May 2005 Archives

The Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG.

* It does A, B and G
* It has very low power consumption
* It has a 100% GPL, non-kernel tainting driver
* You can get it for less than $40
* It has actively developed and maintained drivers (WPA/WPA2 support
coming soon)
* The drivers are being prepped for inclusion into the official kernel
* It has it's own IRC channel (#ipw2100 on freenode) where the Intel
development team hangs out

I currently have the 2200BG part in my laptop which uses the same driver, but only supports B and G. I been using it exclusively ever since the v0.14 driver allowed associating to access points that are hosting multiple wireless networks (ala wireless VLANs) like we have in the Guru Labs office.

Today, May 18th 2005, the new driver v1.04 was released along with new firmware. One of the highly anticipated new features is the support for monitor mode. This also the operation of wireless sniffing tools such as kismet.

Many other bugs were fixed as well. Hopefully Fedora Core v4 will ship with this version of the driver.

Last week, rdesktop v1.4.1 was released.

Changes since version 1.4.0 are:

* persistent bitmap cache optimisations (-P)
* support for more RDP-orders (ellipse, polygon)
* libao sound-driver (for Mac OSX and others)
* Unicode support for transmitted strings/filenames
* Added korean keymap
* Xembed fixes to work with krdc correctly
* Portability fixes
* Support for RDP-compression (all depths)
* process RDP recv queue if send queue is full
* optimizations for the rdp compression at high depths
* fixes to the keyboard-handling regarding ctrl-alt-delete
* improvements to the sgi/irix sound driver
* mppc decompression fixes

Ever since Sunday, May 15th, I've been gettings LOTS of German SPAM.

I found out why last night.

Today the final test release (test 3) of Fedora Core v4 was released.

I used this trick to convert my FC4test2 isos into FC4test3. This way I'm not downloading the bits that haven't changed.

cd /path/to/your/FC4test2/isos
mv FC4-test2-i386-disc1.iso FC4-test3-i386-disc1.iso
mv FC4-test2-i386-disc2.iso FC4-test3-i386-disc2.iso
mv FC4-test2-i386-disc3.iso FC4-test3-i386-disc3.iso
mv FC4-test2-i386-disc4.iso FC4-test3-i386-disc4.iso

rsync -v --stats --progress rsync://name.of.mirror/fedora/linux/core/test/3.92/i386/iso/FC4-test3-i386-disc[1234].iso .

Watching the data transfer speed, I notice that pretty often it jumps up
much higher than the cap of my internet connection. This tells me that
that my trick was worthwhile.

Be sure to grab the SHA1SUM file and check your ISOs once the rsync
completes.

We have been working on updating our Linux courseware and training for the lastest Linux distributions. Recently we took a look at SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 and here are few quick things we noticed:

- blowfish encryption in /etc/shadow by default
- user created during install is "auto-login" by default
- Kerberos implementation switched from Heimdal to MIT
- New Package Group Selections available: Fonts, Voip, Xen, Laptop
- Deleted Package Group Selection: LSB (lsb RPM package exists)
- The original Korn Shell shipped
- The boot process starts the graphical login before daemons are launched
- Network config tied to hardware via physical path via "_nm_name='bus-pci-0000:03:01.0'"
- syslogd replaced with syslog-ng as default

It is possible that some of these changes first appeared in SUSE Linux 9.2.

For many years, on Red Hat distros, the common respository for SSL certificates has been the /usr/share/ssl/certs directory. You'll find the SSL certifcate for cyrus-imapd, dovect, exim, and OpenLDAP in that directory by default. Also, the bundle of trusted CA certicates is also located in that directory.

This is changing for Fedora Core v4 and the future Red Hat Enterprise Linux v5.

As of April 22nd, the Fedora development tree for the upcoming Fedora Core v4 changed the directory to:

/etc/pki

This initially caused some breakage in applications that hard coded the path to the CA bundle. One example was Postfix.

Applications shouldn't be hard coding the path, and instead should make use of the OpenSSL API functions X509_get_default_cert_file() or SSL_CTX_set_default_verify_paths().

Additionally, any HOWTO or documentation out there should be updated to reference the new path. We have already updated the development tree of our Linux courseware.