The guys over at NeoCash Radio had me on for their show #77, talking about Bitcoin and all the rest of it.

Thank you, Daren and JJ, for the opportunity, and I look forward to our talk on the First Crypto War when that comes out.

Curt-

Installing the Trinity Desktop Environment on Debian

A recent discussion on LXer concerning the greatness that was Kmail reminded me that I never did a good write-up on installing the KDE3 fork, Trinity-DE.

One of the more interesting aspects of this particular discussion is that I wasn't the one to bring up Trinity-DE. Usually, it's me who points out that the wondrous fantasticness that was KDE3 has not left the world, that Trinity-DE is alive and well.

So it's time for a screenshot tutorial on installing Trinity-DE. For my base, I chose Debian Wheezy, using the Xfce-AMD64 install CD. You can choose any of the Debian Netinstall, CD#1, or DVD#1 disks and simply install whichever default desktop it comes with.

If you do choose to install KDE4 by default, then put Trinity-DE on with it, let me know how that goes. It's the one thing I haven't tried yet, since I do not prefer KDE4.

Learning by doing: Compiling your own custom kernel for fun and profit

You know that Linux kernel thing, that has thousands of developers from all over the world, some of which do it professionally, most of which do it for the love of solving problems (or something)?

I look at it as a great chance for learning.

The Linux Live CD

It's been 12 years since Mark Knopper first created Knoppix, ushering in an amazing way to try running Linux: directly from a CD.

No installation hassles, no worries about losing data during an upgrade. No getting stuck in the middle of an install and not having a machine to use to track down documentation.

Just a running machine. Easily, quickly, and best of all temporarily.

Go fsck yourself, part duh

You remember last time, when I said, "I'm writing this blog entry on the same disk image that was giving me nightmares just 7 hours ago"? Hahaha, well, that was then, and this is now.

It's four hours later, and this time, I'm writing from the laptop.

Go fsck yourself

Interesting experience today.

My daily use machine has a SATA disk drive, and it would not boot this morning. GRUB would begin, and then fail saying it could not find any initrd or kernel.

I was able to boot using a Live CD, but several of the ones I have didn't work. Time to purge my "rescue disk" collection, download the latest Trinity Rescue and Knoppix, etc.

The one that did work would not recognize that the HD even existed. So no fdisk, no mounting the partitions for backup, nothing. Doomed, I thought. Fried disk. Right.

Microsoft devours Skype

Skype has been purchased by Microsoft, for $8.5 Billion.

I have used Skype for years on Linux, even though Skype treated their Linux client as something like a red-headed step-child. Features like video chat were always included in the Linux client long after they were in the Windows version, bug fixes were slow, stuff like that.

But, and here's the biggest thing: It worked.

I am now a Linux Kernel Developer

No joke.

On Sunday, March 20th, I submitted a patch to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, to fix a compile problem that began when the "binutils" package, that handles programs written in assembly, was updated such that something that was never a problem before became a problem.

The file linux-2.6.38/arch/x86/kernel/entry_32.S had two places where the "END(foo)" did not match the "foo" in its "ENTRY(foo)". The file dates back to 1992, so this problem has been there the whole time and no one noticed because it didn't cause an error until now.

I have no idea if the patch will be accepted, or even noticed, but I've done it and now anyone who gets the compile error...


arch/x86/kernel/entry_32.S: Assembler messages:
arch/x86/kernel/entry_32.S:1422: Error: .size expression does not evaluate to a constant make[3]: *** [arch/x86/kernel/entry_32.o] Error 1


...will know what it is about and how to fix it if my patch doesn't make it into the kernel.

Bodhi Linux 0.1.7 and the Enlightenment Desktop

Bodhi has released 0.1.7, a further development release of the Bodhi Enlightenment desktop Linux distribution. As I've mentioned before, Bodhi is focusing on providing usability with a minimal footprint.

By using the Enlightenment graphics environment, Bodhi creates highly configurable, and aesthetically pleasing, visual effects without loading the system down with bloat.

As Bodhi is a tributary of Ubuntu, and so it's no surprise that Bodhi works as a liveCD and not just an install disk. As an old Debian hack myself, I'm so used to install disks doing nothing but installing that it's still a bit of a pleasant surprise.

The installation is fundamentally the same as before, so I don't see a need to go into that again. Well, I will say that the final screen now correctly points out that it is Bodhi Linux, I'm glad that the Bodhi developers took my previous poke in the humorous spirit it was intended.

SSH, X11, and You

SSH Encrypted Network Connections


Recently I read an article where the author went through great pains to launch an application on a remote system and display it locally, over an encrypted session.


Doing this is actually far, far easier to do than ggarron makes it out to be. It's no more difficult than a single option in SSH. But first, what is SSH to you?


Right off the bat, please, don't fear the command line. If you're new to UNIX style systems, like Linux, the command line can seem daunting. It just sits there waiting for you to type something. Don't let it bother you, as long as you're not root you can't do much harm.

The logo of OpenSSH

Secure Shell is a command line application that allows you to replace telnet, ftp and xhost with a secure link to a remote system with serious protection of the data you transfer.


SSH uses passwords, or can be configured to use Public Key encryption, like GunPG or PGP do. Passwords can work into a system the first time, Public Key authentication has to be set up ahead of time.


For a good SSH primer, if you don't have a "Unix Power Utilities" volume sitting around, this article on WikiHow.com seems quite straight forward. There are lots of results if you use Google to look for "ssh howto", and I've noticed that the Ubuntu forums tend to cater well to "first time users". The OpenSSH.com Frequently Asked Questions list gets rather technical. 

On Linux, Software Patents, Shakespeare and the Web

A user by the name of "Upinvermont" has posted an excellent article, On Linux, Software Patents, Shakespeare & the Web.

I wonder if he's written any SPAM haiku?

"A SPAM, by any other aspic, would smell as sweet?"

But anyway, what I find most interesting about this article is how it brings the raging copying and building upon other's work of Elizabethan England into equation, or at least comparison, with the Open Source software ecosystem the literati often refer to simply as "Linux."

I have often compared the Open Source software environment to music. My favorite example being "Variations on a Theme by Paganini" by Johannes Brahms. A beautiful work of music which in no way detracts from the original, but does inspire someone who loves it to look up the original guitar work, like I did. It is also very much in doubt if such a work could have been produced under the present regime, considering what happened to George Harrison with My Sweet Lord.

Would Shakespeare's works have reached the audience they do today? Who can say. What I can say is that what happens outside of copyright and patent is very different than what happens under Intellectual Property: Imitation becomes not a crime, but the sincerest form of flattery.

If music be the food of love, play on. Play on, McDuff!

A response to DistroWatch "Introducing Debian GNU/Linux 6.0"

The 8th DistroWatch Weekly of 2011 feature article, "Introducing Debian GNU/Linux 6.0", comes in as a qualified success for Debian.

The author,  Jesse Smith, seems to have had trouble with Debian in the past, even while the various tributary distributions like Ubuntu and KNOPPIX would run on his hardware just fine. Hardware wouldn't be recognized, the installer would crash, and so on. But in the words of Michael Palin, "This one stayed up!"

All well and good, let's explore some of Mr. Smith's comments in light of my own rather long history of using Debian.

A note on installation disks. Debian provides 4 different install disk styles in addition to the Debian Live image. These ISO images are Bootable Business Card (under 46MB), Net Install (189MB), CD#1 (642MB) and DVD#1 (4.4GB). Every image except the Bootable Business Card will install a base Debian system without a network link.

Why is Linux security so much better than Windows? Part 2

A recent article came across my radar,

Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government, by Nate Anderson

One particular paragraph in this article anyone interested in computer security really ought to read sprang out at me, on page 5:

"This is ideal because it’s trivial to remotely seed C&C messages into any networked Windows host," noted Hoglund, "even if the host in question has full Windows firewalling enabled."

This comment really isn't a "why is Linux security so much better", but just one example of that principle. The entire article deserves reading if for nothing else than to realize just how confident these people are that they can write such cracking software at will.

Friends don't let friends use Windows.

Bodhi Linux 0.1.5 and the Enlightenment Desktop

20110220 Update: 0.1.6 Released, see below

Bodhi Linux 0.1.5 has been released, and I wanted to get a look at it. I'm glad they are using BitTorrent to distribute the install disk, even though its 380MB size makes distribution easy on the bandwidth.

Enlightenment is one of the most beautiful of the Linux window managers that is being produced. I've used the E-Live and PCLinuxOS-Enlightenment LiveCD distributions in the past, and found them to be both quick and aesthetically pleasing.

And isn't beauty something that the world needs more of? Well, it certainly doesn't hurt.

Why is Linux security so much better than Windows?

Have you ever wondered why Linux systems seem to get hacked so much less than Windows? Here is an excellent example:

Imagine for a moment someone at a Windows conference going on for an hour, with source code and subsystem examples, all the ways he could imagine hacking into Windows via the USB system.

Well, no, can't do that because Microsoft does not allow anyone who has access to the source code and subsystems in Windows to do such presentations. Any such exploits can only be hypothetical, and really smart people who do not work for Microsoft cannot make changes to that source code and submit them to Microsoft.

All that is not just possible in the UNIX, Linux and BSD environments, it's encouraged!


That said, complacency is the greatest danger to computer security. Just because you run Linux does not mean you can run every binary and script someone sends to you. ...and get away with it forever!

Follow-up to the Trinity Desktop

This was originally published on Feb 4th as a follow-up to my prior post, included for completeness.

Enjoy, Curt-

======


Trinity has shown a few problems to me that I consider difficult enough to try to move on to Xfce.

Konqueror-Trinity has failed to authenticate ANY https certificates. I constantly have to "continue anyway" "forever" every time I go to a new site.

K3b-Trinity has not been fixed to correctly verify CDs and DVDs. This was a known problem leading up to KDE4, but was not fixed then due to the excuse we have all heard, "We're not going to bother, because we're not going to be supporting that code base going forward."

Little things like that really inspire confidence.

Anyway, I've used K3b (as in KDE4) and I like it very much. Disk writing is something I do on a regular basis, so it matters to me that my chosen tool works well.

So here are the hurdles to abandoning KDE3/Trinity for me: Kmail, Kaddressbook, Kwalletmanager, Konqueror's bookmarks that I've acquired over the decade of use.

Claws-Mail can, and I've tested to make sure it does, import the Kmail mbox files just fine. And I don't mind going to directories full of individual emails rather than the single mbox files, both can be searched and compressed for backup just fine. The seamless GPG function in Kmail is not quite there, but the known problems with Kmail/Kaddressbook and the KDE4 "everything with a database behind it" give me great pause to consider Kmail to be workable going forward.

Konqueror's bookmarks are stored as XML files, which is annoying but not impossible to work through if that's what I end up having to do. At least it's plain text and not some kind of binary format trying to be "helpful".

I can still use Konqueror-4, even though I find it very frustrating that the favicons aren't being correctly used. Almost as if Konqueror-4 rejects any favicon that was stored by Konqueror-3, just out of spite.

And one thing I am looking forward to: clean menus. There are a number of entries in the KDE3/Trinity menus that are "cruft" from having the entire .kde directory restored from backups each time I've (re-) installed my system, in order to keep such things as the password wallets, bookmarks and GUI settings.

Anyway, this is kind of a sad thing for me to say, finally giving up my dream of continuing with KDE3 style into the future. Hopefully KDE4's Kaddressbook/Kwalletmanager will be reliable enough to work while I try to move them over to more generic and agnostic tools.

Onward,

Debian Linux 6 and the Trinity Desktop

Originally published December 6th, I thought this was an excellent way to open my "blog".

Enjoy. Curt-

======

Well, I am finally done with a week's efforts at almost successfully jumping from Lenny and a very familiar KDE3.5 environment to Sid and the Trinity Desktop.

====== Debian Squeeze Install: ======

Having installed Debian quite a few times over the course of 15 years, this was not difficult. I used a daily-build of the Squeeze bootable business card for the install:

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/unstable/current/i386/iso-cd/

Debian 6, Squeeze, was released February 6, 2011, so my "daily build" comment is no longer valid. Best to use the current "stable" release.