Free Software Linux

What: Gentoo contributors get together to help each other fix bugs Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-bugs When: Saturday, September 6, in a timezone near you What do you need to bring?

Gentoo unstable or “tilde” (~x86, ~amd64) stages are now available for download at the following locations: http://www.funtoo.org/linux/~x86 http://www.funtoo.org/linux/~amd64 I also have unstable OpenVZ templates available for download at: http://www.funtoo.org/linux/openvz/~x86 http://www.funtoo.org/linux/openvz/~amd64

Elections just ended for the Gentoo council for the next year. Turnout was 57% with 145 developers voting, which is quite excellent. The council, created by GLEP 39 to replace Gentoo's previous hierarchy, decides on global issues and policies that affect multiple projects. To select council members, Gentoo uses the Condorcet voting method, which involves ranking them in order rather than just picking a single candidate. Here are your new council members, listed by ranking in the election results:

What: Gentoo contributors get together to help each other fix bugs Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-bugs When: Saturday, July 5, in a timezone near you What do you need to bring?

Hey all – I updated my private fork of Catalyst to support “unstable” (aka “tilde”, ie ~x86, ~amd64) builds of Gentoo. Everything from the catalyst side seems to be working, but no unstable stages are available yet as I’m hitting some bugs in the core toolchain. We (me and Gentoo devs on bugs.gentoo.org) are working to try to resolve these bugs. The current one relates to coreutils-6.12’s /bin/touch using a potentially unsupported system call. Once all the issues are resolved, I should have some nice “unstable” stages for all of you. :) For my version of catalyst, I am using the following naming convention for unstable stages:

Anish (at oz.blogial) is writing a 3 part series of comparisons of Linux distros in the eyes of corporate organisations. In that he is comparing Ubuntu, Gentoo and Fedora. Head over there to know which distro is suitable for your organisation.

1. Ubuntu
2. Gentoo
3. Fedora

I actually haven’t been using Gentoo at all recently. It’s on an older laptop that just doesn’t keep up with all the compiling. However I have a very fast AMD64 desktop at home just waiting to try out the latest Gentoo. I was also waiting for the latest kernel to come out b/c there are some KVM, webcam, and other driver updates I’m interested in taking advantage of. In other news, 2.6.26 adds KVM support for S/390 (IBM Mainframe), PPC (IBM Power) and Itanium processors. I also noticed KGDB (kernel debugger) supports x86 and SPARC right now - SPARC? Hmm… You can read more about the new kernel features here: http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_26

Traditionally, Gentoo Linux has been a distribution designed more towards the more experienced Linux user, perhaps the ‘power user’, if you will. Its source-based package management and offering the user complete control over the system installation and configuration have meant that traditionally, it can be difficult to approach. AdvertisementYour ad here!

As many of you know, I build up-to-date official Gentoo Linux stage tarballs twice a week for a variety of platforms. I've just converted my build system over to using the just-released Gentoo Linux 2008.0 system profile. This has been a fairly easy transition. Everything built from the 8th of July onwards should be using the new 2008.0 profile. Here's an outline of all the different builds I have available for download:

• x86
• i686
• athlon-xp
• pentium4

Just wanted to let everyone know that my Gentoo OS autobuilder is back online and pumping out Gentoo stages for x86, i686, athlon-xp, amd64, core32 and core64. Whee ha! You can download them at http://www.funtoo.org/linux. There are current stages as of June 2 and June 3 and will get updated twice a week.

Last night I decided to give Gentoo 2008.0 beta2 a try. All I got to say is wow! It installed much easier than Gentoo 2008.0 beta1 and is probably one of my fastest Gentoo installs ever.

There is an grave security bug in firebird package 2.0 from debian and ubuntu where an user can connect to the server with SYSDBA and NO password The bug is now fixed in debian sid (unstable) http://packages.debian.org/sid/firebird2.0-super and here is the changelog firebird2.0-super.init: stop exporting ISC_USER and ISC_PASSWORD. Fixes a hole causing remote connections as user SYSDBA to succeed without giving a [...]

"This is meant as a quick tutorial to get gitweb up and running on gentoo with apache as the web server..."

Firebird allows remote connections to the administrative account without verifying credentials. The default configuration of Firebird before 2.0.3.12981.0-r6 on Gentoo Linux sets the ISC_PASSWORD environment variable before starting Firebird, which allows remote attackers to bypass SYSDBA authentication and obtain sensitive database information via an empty password. http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-1880

"I had always wanted to try it since its thought of as a Distro for more advanced Linux users. And it couldn't have been more perfect for me."