Monday, 9 August 2010

Sqeeze freeze

Squeeze has been frozen.

Friday, 2 July 2010

Improved sdsudo security

I am testing a modification to the SD sdsudo utility that addresses a potential security issue I mention here. As I mentioned there, I don’t think the way sdsudo works at present is a security issue when used as intended—as a one-logged-in-user-at-a-time desktop/laptop environment. But more security with no downsides is never a bad thing.

The mod is based on Daniel Stone’s “xhost plus considered harmful” post. If you want to try this yourself, open /usr/bin/sdsudo as root in your favorite text editor. Find the line

xhost +local:root 1>&2

and change it to

xhost +SI:localuser:root 1>&2

A couple tests indicate this works. I’ll need to do some more testing to see if there are any gotchas.

I am hoping that SkinnySqeezey won’t need sdsudo.

Sunday, 27 June 2010

Install script license change

I have changed the license of the SkinnyDebbie installation scripts to GPLv3. The rest of SkinnyDebbie is unchanged: it’s still GPLv2.

Having said that, when I get around to finishing the next version of SD (for Squeeze) it will probably get a GPLv3 license as well.

Why the change? Because, the CC license that used to cover (and if you insist, still does) the install scripts isn’t well suited to software licensing. I originally wanted to use a CC license for these scripts because I got a bit irritated that earlier versions of these scripts were being used without attribution in the source or elsewhere as the basis for installation schemes in unrelated projects. The GPL also protects against attribution infringement, but I thought the CC was a bit more rigorous in this respect. However, I now think that it’s better to use the licenses in the way they were intended.

Monday, 15 February 2010

Karmic, openbox, and messed up desktop numbers

See this.

Karmic and Pulseaudio

I have been bitten by the bug reported at https://bugs.launchpad.net/pulseaudio/+bug/352732 . In fact, I was bitten by this back in Jaunty. There the problem was isolated to logging out of a non-Gnome session (and into Gnome? I forget exactly). In Jaunty I solved the problem by killing pulseaudio before terminating non-Gnome sessions. Now in Karmic this solution doesn’t seem to work in all situations, so I am trying the suggestion in post #77. Namely, in /etc/pulse/default.pa, comment out the line load-module module-device-restore

Here is the snippet from my /etc/pulse/default.pa:

### mfk addition: comment out "load-module module-device-restore"
### see https://bugs.launchpad.net/pulseaudio/+bug/352732 #77
#load-module module-device-restore

We’ll see how it goes.