Skip to main content

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
the avatar of Alex Barrios

Encrypt your files quick n’ dirty

Encrypt a file can be useful when we want to keep sensitive information but do not trust the site is being stored.

GnuPG allows to quickly and easily create encrypted files without the use of public keys or complicated procedures, just run the following at a Linux terminal:

$ gpg -c test.txt _
Enter Password:
Repeat Password:
$ _

After you have run the command gpg -c, this will leave intact the original file and create another file called “test.gpg” in the same directory. This second file is the place where you want to prune without fear that information may be disclosed. You can then proceed to remove the original if needed.

To retrieve the contents of the file, perform the following process on the encrypted file:

$ gpg  test.gpg _
Enter Password:
Repeat Password:
$ _

GnuPG will automatically detect that it is an encrypted file, and request the key that first used.

Hope its useful 😉

the avatar of Andrew Wafaa

Community Discussion - Part 6 Feedback

You have to grant me that I’m persistent ;-) OK so this time round I thought I’d do a quick round up of some of the feedback that I’ve received so far – some of it has been in the form of comments on this here blog, others have been responses on mailing lists, and some has been from direct converstation with me. I’d love to get more from you, and ultimately you get more from yourselves.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Novell Client on openSUSE 11.2

This has been covered on a couple of forums out there, but I’ve yet to find a decent comprehensive post. This is for 32bit systems, it’s easily modified for 64bit setups.

First off, search your favorite RPM repo for binutils-2.19-9.3. I like to use http://rpm.pbone.net, but at the time of writing, they happen to be down.

Get a copy of the Novell Client ISO from http://download.novell.com and mount it:

sudo mount -o loop novell-client-2.0-sp2-sle11-i586.iso /mnt

Extract the files from the RPM:

rpm2cpio binutils-2.19-9.3.i586.rpm | cpio -idv

This should create a “usr” directory in your present working directory. Go ahead and copy it’s contents to your filesystem:

sudo cp -R usr/* /usr/

Change directories to wherever you mounted your ISO (in this case “/mnt”) and run the installer:

cd /mnt && sudo ./ncl_install

As the packages attempt to install, you’ll be given options and warnings concerning libbfd and several other packages. Choose option “2” for everything (“Break dependencies”). Don’t worry about actually breaking anything, just roll with option 2.

Lastly, issue ldconfig as root and reboot:

sudo /sbin/ldconfig
sudo /sbin/reboot

That should get you up and running. You can run “ncl_tray” directly from the command line, or create a shortcut to the client. If you’re having connection issues, make sure that openSLP is configured.

The only issues I’ve had so far is the inability to browse trees, which turned out to be a DNS problem on my end. Occasionally I get warnings on login about novfs kernel modules not being properly loaded, but this appears to be benign.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Check your WPA2 Enterprise setup

Do you have to enter user name and password to establish a link with
your wireless network? If so chances are good that WPA2 Enterprise
with EAP-TTLS or PEAP are used. Sounds familiar? Better check your
setup then. An attacker might easily impersonate your access point
and steal your password if the client you are using isn’t configured
properly.
You are likely vulnerable if you’ve disabled certificate checks
or you’ve checked some button to use a public CA but didn’t specify
any “Subject” or “Common Name” that has to match. NetworkManager for
example doesn’t even allow to enter the latter.
Read more in the paper I’ve written.

the avatar of Alex Barrios

Only a few days for the FLISOL in Venezuela

Venezuelan Linux community is finishing all the preparations for the April 24, the day that all Latin America celebrate the FLISOL, Latin American Festival of  Free Software Installation.

Through the sponsorship of Novell, the collaboration of ambassadors from other distributions, and GoSVe, the user group from Venezuela openSUSE, our distro will be present in all the sites of the great event of free software in the region, giving away DVD’s, LiveCD’s, stickers, t-shirts, and more.

In the city of Merida, we will be giving talks and demonstrations of our distribution and giving away all the material of that will be common in all the sites and stuffed animals for those that choose to “free” their computers and install openSUSE Linux.

Next to come: A lot of pictures 😉

FLISOL Mérida 2010

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

zypper-1.4.2: rewritten package selection code

Zypper has undergone a major refactoring of its package selection code recently. This was mainly to enable automatic testing and to make it easier and safer to add new features.
I'll submit zypper 1.4.2 including this change to Factory soon. It seems to work fine for the most part, but if you spot something that used to work for you in 1.4.1, please let us know via bugzilla. Don't forget to attach both zypper.log and solver test case.

The new version already enables use of unified package arguments (in install, update, and remove commands) in the form of:
[+/-][repo:][type:]name[.arch][OPevr[.arch]]

± (or ~|!) ; install/remove modifier
repo = ; repo alias, number, or name
type = patch|pattern|product ; if not specified 'package' isimplied
name ; can even be a glob
OP = -|=|>=|<=|>|< ; version operator
evr = [epoch:]version[-release] ; edition (version)

E.g. $ zypper in packman:xine-ui-0.99.5cvs20091115-0.pm.1.4 (don't forget to quote the args, if they contain ?/*/</> or spaces).

More about all this (and about a few more features added in the last months) later ...

There is still some work to do to fully support this (especially don't try foo.arch :O), but the main focus now is to make sure that all that used to work before works also now. For future plans see roadmap and comments in the SolverRequester_test code. Don't hesitate to send feedback to or discuss this stuff on zypp-devel@opensuse.org or comment this blog post.

the avatar of Andrew Wafaa

oSC09 videos

Well it’s been almost seven months since our inaugural conference, and there were a load of videos taken. The problem was that our usual VT gurus have been unavailable to do any of the editing etc. So the raw video has languished on the servers waiting for some kind soul to help edit them.

After multiple calls for help and nudges from the marketing team, I decided to see if I could slot it in anywhere (yay me, I’m such a hero :-P) Thankfully I had some brilliant help from SankarP who refreshed my memory on how to edit video, thanks chief!

Currently only Day 1 of the conference is available, you can view online (flash) or download (ogg) the talks from the openSUSE TV channel on BlipTV. I am working on getting a channel on YouTube to enable a wider reach, as some people have bandwidth issues with Blip. You can also subscribe to the feeds in multiple formats – rss, miro, itunes.

If anyone has any openSUSE related video that they would like put on the channel, then please let me know 🙂

the avatar of Andrew Wafaa

Community Discussion - Part 5

Oh yes, I’m still going at it folks! Let’s discuss :-) This time round I’d like us to discuss Collaboration, Learning, Listening and Leading. Let me clarify what I mean by Collaboration; I’m NOT talking about Groupwise/Exchange/Zimbra/Alfresco/SharePoint/Kablink style collabortaion, but I AM talking about working with other parties and teams. Within openSUSE as with other distributions there are multiple teams/projects that in some cases could be classed as competitors – GNOME & KDE are a prime example.

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Conference in FLISOL Nicaragua 2010

The folks of the openSUSE Community in Nicaragua, are preparing a great event in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, in Central America.

Now we have a schedule for that special day:

Sede Hora Tema Ponente
Granada 09:00 am – 09:40 am Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with gnome, basic Aplicacions Denis Torres
Granada 09:50 am – 10:30 am Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with KDE, basic Aplicacionss Adolfo Fitoria
Granada 10:40 am – 11:20 am Openoffice.org Carlos Leal
Granada 11:30 am – 12:10 pm Multimedia Aplication Jose Angel Bonilla
Granada 01:00 pm – 01:40 am Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with gnome, basic Aplicacions Denis Torres
Granada 01:50 am – 02:30 am Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with KDE, basic Aplicacions Adolfo Fitoria
Granada 02:40 pm – 03:20 pm
Openoffice.org
Carlos Leal
Granada 03:30 pm – 04:00 pm Multimedia Aplication Jose Angel Bonilla

And we just recieve the package from novell 😉