Sunday, September 30, 2012

New Mirror Project: Slackware ARM

I'm going to maintain another Slackware-based project on my campus server and that is Slackware ARM or it was known as ArmedSlack.

Slackware ARM includes all of the improvements in Slackware x86, and in addition some of the ARM specific highlights are:
  • All packages rebuilt for the baseline architecture of ARMv5te (from v4te) 
  • Support for two new platforms:
    • The TrimSlice Pro (NVidia Tegra CPU)
    • The Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi is an interesting devices and many universities and research center are now starting to adopt this new devices because it's cheap, but still usable for creating scalable system for complex and high computation need or even for people to hack their devices to run several systems.

Right now, i'm in the middle of rsyncing and hopefully it will be completed when i wake up tomorrow morning. I will announce the URL later on when it's completed and i have set up the rsync service properly.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

New Slackware Tee Shirt

Slackware 14.0 has been released this morning and what's cool is that the Slackware Store has bring in two new products along with this release. They are New Slackware 14.0 Tee Shirt and New Slackware Polo Shirt with a pocket

Interested? Visit Slackware Store and order it right now. Your purchases can help Slackware Linux Project keep releasing further releases in the future.

Friday, September 28, 2012

WhatsApp Not Updating

For the last few days, i didn't get any updates from my WhatsApp. At first, i thought no one send me any messages, but i was wrong. It was WhatsApp's fault for not able to connect and receive/send any messages at all.

Does anyone know how to fix this problem? I have a fully working WiFI connection at my house and i set the application to use WiFI as first priority instead of going with cellular. It worked in the past, but apparently not in the latest version.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

GNOME 3.6 Released

Following several releases, finally the final version of GNOME 3.6 has been released. This is a good news to many GNOME users around the world since they have been expecting this release for some time. KDE has been progressing well so far with KDE 4.9.x and they are now working on KDE 4.10 before going to jump to KDE 5 next year.

GStreamer 1.0 has also been released and it will be likely combined with GNOME 3.6 to provide better multimedia experience to users. I have compiled GStreamer 1.0 package and all of it's plugin in my SlackHacks repository.

iPad 3

I just bought the new iPad today. The first thing i do after setting it up is to jailbreak it so that i can customize it as i like, which is something impossible to do when it's still in the official mode. Thanks to Absinthe, the jailbreak process is easier than ever. All i need is to run the application and then plug the iPad to my computer using USB cable and press the Jailbreak button. They will do the rest.

It's all done now and i wanted to install some applications that i have installed on my previous iPad 1. I guess i will take this weekend to prepare for this new iPad.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Sourceforge Compromised

Just now, i got from PHPMyAdmin's lead developer, Marc Delisle:
Hi,
the PMASA-2012-5 security advisory has been published on
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/security/PMASA-2012-5.php
.

In short, a SourceForge.net mirror server was compromised, leading to

the distribution of a doctored phpMyAdmin kit containing a backdoor.

phpMyAdmin-3.5.2.2-all-

languages.zip fetched from this mirror server is
known to be affected. To our knowledge only one mirror is affected,
which appears to be taken offline already. All other SourceForge.net
mirrors are unaffected.

phpMyAdmin security team
For those who are hosting their packages on SourceForge, please check your packages against the checksums and PGP signature (if there are any).

Thanks to Tencent Security Response Center who notifies Marc about this issue.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Clearing CheckList

The list of packages that are in SlackBuilds's CheckList is now getting shorter each day. With so many dedicated people are working to clear this list, the progress is amazing.

Big thanks to Ponce, Robby, and David who tracked and fixed most of the packages and merged them back to the SlackBuilds's GIT master so that it will be used when Slackware 14.0 is released and the new branch will be introduced.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Highway

I just came back from attending my cousin's wedding party in Semarang. It was 2.5 hours of driving from Semarang. Usually it took at minimum of 3 hours to reach Jogja, but thanks to the new highway, i can cut the travelling time to 30 minutes, just like before it gets crowded like today.

There will be more highware in the future, as the development of highway that connects Semarang and Solo are still in progress. If that's completed, we should be able to get there in shorter time.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Leaving to Semarang

I'm leaving to Semarang this morning to attend my cousin's wedding party tomorrow, so i won't be available until tomorrow night when i will be home again.

As always, i will be slow on replying email messages on my account or any other social sites (Facebook, Twitter, and Plurk).

Friday, September 21, 2012

NVIDIA Optimus Support on Linux

There's a good news about NVidia's support on Optimus for Linux, but unfortunately the demo ended with a crash. There's still hope, but don't expect a stable release soon.

Taken from Phoronix :
Maarten Lankhorst talked at XDC2012 about the ongoing open-source work for supporting NVIDIA Optimus technology on the Linux desktop.

Lankhorst covered the DMA-BUF, X.Org Server, DDX drivers, and RandR component changes being done by him, David Airlie, and others for supporting this multi/hybrid GPU technology that has been notorious under Linux. Maarten is currently employed by Canonical and they are hoping to have some early support in place for Ubuntu 12.10.


As covered in previous Phoronix articles, most of the mainline support is now in place with X.Org Server 1.13, the mainline Radeon / Nouveau / Intel DDX drivers, etc. However, more polished support should come in X.Org Server 1.14 for seamlessly switching between GPUs. Maarten is also still working on synchronization / fence support.


A demo of the primitive DRM PRIME / Optimus support was attempted from an Intel/NVIDIA laptop by Maarten, but it ended up crashing.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

iOS 6 Closed Many Vulnerabilities

With iOS 6, Apple want to fight back against the jailbreakers. It's reported that iOS 6 has closed numerous security vulnerabilities found on previous version. Among these fixed vulnerabilities, there might be some vulnerabilities used by the jailbreakers to exploit iOS and able to bypass it's system to deploy the jailbreak.

Jailbreakers has said to stay away from iOS 6 unless you know the risk. While some has reported that a tethered jailbreak has already being done in iOS 6, most people will definitely wait for untethered jailbreak and that will not come in short time.

We will have to wait until the official announcement from the jailbreakears :)

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Qt is now owned by Digia

Digia has finally finished the acquisition process of Qt from Nokia and now has the responsibility for Qt activities including product development and commercial and open source licensing. The website for Qt is now http://qt.digia.com.

This will ensure the future of Qt 5 and also KDE 5 which will be based on Qt 5. Some workers are enjoying this transition since they now have a company to pay for them, but some people (around 60) that used to work for Nokia in Brisbane, Australia is not that lucky.  Last month, Nokia shut down their office in Brisbane which was in charge of some Qt development and right now, they are jobless (some might already find another job currently). Hopefully they could find a better company that will hire them and use their wonderful skills and they can still contribute to Qt.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

GNOME Hell

Now i know why Slackware removed GNOME in the past. Maintaining GNOME packages requires a lot of efforts, since new packages will most likely add new dependencies and it keeps growing and growing on each release.

I tried to compile Anjuta which uses some of the GNOME libraries and the list of requirement is tremendous. That doesn't count the dependencies of the Anjuta's dependencies package. So, if being counted in total, i must install and configure like 15 packages. Geez....

Probably i should call this GNOME Hell instead :)

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Linux Kernel 3.5.4 Released

Greg has released Linux Kernel 3.5.4, the latest stable release for Linux Kernel 3.5 branch. As always, people are recommended to upgrade to this version as this fixed a lot of problems spotted during the development of Linux Kernel 3.6 and it's backported to Linux Kernel 3.5.x.

There are tons of fixes that has been merged on this release. Architectures, drivers, file systems, networking, sounds, and memory management. Every one of them gets a piece of updates that should make it even better than before.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Working with GIT

Lately, i have been playing with GIT more intensively than ever. I'm maintaining several GIT repository for my own work, my personal project, and also for community, such as SlackBuilds project which now uses GIT mainly for tracking changes.

GIT itself is a very powerful tool for managing source code. No wonder many open source project decided to switch to GIT from many other SCM tools, such as CVS and SVN. It's nature of a distributed system makes it perfect for projects whom it's member are working in a different time zone, different area, and may have many different policies throughout their code.

As i'm still learning more about GIT, there are still a lot of commands that i still don't understand, but i'm trying to learn all the basic steps to work with my repository and so far, i'm still on the right track (hopefully).

I'm using Pro Git as my reference to work with GIT. You might want to read it as well if you want to learn more about GIT. I'm sure you will love it.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Samba 4 RC1 is Ready

Samba finally released their first RC release for the upcoming Samba 4. This is another milestone after reaching 8 Beta releases during their development cycle. The primary additional features over Samba 3.6 are support for the Active Directory logon protocols used by Windows 2000 and above.

Here are the new features implemented in Samba 4:
Samba 4.0 supports the server-side of the Active Directory logon
environment used by Windows 2000 and later, so we can do full domain
join and domain logon operations with these clients.

Our Domain Controller (DC) implementation includes our own built-in
LDAP server and Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) as well as the
Samba3-like logon services provided over CIFS.  We correctly generate
the infamous Kerberos PAC, and include it with the Kerberos tickets we
issue.

Samba 4.0 ships with two distinct file servers.  We now use the
file server from the Samba 3.x series 'smbd' for all file serving by
default.

Samba 4.0 also ships with the 'NTVFS' file server.  This file server
is what was used in all previous alpha releases of Samba 4.0, and is
tuned to match the requirements of an AD domain controller.  We
continue to support this, not only to provide continuity to
installations that have deployed it as part of an AD DC, but also as a
running example of the NT-FSA architecture we expect to move smbd to in
the longer term.

For pure file server work, the binaries users would expect from that
series (nmbd, winbindd, smbpasswd) continue to be available.  When
running an AD DC, you only need to run 'samba' (not
nmbd/smbd/winbind), as the required services are co-coordinated by this
master binary.

As DNS is an integral part of Active Directory, we also provide two DNS
solutions, a simple internal DNS server for 'out of the box' configurations
and a more elaborate BIND plugin using the BIND DLZ mechanism in versions
9.8 and 9.9. During the provision, you can select which backend to use.
With the internal backend, your DNS server is good to go.
If you chose the BIND_DLZ backend, a configuration file will be generated
for bind to make it use this plugin, as well as a file explaining how to
set up bind.

To provide accurate timestamps to Windows clients, we integrate with
the NTP project to provide secured NTP replies.  To use you need to
start ntpd and configure it with the 'restrict ... ms-sntp' and
ntpsigndsocket options.

Finally, a new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing
Python programs to interface to Samba's internals, and many tools and
internal workings of the DC code is now implemented in python.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

New PHP Released

PHP Team has released PHP 5.3.17 and PHP 5.4.7 to fix several issues found on previous version. There are several segfaults that has been addressed on this release, and hopefully the number of problems spotted has been reduced. See the ChangeLog for more information about the changes.

Head to the Download page to get the latest release of PHP

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

GNU Patch 2.7 Released

GNU Patch, a very important utility used to patch source code has gotten itself a new stable release after three years without doing so. Andreas Grünbacher has sent an email to several mailing list announcing this great news.

As new stable release, GNU Patch has received several big changes, such as:

* Support for most features of the "diff --git" format, including renames and
  copies, permission changes, and symlink diffs.  Binary diffs are not
  supported yet; patch will complain and skip them.

* Support for double-quoted filenames: when a filename starts with a double
  quote, it is interpreted as a C string literal.  The escape sequences \\, \",
  \a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v, and \ooo (a three-digit octal number between 0 and
  255) are recognized.

* Ignore destination file names that are absolute or that contain a component
  of "..".  This addresses CVE-2010-4651.

* Refuse to apply a normal patch to a symlink.  (Previous versions of patch
  were replacing the symlink with a regular file.)

* When trying to modify a read-only file, warn about the potential problem
  by default.  The --read-only command line option allows to change this
  behavior.

* Files to be deleted are deleted once the entire input has been processed, not
  immediately.  This fixes a bug with numbered backup files.

* When a timestamp specifies a time zone, honor that instead of assuming the
  local time zone (--set-date) or Universal Coordinated Time (--set-utc).

* Support for nanosecond precision timestamps.

* Patch no longer gets a failed assertion for certain mangled patches.

* Many portability and bug fixes.

The source code for this new patch utility can be taken from GNU's FTP Server.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Arang and the Magistrate

Finally, after several days without any KDrama to watch, finally i have decided to watch Arang and the Magistrate. One of my reason to follow this drama is because it has a good translations from DarkSmurf Sub. I can't speak Korean, so i need good translations from subbing group so that i can enjoy the movie.

This drama is scheduled to have 20 episodes (10 weeks) and it has been airing since last month (August 15). The main cast of this drama is Shin Min Ah, who played as Gumiho in her previous drama. It looks like she enjoyed being a "ghost" character.


Here's some synopsis, taken from several source:

The drama is based on famous folklore, as all ghost stories are: During the Joseon era in the city of Miryang, Arang was the pure, beautiful, goodhearted daughter of a magistrate. She grew up without a mother, and was raised by a wicked caretaker who conspired to have her be raped and ruined by a servant. He attacked and she resisted, so he stabbed and killed her, and left her body to rot in the woods.
Her father the magistrate just believed that she dishonorably eloped with a man and so resigned his position swathed in shame. Thus the legend goes that every time a new magistrate comes to Miryang to fill the position, Arang’s vengeful ghost shows up to tell him her story and he flees in terror.
But one day a new magistrate comes to town — a young man by the name of Lee Eun-oh. Arang appears to him like every other magistrate before him, but this man doesn’t flee, and instead sympathizes with Arang, and promises to find her killer and avenge her death.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Hotel Hell

Right now, Gordon Ramsay is not only working on finding the best chefs through Master Chef and Hell Kitchen, but he's also working on hotel management TV shows called Hotel Hell, produced by One Potato Two Potato, and broadcasted on Fox Channel. This TV shows are narrated by Gordon Ramsay himself.

Too bad that season 1 only consists of six episodes, featuring 5 hotels (the first hotel is split into two episodes) and one of the have to be closed before the show was airing.

Fox has renewed Hotel Hell for their second season. I'm looking forward for the next season. It should be quite interesting.

Sunday, September 09, 2012

Kernel 3.6-rc5 Released

Linus finally released Linux Kernel 3.6-rc5 and it's getting more calm than previous rc release. He was hoping that the current situation goes all the way until the final version of Linux Kernel 3.6 is shipped and the development will shift to the next merge window that marks the new development cycle of Linux Kernel 3.7.

Get the Linux Kernel 3.6-rc5 from Kernel.org

Saturday, September 08, 2012

Database Designer for iOS

I'm involved in quite a complex project right now and i'm responsible for the system architecture and DB design as i'm the project leader for this project. Sometimes, when i'm not in front of the PC, i wanted to work, at least designing the database using my iPad.

I searched through Google and found a product that might be perfect for me: MySQL Mobile Database Client by Impathic. Here's some description and it's feature copied from the original page in App Store:
Browse, search, and update all your MySQL databases on the go with the DataGlass Mobile Database Client for MySQL! DataGlass is your one stop for complete and flexible access to your MySQL servers. From DBAs and IT professionals that need to run ad-hoc queries, to executives who need immediate access to the raw data, to analysts who need to build and execute sophisticated reports, DataGlass is the only app you will need to connect you directly to your data. Whether you are accessing your servers from your local network, or remotely through your organization's secure VPN, you never need to be without the information that is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise. DataGlass requires no complicated desktop servers or expensive middleware to set up: the speed and flexibility of direct connections to your server provides unparallelled efficiency.

• Compatible with MySQL versions 3, 4, and 5
• An unlimited number of databases can be simultaneously managed by DataGlass
• Connect directly to your databases without the need for complex and expensive middleware
• Corporate databases can be accessed remotely using a VPN or by using the built-in SSH tunneling
• Can access tables and views in OLTP databases and data warehouses alike
• Export your raw data to Numbers, Mail, or CSV files for inclusion in external reports
• Save local snapshots of your data for browsing offline or on the road
• Generate elegant charts from your data within the app
• Print the results of your queries directly from your printer-enabled iOS device
• Build and execute sophisticated queries spanning multiple tables using the innovative Query Designer, or enter custom SQL
I think it's a good product. I will have a look on it shortly

Friday, September 07, 2012

Teaching using Slackware

I teach Network Administration course this year and i'm using Slackware as the base operating system during this course. I build a VMWare image using the latest Slackware 14.0 RC4 as the base and i gave it to my students. Some of them dare to set up a native dual boot even though i never asked them to have a native installation.

Today is the second week, but it's really the first week when i really teach them on how to learn the Slackware environment. So far, everything went well and no big problems except that at the beginning, the progress was kinda slow since we had to transfered 5.6 GB of data (VMWare image) to several laptops. When that was done, everything progressed smoothly.

Firstly, i taught them how to add a new user. It's not safe to use root as your daily user, especially when you are inexperienced user. Next, i taught them some basic understanding about directories in Linux, some basic commands, and some basic configuration. I will continue the course next week by teaching them about permissions, package management, and more basic configuration so that their new environment is comfortable to be used by them.

Thursday, September 06, 2012

Good Bye ArchLinux Repository

I decided not to host ArchLinux repository anymore since the server is hosting more and more services used in our university. The main problem with ArchLinux is that it is updated too frequent and it took some time to complete the whole update. Meanwhile, i can only use rsync at night because at morning until evening, the bandwidth are reserved for students and academic activities.

So, at the end, i have to end up this service for good. I have sent an email to the ArchLinux mirror mailing list to ask them to remove UKDW Repository as their ArchLinux mirror site and hopefully by tomorrow, i can delete the whole ArchLinux repository. I have removed the information on the page and also the rsync access to the packages.

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

OpenSUSE 12.2 Released

After suffering several delays, finally OpenSUSE 12.2 came to surface and now it's ready for public consumptions. This is the results of the two months of stabilization phase which hopefully paid their user's patience.

This release uses a stable package instead of going with the bleeding-edge version, such as:
  • Linux Kernel 3.4
  • Systemd 44
  • Glibc 2.15
  • Bind 9.9
  • OpenSSH 6.0
  • Grub2
  • OpenSSL 1.0.1c
  • Mesa 8.0
  • KDE 4.8.4
  • GNOME 3.4
  • XFCE 4.10
  • GIMP 2.8.0
  • Firefox 14 (will be upgraded to 15)
  • and many others
Download ISOs and torrents are now ready. Go Get Them while  they are still GREEN!!! 

Tuesday, September 04, 2012

KDE 4.9.1 is Approaching

In the next 24 hours, KDE 4.9.1 will be announced and bringing a monthly update which should bring their users towards a stable, mature desktop environments. KDE plans to release 4 minor updates for KDE 4.9.x branch which will be maintained until December 2012. It's all documented in their release schedule.

KDE team will continue to work on future KDE released, marked as KDE 4.10 which has it's own release schedule. It is scheduled to be released on January, 23 2013 and will be maintained until June 2013.

Meanwhile there aren't any news about KDE 5 yet. QT 5, which will be the base for KDE 5 are now in Beta version, hopefully they will release the final version soon, so that KDE team can start focusing on planning KDE 5.

Monday, September 03, 2012

LFS Upgraded to 7.2

LFS (Linux From Scratch) project has been updated to 7.2. A lot of changes has been included on this release, which is mentioned on the project guide. Some of the most interesting changes are the new toolchain used to build the system, namely Coreutils 8.19, GCC 4.7.1, GLIBC 2.16, KMod 9, Linux 3.5.2, Udev 188, and Util-Linux 2.21.2.

If you are interested on  this project, get started and hopefully you will understand more about creating your own Linux system from scratch (or from other Linux project)

Sunday, September 02, 2012

Sore Throat

I think i'm having a sore throat right now. It's really in a bad timing as i need my voice to teach in my daily activities. I'm teaching 8 classes a week and there are still 12 weeks left before i can have some rest a little bit.

I'm hoping that it won't gets worse by tomorrow as i will have 2x3 credits classes tomorrow and i guess it will be a lot of questions and discussions at those classes :)

Saturday, September 01, 2012

Optimus Linux Support

While many Linux users might be digruntled about NVidia's decision not to support for Optimus in the past, right now, there might be some hope as Aaron Plattner from NVidia is reviewing Dave Airlie's work on RandR 1.4 and PRIME buffer sharing and he has mentioned that he got a proof of concept working.

It's a long journey to have this feature officially supported by NVidia's blob driver, but i guess many Linux users will be happy with this news. I'm hoping that soon enough, they will support hybrid GPU and i can enable NVIdia on my laptop which has been disabled everytime i boot.