There’s been an update to the unofficial patch for the WMF (Windows MetaFile) vulnerability. The main change appears to be some options to allow for quiet installation (unattended) to help administrators in large environments try to roll the patch out in automated login scripts/etc.
It can be found here or at the incidents.org site.
I don’t know off the top of my head of a graphical joystick calibrator for linux, but there is a command line utility that’s dead easy to use…. jscal I found the tip in a flightgear mailing list after having a hard time with one of the first flights. The stick was very far off center, I had to pull almost all the way to the right to keep level. Anyway… here’s the tip.
I REALLY like secure shell (SSH) for remote access to linux machines. You can do more than just a “telnet” like remote shell with it. (Port forwarding.) However, the default configuraton for the openssh-server is sometimes a bit less tight than I would like. For that reason on a new install, I usually like to make a few changes. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I haven’t devoted a post JUST to this, so… here we go.
There are lots of ways to get a remote desktop under linux, remote X, nxserver, vnc. One of the problems though is the most common configuration doesn’t let you connect to a running desktop session. There is a vnc component that let’s you do this and I’m using it right now. On the home network, sometimes I don’t want to be sitting at the desktop machine and would rather use the laptop while checking in on programs running on the desktop itself. But, being too lazy to go to the desktop it would be nice if there was a way I could run something remotely that would let me view that desktop… ahhh there is a way.
Ok – Nvidia driver was an easy one, download the latest from nvidia.com stop the X server, run sh NIVIDIAlongfilename.run, hit enter a few times, wait and eventually…. restart the X server log in and glx hardware accelerated goodness awaits…. Really and truly that was simple (a lot simpler than what I had tried with the urpme/urpmi of the nvidia rpms.) I should have just done that when the urpmi didn’t seem to have things working.
Well, where are things? The gui installer did a good job, got the system up and running. The biggest initial problem is that it didn’t change the default boot entry in lilo, which meant the system tried to boot under the old kernel and things died (likely c++ incompatibilities?) So, on a REBOOT, I chose linux which I assumed pointed to the new kernel and everything went fine, booted to the gui login. The network upgrade took a while (several hours) to pull in 1400 or so packages.
This one is going to be tougher. Of what we’ve looked at so far this will probably take more work and learning than any of the others. The good news is, depending on your situation you may need to do less here. IF you have decided that your pc (or network) has ports open to the outside world, so that incoming connections can be listened for. You NEED to do this. For every service that is accessible from the outside world…
Just noticed that for the last (hour?) the main adsense login site has been down with an interesting multi-language error message page. Ads seem to be served still, but the login is offline at the moment. And back up by 1AM EST 12/17/05.
Software has been released that essentially allows users to take advantage of GMAIL’s 2+GB of storage space for peer to peer (p2p) file sharing. There are disadvantage’s such as turning over your gmail login info to the group behind the web-based service (!!!!)
A little while back I talked some about TightVNC which for a long time has been my favorite implementation of a remote framebuffer, or remote desktop viewing protocol known as VNC (Virtual Network Computing.) The original VNC (now realvnc) came out of AT&T research labs in the UK and has developed quite a following as a pcanywhere alternative depending on what you need to do. Now, tightvnc has been a favorite of mine for a couple reasons. 1) it’s well supported under linux which is a must for me…, 2) it excels at slower speed connections. Which is also fairly important to me.