Disabled root - by default; up2date more annoying
by Colin Charles
Hi all, some thoughts on end-user improvements follow.
As the Linux uptake becomes greater, and Fedora becomes way more
popular, and the clueless getting by their daily work as root happens,
its only a little while before we have a major "Linux mydoom" styled
virus attack (which will give us bad media coverage!).
A while back on irc, mharris was also mentioning that folks might not
upgrade their software; so even if up2date blinks nastily, nothings
going to happen (from a user perspective).
So, my proposals:
1. Follow the Mac OS X style of disabling a root login by default.
Enable sudo, and the first account that gets created thru the firstboot,
gets sudo privileges. Thoughts?
2. up2date blinks a little red icon at the bottom of the screen provided
you have a Net connection. *If* a user scrolls across it, it says "30
updates available" for example.
How does the typical end-user know what to do? During the user's entire
usage of Fedora, (s)he will be having the little blinking red icon! My
proposal is to make a pop-up, literally telling you "up2date has found
30 packages".
And give a selection list (like what up2date currently provides), and
then let the user choose. This can happen once a week once (or at some
other time interval), and this ensures that the system is always
generally, updated.
This may seem like a noisy approach, but if we're targetting the desktop
end-user, its probably worthwhile. (Again, stolen from Mac OS X).
Thoughts, comments?
--
Colin Charles, byte(a)aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/
http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/ - Fedora News Updates
20 years, 3 months
Mono on Fedora
by Peter Landy
Has anyone successfully installed Mono on Fedora. I get the Mono base
package installed OK but cannot get the MCS complier installed and
running. Does anyone have a HowTo on this.
Regards
Peter Landy
20 years, 3 months
rpm --addsign problems
by Gavin Henry
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Dear all,
I am trying to sign a SRPM, but issuing rpm --addsign (according to
http://www.fedora.us/wiki/PackageSubmissionQAPolicy)
comes up blank.
I setup a ~/.rpmrc for GPG details and issuing a rpm --showrc shows GPG is
setup correctly.
There's seems to be conflicting info about all this, and somewhat out of date.
Anyone have any tips on this?
- --
Regards,
Gavin Henry.
Director.
Open Source. Open Solutions.
http://www.suretecsystems.com
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20 years, 3 months
rpmlint on binary rpm's
by Gavin Henry
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Should this be run on binary rpms too?
As my src is fine, but the binary has:
rpmlint netmon_applet-0.4-0.fdr.1.i386.rpm
W: netmon_applet invalid-vendor None
W: netmon_applet invalid-distribution None
Thanks.
- --
Regards,
Gavin Henry.
Director.
Open Source. Open Solutions.
http://www.suretecsystems.com
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20 years, 3 months
Security/Updates CD?
by Gavin Henry
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Dear all,
I was wondering how difficult (I would do a much as I could) to add an option
for install/asking for a security update CD or extra package CD to the
installer.
So, when installing Fedora you could tick a box and then be asked for a CD
with all the latest updates on it, or an extra CD with say Wine3x or Cross
overoffice or any other rpms you have.
This would be extremely useful for people with modems that buy a CD set form
someone.
What are everyones thoughts?
- --
Regards,
Gavin Henry.
Director.
Open Source. Open Solutions.
http://www.suretecsystems.com
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20 years, 3 months
Self-Introduction: Bryan O'Sullivan
by Bryan O'Sullivan
Full legal name: Bryan O'Sullivan
Country, City: USA, San Francisco
Profession or Student status: professional hacker
Company or School: representing myself
Goals in the Fedora Project:
Want to see netplug (http://www.red-bean.com/~bos/) added to
Fedora Core, as it's rather extremely useful for both laptops
and large clusters.
What other projects have I worked on in the past?
Everything from DRAM controllers and through kernel hacking,
security, databases, up to big distributed systems such as CPU
verification tools, Jini (designed part of the original Jini
protocols) and BEA WebLogic Server (rewrote much of its security
infrastructure). In the recent past, did a little stabilisation
work on the 2.5 kernel for x86_64.
Currently working on a high-performance 8-million-line GPLed C,
C++ and Fortran compiler suite, along with performance tools for
Opteron on Linux.
What computer languages and other skills do you know?
C, C++, Perl, Python, Fortran, Lisp, Haskell, Caml, awk, bash,
make, etc, etc.
Why should we trust you?
Been using Linux for about a decade. Been involved in bit parts
of free software projects for about the same time.
GPG KEYID and fingerprint
pub 1024D/A04AA207 2000-09-15 Bryan O'Sullivan <bos(a)serpentine.com>
Key fingerprint = F5C1 5C31 36BB FE88 779D A9E7 1BC3 EF1B A04A A207
sub 1152g/E7DC6629 2000-09-15
20 years, 4 months
Self-Introduction: Jonathan Gardner
by Jonathan Gardner
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1. Full legal name
Jonathan Mosiah Gardner
2. Country, City
Federal Way, Washington, USA
3. Profession or Student status
Web Developer / Software Engineer
4. Company or School
Amazon.com (full-time)
Redweek.com (part-time)
5. Your goals in the Fedora Project
* Which packages do you want to see published?
PyKDE
QScintilla
eric (the PyQt debugger)
spread (along with perl, java, python, etc interfaces)
Postgres-R (needs spread)
Exim
* Do you want to do QA?
I will do it from time to time. I'm interested in the above packages, so
if you want me to test something related to them, email me.
* Anything else special?
I think fedora has a lot of potential. Debian lacks /focus/, but Fedora
has a real leader who is going to try and herd the engineers towards
specific, profit-oriented (and thus customer-satisfying) goals. I've seen
enough of what happens when you let engineers take over a problem and I
appreciate having a manager point to his watch and emphasize the needs of
the customers.
6. Historical qualifications
* What other projects have you worked on in the past?
I've never contributed significant amounts of code to any project, but I
have done some work with the following projects:
PyQt, ViM, PostgreSQL, python, Text::Forge, HTML::Mason, mod_perl,
mod_python, Mozilla and many more I can't remember now.
I help maintain the Sourceforge website for the PyQt project currently.
I'm working on Materialized Views for PostgreSQL.
* What computer languages and other skills do you know?
Python, perl, C, in that order. I deal a lot with HTTP and web
technologies (HTML and friends). I work with PostgreSQL databases, Qt,
PyQt.
* Why should we trust you? <--- too blunt?
No, it's a great question. You don't have any reason to trust me until you
see what I do. Go ahead and search on Google for past posts by me, and
search the web for anything you can find on me. But don't give me the
keys to your car until you know I can drive and I won't steal it.
7. GPG KEYID and fingerprint
This is my old key. Note the expiration date. You won't be using it for
long if you use it at all.
pub 1024D/0BE958DC 2003-02-28 Jonathan Gardner
<jgardner(a)jonathangardner.net>
Key fingerprint = C151 4F3E 6DB3 F51F 31B9 850E 5A0C 05DD 0BE9 58DC
sub 1024g/5F007918 2003-02-28 [expires: 2004-02-28]
This is my new key. Note the expiration date (or the lack thereof). I
created it today upon realization of the expiration date of the above.
pub 1024D/C546970C 2004-02-06 Jonathan M. Gardner
<jgardner(a)jonathangardner.net>
Key fingerprint = 1687 992A FA8F 4EF8 862D 5E00 AA9E ABFC C546 970C
sub 1024g/F4A4CFC0 2004-02-06
- --
Jonathan Gardner
jgardner(a)jonathangardner.net
Live Free, Use Linux!
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20 years, 4 months
FHS 2.3?
by Tim Waugh
Do we intend to implement the new bits of FHS for Fedora Core 2? For
instance, there is now wording about /usr/share/xml.
Tim.
*/
20 years, 4 months