es multiplicado por el numero en dicha posicion.

Tomando como ejemplo el numero 2132

2 x  (16^0) = 2 x 1 = 2
3 x (16^1) = 3 x 16 = 48
1 x  (16^2) = 1 x 256 = 256
2 x (16^3) = 2 x 4096 = 96

2 x  (16^0) + 3 x (16^1) + 1 x  (16^2) + 2 x (16^3) = 8498

2 +  48 + 256 + 8192 = 8498

o para simplificar las cosas puedes usar Google http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=0x2132+in+decimal

toto - git powered blog engine

Just came across toto [http://github.com/cloudhead/toto], a minimalistic git powered blog engine. Using git as the datasource for you blog engine is a really great idea since all of you posts will be Version Controlled using git, and you can use github.com if you don't have access to a git repository.

Qouting the REAME from toto

philosophy

Everything that can be done better with another tool should be, but one should not have too much pie to stay fit. In other words, toto does away with web frameworks or DSLs such as sinatra, and is built right on top of rack. There is no database or ORM either, we use plain text files.

Toto was designed to be used with a reverse-proxy cache, such as Varnish. This makes it an ideal candidate for heroku.

Oh, and everything that can be done with git, is.

If you think about it, a VCS (git, hg, svn, etc) makes for a great datasource for many other application, all you need is a repository and your application now has built in version control. Also, you eliminate the need to have a full blown DB to power your application. Got a few projects were I could apply this to.

Still not sure if I want to keep WordPress or roll my own (using django). Any suggestions? I've decided to go with blogger. Want to spend more time writing content and not maintaining the software.

GNU Screen and byobu

GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer which allows you to run multiple console based applications within a single terminal. With screen there isn't a need to have multiple terminal windows open and if you're running in console mode you won't need to worry about running out of console.

Screen is extremely helpful when administering a remote machine allowing you to have multiple consoles through a single SSH tunnel. It also allows you to detach from a console and exit you SSH session and reattach to the console either locally or another SSH tunnel.