Debian

Posted October 25th, 2008 by ernest.park

http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2008-0166

http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/310.html

In the Debian example, the open source community trusted that someone else would look and find the problem. Users believed that the power of community review would reduce the risk of using the software.

Regular readers of this column will know that I’m a fan of education and positive experience as an advocacy tool in place of shouting from rooftops. Winning the mindset of an average computer user — particularly home users — is never going to be a quick process but a recent experience showed me we still have some old and familiar hills to climb. How do we combat legacy reputations of GNU/Linux that are no longer valid?

Source: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS4471547300.html

KangarooBox is shipping a "free" open-source server appliance that runs Debian 5 GNU/Linux. Targeting small offices, the silent, fanless "Joey" employs an AMD Geode-based PC Engines ALIX 3c2 single-board computer (SBC), and is given to customers buying a $3,000 one-year support plan, the company says.

(Click for larger view of the Joey)

This is a very simple, step-by-step guide to installing and using new X mouse themes without the need to rely on a GUI configuration tool. This is useful for anyone who uses a standalone window manager as their graphical interface. Window managers such as Fluxbox and Openbox do not include tools for altering the mouse theme. At the same time, many users of these window managers are pretty picky about the look and feel of their desktop.

Hi all.
This How-To it's an update of the e17 installation method from code, here, due to a recent move from CVS to a SVN repo. Old CVS tree it's still available but will be not maintained anymore.

This method propose a simplified way to install a fresh and stable e17, compiled and updated from source, on Ubuntu or any Debian based distro.

All it's done automatically from a single deb package, based
on a famous script, easy_e17.sh from morlenxus, one of the e17 developers.
This script it's well known for it's developer care for quality and continued maintenance, made it one of the best available (besides the fact that it's the one used "inside" for e developers tests).

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/08/open_source_cu...

How to react to the news that an earlier flaw in Debian's random-number generator has been used to fuel an honest-to-Linus exploit, especially after yesterday's post? Welcome to the tip of the iceberg.

It's been said, somewhat cynically, that one possible good reason we don't see more Linux exploits scurrying around in the wild is because Linux doesn't represent the same kind of attack surface for criminal hackers as Windows does. True, Linux still doesn't have the desktop market share of even the Macintosh -- but it's become that much more interesting as a target because of the number of server and infrastructure systems that use it.

Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=340

The Linux landscape is constantly changing and has a strong community of both developers and users. But where is Linux the most popular, and where are the different Linux distributions the most popular?

To try to answer these questions, we have looked at data from Google with the highly useful Insights for Search, which gave us a number of interesting and often surprising results.

How to Recompile/Repack a .deb Program.

By: Zeb Carnell

Ok so you have a program you like on your Debian GNU/Linux based system and would like to edit a menu or option or even recompile the .deb source with a new option or config. You may wonder how you can do this. Well here goes.

Build the basic development environment:

apt-get install devscripts build-essential fakeroot

This installs the necessary packages needed for most development builds in GNU/Linux.
Now you need the source code for the package you wish to repack:

apt-get source packagename

This will download the source code for the package into the directory you are currently in. So please Change Directory (cd) to the directory you want to work in. The above command also unpacks the tar file for you into that directory, so now for you to edit the source code you need to cd into the source folder: