The Firefox Crop Circle

Everyone who uses open-source software knows that many people devote hours and hours to development, planning, art, and so on, but crop circles might not be the first thing that comes to mind when people think of open-source. The Oregon State Linux Users Group created a gigantic Firefox crop circle. (Picture) You can read more about the process at The Fox Tales or see a video about it here.
As it turns out, the Oregon State Linux Users Group is not a stranger to massive Firefox projects. They painted a huge version of the Firefox logo on the sidewalk and sent a balloon carrying the Firefox logo up into the sky.

UltumixLite v0.0.0.1b released yesterday!

Is this what linux community waited for a long time?Ultumix is the new Linux distro that combines everything you want (- the illegal non-free stuff) for you and your computer customers already installed. It's already up to date and has a Vista like interface. I'm sure you can use it. However it's 1.3GBs.
Ultumix is the new Linux distro that combines everything you want (- the illegal non-free stuff) for you and your computer customers already installed. It's already up to date and has a Vista like interface. I'm sure you can use it. However it's 1.3GBs. I have a torrent set up on my site. I'm in WA state and have 800 kbs upload so be the first to get it. If someone wants to go to www.midnblowingidea.com/Ultumix and click sourceforge.net and sign up I would appreciate any help uploading to the CVS. Thanks. I will tell you up front that this distro has unintentionally created tension in the PCLinuxOS community. I use to be a member of their forums and I wanted to find out if I was doing everything the way they wanted since it was a remaster of their distro. I did everything I could to please them and they took it the wrong way. Someone told me that they thought I was trying to get support for my new distro in their forums, others said I was sending out spam (of course I have no knowledge of spam being sent from my account). I was also banned from the PCLinuxOS IRC Chat. They asked that I donate money to their distro that I made off of selling DVDs. I agreed to do it but now I can't communicate with them any more. If any of you are from the PCLinuxOS community and you are reading this I'm sorry for any misunderstanding that this might have caused and I hope we can work together in the future.

A fast way to install ATI X-series videocards on ubuntu 7.04

Many people are having problems installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on machine with ATI X**** series video cards. This is caused by this bug that unfortunately could not fixed before the release of Ubuntu 7.04.

This quick guide will get Feisty installed and X.org 7.2 up and running.

1.Boot using PC (Intel x86) alternate install CD for Ubuntu or Kubuntu.
2.Start text mode installer and install Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
3.Finish Install and reboot.
4.Update package list and upgrade any packages needed.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

5.Install fglrx closed source driver for ATI video cards.

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

6.Update loaded modules.

sudo depmod -a

7.Configure /etc/X11/xorg.conf

sudo aticonfig --initial
sudo aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv

8.Reboot

Ubuntu 7.04 should now boot into GDM/KDM.

Linux being launched at schools

The project to install open-source software at schools has been launched in Russia. The first stage involves the tender, which is to be held by the Ministry of Communications, to develop software for the pilot regions. According to the tender procedure the bidders are given a month and a half to assemble and test the distributive. The results of the tender are planned to be announced on November 30th. The winner will get 70 mln. rubles ($ 2.81 mln).

A decisive battle in the fight against piracy at schools and for the software legality has started. The competition to supply schools with the open source software started on October 15th, so on November 30th the results will be announced.


Besides the operating system the package is to comprise some freely distributed programs, close to MS Office by their functionality, which are to be used on computers with the following characteristics: 233 MHz and 128MB DDR.

The new open source software will be tested till 2007 end by the customer, then it is to be examined in three pilot regions within 2008, i.e. in Tomsk Region, Perm Krai and Tatarstan.

That is the second project to fight for the legal software at schools in Russia. The first was initiated in current spring by the Ministry of Communications and was held at approximately the same time with the notorious proceedings on Alexander Ponosov, the school director. According to the Ministry 2.9 bln. budgetary rubles ($ 166.7 mln.) are to be used to legalize the already installed counterfeit software at schools. As there are 760 thousand computers used in Russian schools the given sum does not seem enormous, the expenses per one computer coming to not more than 3800 rubles ($ 153.019).

Legalization of school software for children will not cost much to taxpayers this year. Within the pilot stage the developer will be paid only 70 mln. rubles for the Linux school distributive. The given sum is indicated in the tender procedure on 'the site to post the information about orders', while 720 mln. rubles ( $28.99 mln.) are laid out to implement the Open Source at schools across Russia.

OS Linux is appraised by some people for its reliability and openness, but the others are horrified as it is difficult to install. However, the given OS is gradually replacing MS Windows in European public institutions and at schools. In 2002 670 schools of one of the poorest Spain provinces Estremadura moved to Linux Debian. The French Parliament is moving to Ubuntu Linux since summer 2007 because of security precautions, while French schools approve of Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of economic efficiency. Linux centralized implementation is known to have been carried out in Venezuela, Japan and Cuba.



Shools move to Linux in Japan, Franch, Venezuela and Cuba, so Russia will do the same

There are no less than 5-7 Linux distributives in Russia, which might be used to assemble proper OS for schools. CNews can name two large alliances of Linux vendor companies, each of which was founded especially to promote open source software for schools. One of the alliances consists of Alt Linux, Linux-online, Naumen and Etersoft. It comprises more than 250 open source software vendors. The second founded in a week after the first one consists of Linux Ink, Linux, LinuxCenter, Infra-Resource, Publishing House BHV and Scientific Development and Production Center Set.

Alt Linux, heading the first Alliance, has not put in a bid for the tender yet, but it is sure to do it. The company is not frightened by the short terms for the distributive development. 'We are not embarrassed by the terms, - Andrey Cherepanov, Alt Linux Project Manager says. – We have been long working at Junior, the software for education institutions on the basis of our own distributive. It is being tested now, so soon it will be available through FTP'.

The vendor company Linux Ink has not also put in any bid, but intends to participate in the tender, although Leonid Solms, Linux Ink Director General is rather skeptic about the tender procedure. He points to several blunders in the competi tion task: 'If the distributive is made up in accordance with the technical assignment, no one will need it, - he tells CNews. – The software for a single PC is described there. It is absolutely not supported by the server components. How are they going to administer the process of education using such software? How are they going to manage school as economic institutions? In accordance with the technical assignment nothing of the mentioned should be implemented in the final product'.

Leonid Solms is also embarrassed by the fact that nothing is said in the state order of a multinational country regarding the school software localization. The given issue is also supported by Tatarstan, which is one of the pilot regions to test the software next year. The product, Mr. Solms's company is going to present at the tender, is sure to be free of the mentioned shortcomings.

Ubuntu: 32-bit v. 64-bit Performance

While 64-bit support is now considered common for both Intel and AMD processors, many Linux (as well as Windows) users are uncertain whether to use a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system with there being advantages for both paths. With this being the last Phoronix article for 2006, we decided to take this opportunity to look at this common question of whether to use 32-bit or 64-bit software. In this article, we will be comparing the i386 and x86_64 performance with Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft and Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 1 to see how the numbers truly stack up.

One of the common (and leading) reasons for 64-bit processor owners continuing to use 32-bit software is due to some software not being available for x86_64 Linux. The key package that keeps many Linux users to running i386 software is for Macromedia Flash Player support (though 32-bit Firefox on 64-bit Linux fixes that issue or using Gnash). Linux provides backward compatibility for running 32-bit executables and most open-source software can easily be compiled for x86_64.

source

How to boot fedora under 24 seconds!

Everyone wants a quick boot time, from the beginner user to the advanced user, this is a issue that bothers us all. As Linux has advanced it has increasingly become slower to boot. I have tested on my machine 5 Linux distributions: Linspire, Fedora 3 & 4, Suse 9.2 & 9.3, ubuntu and Debian. And on average between all these distributions Linux needs around a minute to 1 and half minutes to go from boot loader to graphical login screen. So I decided to look into reducing the time it takes to boot my current setup, which is Fedora 4. In doing so I was able to reduce the boot time of my Fedora 4 installation to less than 25 seconds (just above 24 seconds on average). Below I have documented what I did, and what you can use to potentially reduce your boot up time for Linux.

Of course we will be dealing with advanced Linux know how, so this is not for beginners. Also results may vary on your end since there are a lot of factors involved.

My Initial Setup

My initial setup was pretty much standard Fedora 4 with nvidia driver loaded. My PCs hardware is an Athlon64 3000+, 1GB RAM, 80GB SATA 7200 rpm hard drive, and Nvidia Video Card. I was getting about a minute for booting Fedora 4 on this setup. I decided to benchmark in two ways, the first was using a standard stopwatch and manually starting / stopping, and the second way was using bootchart software which you can download here (bootchart.org). Bootchart will capture you boot time from when init starts (init? See below) till its finished loading your system up. It also provides visualization so you can see potential bottlenecks. My initial setups bootchart is below.



Note: I will describe a basic simplified overview of the boot process. When you turn on your computer the BIOS starts up and after initializing some parts of your PC, it hands over control to the bootloader. The bootloader then loads the Linux kernel and hands control to the kernel. The kernel then executes init a program that starts and manages services. After its finished loading up all services specified a login prompt is displayed. To reduce the time it takes to boot we need to reduce the time it takes in any of these stages. For the most part there is little you can do to reduce the time it take for the BIOS to go from power on to bootloader though generally this is only a 1-2 seconds anyway. And the bootloaders life is extremely short lived since it only loads and executes the kernel, so all the optimization tips I will discuss in this article are going to center on the kernel and init parts of the boot sequence.

The First Step

As you can see X gets started twice, which is a major time waster. So I decided to look into disabling that, and as I was googling I found an interesting feature disable by default in Fedora 4 called “early-login”. This enables you to only start X once and allows a user to start logging in while other services are still starting in the background. This both reduces the actual boot up time and the user impression of boot time (Since they can log in earlier it seems to boot up faster even though it still booting up in the background). To enable, type the following:

[As root]
# chkconfig --add gdm-early-login
# chkconfig --add gdm-allow-login
# chkconfig gdm-early-login on
# chkconfig gdm-allow-login on

I also wanted to reduce the number of services I was running there by reducing the number of things that need to start at boot. Below is a list of services I decided was only needed for what I do on my personal desktop Fedora machine. The services you need may vary:

acpid
anacron
atd
crond
cups
cups-config-daemon
gpm
haldaemon
iptables
messagebus
netfs
network
portmap
syslog

As you can see I disabled kudzu (bootup hardware detection, saves a second of time), auditd (I also disabled selinux), rhnsd (red hat network update daemon), and sendmail. I personally use yum to do updates and will weekly check for them, I rarely make changes to my hardware but can add hardware on my own if needed, and I think selinux is overkill for a personal desktop machine. You can do this by going to Desktop->System Tools->Server Settings->Services and de-selecting services to disable. Then when you are done click done.

Below is what the boot looked with these changes. Wow, as you can see we went from 41 seconds in bootchart to 25 seconds. But with my stopwatch we where looking at 34 seconds of boot time from boot loader to login screen. Definitely better, but can we see even quicker boot times? I wanted to find out.



Note: What was interesting with my system is in the time X took to start and display a login screen, it was finished loading up all background services. So I could literally log in right away as soon as the login prompt was displayed. Since I did not test this on any other machines this behavior maybe localized to my system or similarly configured PCs as mine.
Drivers and Modprobe

The boot up time is also consumed by loading additional kernel modules as you can see with the modprobe bar in the boot chart. So I decided to reduce the number of kernel modules that had to be loaded by compiling them into the kernel. To do this you will need kernel source of course, and will need to take an inventory of what drivers you need on your machine. I also compiled the ext3 file system into the kernel so this didn’t need to be loaded either. I also reduced the number of drivers / modules in my kernel, by disabling the ones I did not use (for starters wireless lan, SCSI raid controllers, console frame buffer [they use to conflict with nvidia driver, do not know if this is still the case], selinux, and some of the misc. filesystems (amiga fs?). Below is an overview of the changes I made to the kernel:

Ext3
USB driver (on my system OHCI, EHCI)
Removed Selinux and auditing system calls feature
Compiled in Drivers, Ex. Parallel Port, Floppy, and others
Compiled in some features that where originally in module form.

This distribution was based on the latest kernel release for Fedora, 2.6.12-390.
So I compiled, rebooted, and below the results…24 and change. I am now at 18 seconds in boot chart, but now we are at little more than 24 seconds for total boot time using my stopwatch.



Did I stop there? Of course not, but nothing else more I tried worked. So I will have to write a follow-up article if I find anything more. Below are some things I tried which had little effect:
Recompiled the X server with custom optimization for my processor. My aim was to reduce the X servers start time, but this did very little.
Compiled the kernel with size optimization instead. My aim here was to reduce the size of the kernel (which it did) and to potentially speed up the kernel load time (less of a kernel to load). This did nothing either.


Conclusion

And there is my story for 24 second boot time in Fedora on standard PC hardware. I really think I’m onto something with compiling some of the kernel modules into the kernel. Why would ext3 filesystem not be compiled in anyway? It is the default file system for Fedora. Ext2 is compiled in.Hope you enjoyed!!

Fedora patches old OpenOffice flaw

Fedora has fixed a 'highly critical' flaw in the OpenOffice suite of products more than two weeks after it was first discovered.

The vulnerability was announced on the Secunia security website on 18 September and Red Hat provided a fix on the same day for its Enterprise Linux products.

However, an update to fix the problem in the free Fedora Linux has only just been released, despite Red Hat being its main sponsor.

The OpenOffice vulnerability is caused by integer overflows when processing certain tags within Tiff images.

The problem could be exploited to cause heap-based buffer overflows, possibly by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted document.

Successful exploitation could allow the execution of arbitrary code and compromise a user's system.

OpenOffice is a free office productivity suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, formula editor and drawing program.