Updates!

Well, it's been a long time in the road since my last post here. This weblog isn't over, but I been doing a lot of things and didn't got the time to write something.

Ok, things I've been doing:
* I wrote a new network manager for Kwort 2.4.2 (I'm already working on a new Kwort version), screenshots are coming
* I also wrote a new user manager for next Kwort also. Screenshots are ON the way. :-D
* A friend of mine (Jp) is working on a new init system which is very cool, so Kwort will use it.
* Bought a pretty cool (4 cores) new computer (Desktop). I would like to thank to the aircable.net people who helped me to buy my new computer with a donation. (A BIG THANKS TO YOU GUYS)
* Working... :-)

Anyways, I want here to point to two links, the first one if from my good old friend Andreas Schipplock, he made a small list of interesting links to read and/or hear. The second one is to the "Open Unix Society" which is a cool place full of documents and books for learning.

Online video lectures
Open Unix Society



Btw, I took a position at iProgrammers and I'm working at Accenture now as a Senior Programmer.

Kwort 2.4 released

I'm proud to announce that Kwort 2.4 final version has been released after a very long time (more than a year). The system is very stable and very usable.

The core system is based on Slackware and provides a rock solid system, and it's also a great place to start making a full featured and usable desktop environment using Xfce.
This version includes several changes from 2.2 from a new toolchain to a completely new base system. The inclusion of hal provides a great way to communicate the hardware with the desktop making the system a lot more user friendly.

Good things in this new version:

• Hal: As I said before provides a lot of new features giving the desktop some kind of control of the hardware.
• New init system: Kwort 2.4 includes a new init system written mostly from scratch. Also it puts all the work together with the new service command.
• Linux 2.6.24.3: The latest stable version of the linux kernel.
• Kpkg: The new version of kpkg was re-written from scratch.
• Kwort User Manager: Provides a simple way to create and remove users with default Kwort templates.
• Xfce: This new version integrate great with hal.
• Ristretto: The image viewer of the Xfce project.
• Mplayer: The most famous video player on Linux is now included in the iso.
• Pidgin: The latest version of the best multiprotocol IM.
• Mpd+Gmpc: This is the new combo to play media files in Kwort. Just put your media files in ~/Music, go to gmpc, give update and play.

As in every old version now comes the things that I look forward to improving:

• Better support for wireless devices: This is not part of Kwort itself, but the kernel, but finally affects Kwort users.
• Amule: Once again amule is giving the hebbe-jeebes. There is no stable version of amule that works well enough with Kwort. The latest version is dated from middle of 2006 wich is very old and buggy with newer versions of wxGTK.

Screenshots available here: http://kwort.org/?page=ScreenshotView

People who I would like to thank:
Andreas Schipplock for making and maintaining the website, mirroring the iso, working in Kwort core (he made most part of the job with Core) and bring lzma support to Kwort.
Stijn Seger for working in some packages like openntpd and the pm support. And writing the Kwort user manager.
I would like to give a special thanks to the users who ran tests specially to David Luskovec and Juan Martin Villanueva, if it wasn't for you guys, this iso would take even longer to come out.
Manuel Naranjo for reporting bugs, submiting patches for the new init system, hosting the iso and run test all along Kwort core.
Also, I would like to thank all the mirror providers: Ricardo Brisighelli for the development mirror in the UNR, Alberto Ferrer for the mirror in Emanon Linux and the AIRcable people for the mirror at aircable.net.
Finally, but not less important a very big THANKS to Patrick Volkerding for Slackware Linux, the system kwort is based on. I hope I didn't forget anyone.

As usual, if you need support, help, or you just feel like talking about Kwort (or anything else), or you just want to meet the people who is behind Kwort, you can join us on IRC: irc://irc.oftc.net/Kwort

Nice picture

Well, not much to say these days...




Sometimes we have to find a reason to laugh, even a little bit... I found this picture very funny. :)


nobody:nogroup

Why ktsuss use setuid?

Well, this was the question made by one of the debian packagers. I see a good thing the fact that they ask this, since including a program setuid without asking the reasons would be kind of dumb. They ask why not using pam or su in the way gksu does, so I will try to answer these questions.

Using pam would requiere setuid too (since pam_unix2 doesn't have it's own wrapper), which doesn't bother me as long as I program in a secure way... What really does, is that not every distribution out there use pam, slackware is the most important it comes to my mind now.
Using su, well, there might be a problem there, gksu does it in a very unportable way waiting for the string " Authentication failure" which is a very bad idea, look this example:

Fedora "su" command:
-sh-3.1$ su
Password:
su: incorrect password
-sh-3.1$
Slackware (Kwort) "su" command:
nomius@Neptune:~$ su
Password:
Sorry.
nomius@Neptune:~$

As you can see in gksu, different versions of su would really break things up.
None of above shown implementations gives " Authentication failure". I guess that message is given by pam with strerror(), so once again, it's not portable.

The actual ktsuss code is very clean and simple (which is the whole idea behind ktsuss), I always gave security with the authentication backend, maybe a feature bug (like the PATH thing in 1.1), but not security issues.

There might be a way using su better than what gksu does, something like doing "su -c exit" (pepping the password of course) getting the exit status with WEXITSTATUS(), waiting for 0 (password ok and then run su command with the same password) or 1 (wrong password). But would be kind of messy...
I should see that like something in a long distant future... But I think it could be a way to avoid the paranoid.

So since ktsuss have its own implementation of authentication backend, that's why it needs setuid.

Some flashlights of Kwort 2.4

Well, me and the rest of the team are working in Kwort 2.4 (2.2.2? I dunno, but I think 2.4 will be alright).

Andreas Schipplock (aka Avarus) is working on the core system and as far as I know he is making a remarkable work on it.
One of the most important parts is the lzma compression for the packages, so the final iso will be smaller than the Kwort 2.2 one. He is now working on the installation system, so when he gets done I'll put Kwort desktop on it.



Stijn Segers is working on the new interface for the users admin system (as my mockup looked very bad :-P), so once he finishes with it I will make a Xfce plugin of it and include it in the mcs settings manager.
He will also take care of the kernel. So this time, getting kernel source to compile drivers won't be needed and as he told me we will include some drivers by default like those free ralink ones. But kernel work stopped until 2.6.23 come out, as that one will be the one for Kwort 2.4.

And it's time to tell what I'm doing... Well, until Andreas and Stijn doesn't finish I'm still maintaining 2.2 serie including and upgrading packages (http://www.kwort.org/?page=MorePackages).
But until that happens I'm checking projects and taking decisions for the desktop and in core (helping Andreas and Stijn). Today I did some user custom actions for kwort packages:


For those paranoids (I know you guys are right about this), ktsuss will be included and all those sudo commands will be removed (sudo will still be included, but not used for anything else but xfsm-shutdown-helper). So this custom action showed above use ktsuss in case you ask.


Oh, another interesting things are the fact that kwort is listed in www.xfce.org/download/distros as a Xfce distribution and Kwort being used in school (COBAEH - Cuautepec de Hinojosa - Hidalgo - México) with old machines (Pentium MMX 200Mhz with 32MB ram).

Well, that's all for now folks, I will keep bringing Kwort newsflash :)

The IT Crowd for download

The last week I started to see a tv serie called "The IT Crowd" on Sony, it's a funny geek serie about an IT team in a british company. Anyways, a friend of mine (Manu) wanted to download all the chapters from a site, so I wrote this simple script for him:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

wget http://stage6.divx.com/The-IT-Crowd---Spanish-Subtitled/videos/
i=1
for x in $(egrep -i "The-IT-Crowd---1x0*" index.html | awk -F '/' '{ print $4}' | sort -m -u); do
   tput setaf 1
   echo "Downloading chapter ${i} (Link: http://divx-226.vo.llnwd.net/stage6vid/${x}.divx)"
   tput sgr0
   wget http://divx-226.vo.llnwd.net/stage6vid/${x}.divx --output-file="${i}.avi"
   i=$((i+1))
done

I hope someone find it useful.

EDIT: Unfortunately, this doesn't work anymore, since stage6 was closed.

Vista stealing Mac OS X ideas? Nahhh, they are too different

I had another thing to post tonight, but I just wanted someone to note this:

Something interesting

This is kind of "off topic" but I see this interesting:

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana over a set of stairs. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray the other monkeys with cold water.

After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result--the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when any monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace him with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To the monkey's surprise, all the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he'll be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace him with a new one. The new comer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous new comer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.
Advertisement

Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they weren't permitted to climb the stairs or why they're participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know, that's the way it's always been done around here.

My new keyboard

Yesterday I got this new "old keyboard". Believe or not, this treasure was going to the trash, and my little brother save it because I told him I was looking for one. He came to me with it at 1:30 in the morning.
I been looking for one of this since 5 years ago. This is a IBM Model M keyboard (latin american) model 1391506. Produced in 1988 is an old school keyboard for people who can appreciate the sound and tact of a real keyboard, this is one of the best (If I don't say the best) keyboard ever made. If IBM knows how to do something is keyboards.
This is real shit, not for those kiddies with multimedia keyboards, this keyboards if for mans, so kids... Stay out, or I'll punch you with it (real, it weight is 2.5kg :D).

How this keyboards works? See this animation:


For those who doesn't know how this keyboard sounds like, you can listen at this: model_m_sound.mp3