As an experienced traveler, I regularly run into a situation where the housekeeping staff will put the plug in the tub and leave it there. Why do they do that?
My reasoning is that its pure laziness on their part, mostly because I am the guest and shouldn’t have to be greeted with a tub full of shower water after a couple minutes of letting it get warm.
Anyway, just a small gripe I had to get off my chest today.
Cheers,
Herlo
Let me get this out first, I’m a avid fan of all things Mozilla. Even with the limitations they cause, the problems I’ve heard about Firefox and Thunderbird and all that Jazz, I’m still a big fan, current and future consumer of these wonderful applications.
BUT!
Why is it that a bug that has been logged for some time can go so long without being fixed. It sure seems like a very simple fix, but no, its still broken.
What, you ask, am I talking about? Well, its this bug on mozilla’s bugzilla that’s bugging me. While its not a major bug, its annoying and causes me heartache every time I look into my /tmp directory.
The problem is that as Thunderbird creates and moves data around when using a filter rule. It creates temporary files which is all fine and good, but the problem is the code is broken that removes the temporary files. My /tmp directory just fills and fills with these useless little files. It’s driving me insane. Every time I go into the directory to look at something, I’m bombarded with files that are named tmprules-##.dat , where the ## is a number.
Have a look into the directory:
$ ls /tmp/tmprules*.dat | wc -l
492
Why do we need to have 492 files in there? I don’t even have 492 messages I read each day. Come on Mozilla Foundation, take a few minutes and fix this annoying little bug that’s been hanging around since this March!
Cheers,
Herlo
An interesting tool I came across in the last week or so is this week’s Program of the Week: Agave, from the GNOME Community. Recently, we’ve been working on a new logo for the Utah Open Source Foundation, and needed to come up with some simple color schemes that would work well with our logo. In doing so, I came across Agave and started playing with possible combinations of colors we could use.
This tutorial will cover some of the simple, but effective features Agave provides to help provide a good contrast in designing logos, websites and more.
To install Agave, I simply did the following:
# yum -y install agave
.. snip ..
Installed: agave.i386 0:0.4.2-5.fc8
Dependency Installed: gconfmm26.i386 0:2.20.0-1.fc8
Complete!
Once Agave is installed, it is immediately available from the main Applications -> Graphics menu in GNOME. If you use a different desktop, its possible to type agave at the command line. Agave starts up similar to this screenshot:
As is shown above, its simple to see that the three colors here would go nicely together, maybe a bit bright for a website, but not too bad for a logo maybe. In our logo, however, we didn’t want such bright colors, plus we wanted to base it on a color that already existed in our already established brand logo seen below:
This logo is well known in our community, and thus we wanted to make sure to keep the look and feel as our org morphs into its true form. Out game GIMP and with the color picker tool, I obtained the bluish color needed for contrast. Agave only needs the value to give several different options through its several available views. The first view shown is the triads view, in other words, a scheme with three colors that fit well together:
yields the triad 
But the real power of Agave is in this section of the application:
The color picker provides for easy to choose colors on the left.
On the right hand side, is the color scheme chooser which allows 6 different choices; Complements, Split-Complements, Triads (3 colors), Tetrads (4 colors), Analagous and Monochromatic. In addition, on the toolbar near the top, is another feature that allows random color schemes to be chosen.
When we’ve finished our site and logo, I’ll update this article with the results.
Try out Agave today and maybe even paint your house using its recommendations!
Cheers,
Herlo
This week’s program may seem like a bit of a cop out, but it really isn’t. I’ve regularly found myself in need of some quick passwords to hand out to users that are both semi-secure and easy to remember. With apg, this can become a reality.
First, install apg:
# yum install apg .. snip .. Install 1 Package(s) .. snip .. Total download size: 101 k Is this ok [y/N]: y .. snip .. Installed: apg.i386 0:2.3.0b-5.fc8 Complete!
apg does provide several switches which help to provide an easy way to distribute passwords. Recently, I generated random, yet pronounceable passwords for about 30 users of an application I was using. it was quite nice to let the users login and feel safe with my choices of passwords.
To start with apg is quite easy to generate a set of passwords:
$ apg NatnawmIx GhisImAv* Bahiwaihet adMuhevep Ombachat cier]bipt
These passwords are the default set from apg, providing six pronounceable, 8-10 digit, In my opinion, its better to lose a bit of security to make a password easy to remember, than to have a user have to write the password down, more or less defeating the purpose of the password in the first place.
Because of my opinion, (and no, I’m not a security expert by any means, just using common sense), its probably a good idea to have a look at some of the switches provided by apg:
-a : 0 (default) will make the passwords semi-pronounceable, 1 on the other hand, will be pseudo-random -n : tell apg how many passwords to display -m/-x : the minimum/maximum length of the generated passwords
Here’s an example of these options in use:
$ apg -a 1 -n 2 -m 7 -x 10
apg has more to give us though. We can use some standard Linux password checking utilities to help us:
-r : checks the generated passwords against a particular dictionary file. /usr/share/dict/words, for example.
Adding this to our previous example (and removing the -a option) will verify the password doesn’t have any dictionary words:
$ apg -r /usr/share/dict/words -n 2 -m 7 -x 10
The last component is -M mode, which can request/require that a password has a particular set of attributes. Its a bit more complex than the others above. The mode consists of eight letters, S, N, C and L, in both upper and lower case.
S : must use special symbol set for every generated password. s : should use special symbol set for password generation. N : must use numeral symbol set for every generated password. n : should use numeral symbol set for password generation. C : must use capital symbol set for every generated password. c : should use capital symbol set for password generation. L : must use small letters symbol set for every generated password (always present if pronounceable password generation algorithm is used). l : should use small letters symbol set for password generation.
As you might be able to tell, the list above is almost directly from the man page for apg. This is on purpose as it is very well explained (and recommended to read each and every man page for any tool used). Many a good trick has come directly from the man pages.
Let’s see these options in use:
$ apg -n 2 -m 7 -x 10 -M SCnL Hej=Nio nefMit/
What is noted right away during several iterations of these modes is the fact that rarely, if ever, is a number included. It seems the lowercase modes are not strong suggestions except in the case of “lower case letters”. However, using the uppercase mode values works every time as expected.
apg is a simple, yet effective tool for generating passwords. My hope is that you decide to use more secure passwords in the future with tools like apg.
Cheers,
Herlo
Tonight at the Ubuntu Utah User Group I presented about Locate vs Find.
The slides are here and written in S5.
Kevin Kubasik also presented on Desktop Search in Gnome. It was pretty cool as well.
The presentations went very well and was streamed and recorded by Utah Open Source Foundation.
The POW is going to be the improvements made in the Bluetooth functionality in Fedora 8. I’m actually quite impressed with it as its been a bit of a challenge to keep my little mouse connected in the past.
Fedora 8 provides a new extended technology with its bluez-gnome package. In fact, the simplicity of it is that I only have to be able to click and approve a new device.
When I first turn on my bluetooth mouse and start to move it around, it doesn’t work, but up in the top right hand corner of my GNOME desktop is the bluetooth manager. It has a message for me:
The message indicates a click to authorize the device, namely the bluetooth mouse. (One note here, I was originally unable to use my touchpad, so I had to resort to other tactics [not pretty] to enable my mouse. Probably ought to have some other options available instead of clicking.)
Clicking on the notification window above brings me to an authorization window.
At this point, authorization is quite simple. Click yes for a one time authorization of the mouse (Note the Bluetooth Travel Mouse indicated in the description), and to authorize it more permanently, choose Always Grant Access.
That’s it. My Bluetooth mouse is now enabled and working. I’d say this is much friendlier than what I used to have to do, including running hidd –connect <bluetooth id> after pressing the little connect button on the bottom of the mouse. This is sure nice now!
Its possible, that at some point, disconnecting the device might be necessary. To do this, right-click on the nice little Bluetooth logo at the top right of your screen.
Choose Preferences. Up pops the Bluetooth Preferences window. From this window, three tabs are available. In the first (and also selected) tab, there is a section at the bottom of the window which lists the devices that are currently bonded and/or trusted. Choose the device from the list and then the appropriate action. The choices are Disconnect, Trust or Delete.
In addition to just configuring your devices, it appears it might be possible to do things like Bluetooth DUN with a Treo, or enable data synchronization between laptops. One thing I’ve always wanted to try is to get my bluetooth headset working so I could do Skype or Asterisk phone calls through my headset, to my computer and out through the service.
Cheers,
Herlo
Recently, there was a request in one of my comments on this post. The request was for an easy way to upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8. So I took this on as a bit of a challenge. I feel pretty comfortable with yum and I thought it would be a good and easy task.
A bit of warning here, make sure your current Moonshine ( Fedora 7 ) release is update by running yum update. Also, it is recommended that backups be made of files being modified. If you don’t backup the file, it may be impossible to fix in the future. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
Let’s upgrade Moonshine ( Fedora 7 ) to Werewolf ( Fedora 8 ) in three easy steps:
First things first, lets print out some version info:
$ cat /etc/*release Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)
$ uname -r 2.6.23.1-21.fc7
Its easy to tell that this machine is indeed using Moonshine ( Fedora 7 ), so let’s upgrade!
Located in /etc/yum.repos.d directory are where the yum repository files are stored. We need to modify one line so that yum will know where to look:
$ su - # vim /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
Find the first line that starts:
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch
and change it:
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=$basearch
What changed? Well, the $releasever value is the current value for our version of fedora, in this case 7. By changing it to 8, it’ll load the correct repositories for Werewolf (F8) instead of Moonshine (F7). Save the file, and now we’re ready to move onto the next step.
Since posting this, I’ve learned that another option is available. To update the repositories, its possible to install an rpm to accomplish the same as above and it won’t require Step 3.
Choose your mirror from http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org. I picked University of Oregon’s site because it was close to me.
# rpm -Uvh \ ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-*.rpm
Your ftp/http line here may be different, that is fine. This command installs the updated repositories for Werewolf ( Fedora 8 )
In this step, we just need to run (as root):
# yum update fedora 100% |===============| 2.1 kB 00:00 primary.sqlite.bz2 100% |===============| 4.9 MB 00:03 Setting up Update Process Resolving Dependencies .. snip ..
A few prompts will appear, after the repository data is loaded, a list of several hundred megs (possibly a gigabyte or more) of packages will be ready to install. This is the moment of truth.
Transaction Summary ============================ Install 88 Package(s) Update 836 Package(s) Remove 1 Package(s) Total download size: 1.0 G Is this ok [y/N]:
Start the download of over 800 packages (in my case) and install and update your system. If you feel a bit of trepidation, I concur. Its still exciting though, isn’t it?
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Now aren’t you excited! In about 30-45 minutes, you’ll have a newly upgraded Werewolf ( Fedora 8 ).
Downloading Packages: orca-2.20.0.1-1. 100% |=========================| 1.5 MB 00:01 .. snip ..
Welcome to your new Werewolf. Treat it wisely. First things first though, we need to clean up our editing from step 1:
# vim /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
Find the first line that starts:
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=$basearch
and change it:
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch
Save the file, or if you prefer, copy the backup you made over the modified repo file.
In addition, there are some items that aren’t in Fedora 8 the same way they were in Fedora 7. For these, read this guide. I didn’t have these problems myself, ymmv.
To get the newly updated kernel and all the new goodness of Werewolf, a reboot is necessary. Enjoy your new Lycanthrope on the flip side.
Cheers,
Herlo
While doing my normal reading about new features in Fedora, I came across this snippet in the rsyslogd man page. The section I was reading was in regards to how to deal with security threats.
4. Disabling inet domain sockets will limit risk to the local machine.
5. Use step 4 and if the problem persists and is not secondary to a rogue program/daemon get a 3.5 ft (approx. 1 meter)
length of sucker rod* and have a chat with the user in question.
Sucker rod def. — 3/4, 7/8 or 1in. hardened steel rod, male threaded on each end. Primary use in the oil industry in
Western North Dakota and other locations to pump ’suck’ oil from oil wells. Secondary uses are for the construction of
cattle feed lots and for dealing with the occasional recalcitrant or belligerent individual.
Quite a good chuckle!
Cheers,
Herlo
This week’s Program of the Week is a bit ahead of its release. The package is Codec Buddy, and is currently slated for release in Fedora 8 tomorrow.
Codec Buddy, with a little help from the Fedora and Fluendo development teams has grown into something that could be great. I see Codec Buddy really helping those who want to use and play non-free media sources from within Fedora. If you are currently running rawhide, you probably already know about this, but very soon, many other people will start to understand how Codec Buddy works as well.
One of the goals of the Fedora Project is to be free of any proprietary software. Though I don’t see that many people using Fedora without at least a few proprietary components, media codecs, drivers, etc. Maybe one day…we can always hope.
To that end, I am a big media buff. I regularly watch TV shows and movies that use proprietary codecs. As an example, most people don’t realize that using the reverse engineered DVD encoding provided by DVD Jon could be considered illegal. Fedora doesn’t want to be encumbered by these risks, and truthfully, I don’t blame them one bit. Considering that my backlog of mp3s and DVD rips will require an additional bit of software not normally included with Fedora, I think this is a great software solution. Give the user what they want without compromising the integrity of the project.
Codec Buddy is provided to help the average Joe understand the world of media formats. Its job was originally to provide a short description of why Fedora doesn’t include this in its distribution. Then point to where one might find more information about these formats. Codec Buddy has been altered a little, but attempts to accomplish the same thing using the Fluendo website.
Fluendo is the company that employs many of the individuals that work on the gstreamer project. Its quite a noble project, providing media codecs (installable formats) for many of the audio and video we like to use every day. Its great to have open source companies like Fluendo helping open source grow.
Codec Buddy works by launching a small application when someone tries to access a media codec not currently on the system. For instance, I’ve attempted to play a show I’ve downloaded.
Launch Totem
Open the file
Start the video
As the video attempts to play, a prompt appears, indicating the media isn’t supported. Codec buddy then provides a few options to enable playback for this particular media format.
The available items are MP3 Audio Decoder, MPEG Playback Bundle and MPEG4 Part 2 Video Decoder. By default only the MP3 Audio Decoder, which is also the only codec that will be installed without payment, is checked. The other two codecs are available for a small fee, which helps Fluendo to provide these codecs.
Clicking the “Get Selected” button will immediately start the download of the MP3 Audio Decoder (if it was selected).
A license agreement then appears, make sure to read this and if you agree, click Accept.
Once the agreement is complete, its time to purchase the remaining codecs. Choose Start Web Browser and in a few moments, the Fluendo website should appear. This should allow you to purchase the remaining codecs needed for the video I want to watch.
The Fluendo website has a good list of available codecs beyond the choices available in Codec Buddy.
The purchase will seem similar to many others on the web, add things to the cart, and pay.
Fluendo is a good start. I’m sure there will be many people interested in purchasing these codecs here. However, I believe however, that the biggest problem is that most people can get these codecs for free on Windows, Mac and even other Linux distributions. So far, the thing I feel is missing here is the explanation for why charge for these codecs and who benefits.
Fluendo is a great resource and provides some kick-ass codecs. If there is no explanation as to why we need to pay for something that one can get for free. Potential customers who don’t understand the reasoning behind it might go elsewhere, or worse even, choose another distro or operating system.
I love fedora for the freedom it gives me to choose my path. I love fedora for its focus on making sure things are free and open, both monetarily and in liberty. I love fedora for trying things like Codec Buddy, I want it to succeed. I hope that with a few suggestions, both fedora and Fluendo can make Codec Buddy the informational tool that it was originally intended.
Cheers,
Herlo
So its been a whole two days since I upgraded to Werewolf. I love it! Most everything works out of the box (OOTB), wireless, bluetooth, even suspend/resume seem to be possible for the first time!
But one of the oddities I encountered while upgrading was the names of the packages. Mind you, this is just my twisted mind being interested in some of the funny odd or strange package names I found while the yum upgrade was taking place.
So here’s the list anyway, with a short description of each. Enjoy:
This information was gathered using the command ‘rpm -qi <packagename>’. This provided enough information to help understand at least the basics of each of these packages and whether to consider using them in the future.
The packages in italics above are packages that I consider interesting, and I plan to attempt to blog about each of them in turn as part of my POW series.
The devilspie package has a * which means that I’ve used this program before. I quite enjoyed using the Devil’s Pie, and plan to take a look at it again in Fedora 8 as the previous package had some real limitations and lacked needed flexibility.
Please watch for the upcoming articles on these utilities. Also, if there are packages that you found interesting during your upgrade, please comment and let me know what they are so I can learn and possibly use them as well.
Cheers,
Herlo
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