Mozilla is soliciting people to test the candidates for version 1.5.0.7 of both Firefox and Thunderbird, so that sounds as though release is VERY close for that version. It sounds as though there are security issues addressed. (September 7 is the tentative release date… according to this page.)
Category: Linux Software
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Linspire’s Click n run is now free
First, Linspire released the freely available “freespire” release of their operating system (based on debian linux). Now, users will no longer have to pay an annual subscription for the click n run service. That’s now available for free as well. There is a writeup here. Previously the annual subscription fees were $20/$50 per year depending on service level. This does not mean all software through cnr is free, there is commercial software available there for a fee. I know that not long ago there was some talk about opening up cnr (click n run) to other distributions, possibly starting with debian based distros such as ubuntu.
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Sendmail DoS vulnerability
I’ve got to admit, I hadn’t caught the notice of this until it was at incidents.org. I don’t currently administer sendmail on any machines, but…. Sendmail released version 8.13.8 on August 9th to address several issues (including a DoS vulnerability). It was possible for a specially crafted email to trigger the problem.
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Converting pdf to tif (tiff) images
One of the things I was looking into this morning was the possiblity of converting a pdf into a tiff image. Many character recognition programs (and some music recognition software) uses tiff as one of the formats that it can recognize from. I have a number of things in PDF format that I wanted to test out by converting to tif. There MUST be a way….. yes there is (several I suppose).. In linux though the answer is ghostscript.
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Flashplayer 9 on linux
Macromedia Flash player 9 running on linux? Impossible? No… many things that seem impossible, well… aren’t This morning there’s a good writeup at how-to-forge about installing flash player 9 on linux. It involves wine and the how-to is specific to Ubuntu. However, the first two steps (sudo apt-get install wine and sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts) are the only ones that are ubuntu specific. For your given distribution, install according to your distro (urpmi/etc.)
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Using screen to connect multiple users to a shell session
I NEVER knew you could use screen for this…. Let multiple users connect to the same Console (command shell/bash shell) session simultaneously. I’ve looked at screen before. It’s a great *nix utility that’s available for most linux distributions. The primary use I’ve seen for it is to be able to have a shell open, and use screen to be able to disconnect and reconnect to a session. Let’s say you have software compiling, you can use screen to get it started from one location and then re-connect to your screen session from another machine. Think…. VNC for the command line. Well, much like VNC it’s possible for multiple users to view and use the session.
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Wireshark, various vulnerabilities disclosed
There used to be a tool called ethereal and then it changed it’s name to wireshark. Today a number of security vulnerabilities were disclosed. A new version is available and workarounds. Please upgrade if at all possible.
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Skype and linux audio issues
One of the things I didn’t mention in my first skype post was the “getting skype to work with linux” bit… The version available via urpmi in Mandrake was 1.2, so I installed it (before I had the usb audio phone) and gave a try. It gave consistent errors trying to access the audio device (/dev/dsp). I looked and it seems that the older 1.2 version used OSS exclusively for this and had LOT’S of problems. I did find that version 1.3 that can use either OSS or ALSA seemed to work flawlessly on the three systems I tested. (Two of them Mandriva 2006 and the test box Ubuntu 6.06.1) The testbox didn’t have a sound card prior to the usb phone, the other two had built in sound and that is what was tested.
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Encrypting wireless traffic
Incidents.org has been running their security tip a day this month and I really liked this one. It’s essentially a way to encrypt your wireless traffic using ssh. That’s something I’ve covered here before, but it’s worth reminding that it’s possible and a good idea.
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Helixplayer to include Windows media file viewer
WMV and WMA file formats (Windows Media Video and Windows Media Audio) have been one of those sore spots for desktop linux. Yes, I KNOW mplayer and other players can handle them. (If the codecs are installed.) (and wine can run media player) But, there have been licensing issues there. The fact is, distributions that are strict about their “open source only” policy have a situation where those formats don’t work out of the box. That appears as though it will change soon as Real Networks includes open source codecs for those formats in it’s Helixplayer. DRM (Digital Rights Management) will not be supported in the helixplayer project.