Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.
(Via Linux.com :: Features.)
On the hunt for a travel netbook? After testing out early models with squished keyboards I decided to wait for a model with useable size and 10″ seems to be about perfect. I originally thought I wanted a fully loaded netbook until I realized that wasn’t the point. Netbooks are not intended to replace laptops. They are intended to be ultra portable with prices making them nearly disposable. Netbooks are perfect travel companions for photographers who need to dump the days pictures onto a backup external hard drive and review images on a screen larger than the thumbnail preview on the back of their camera.
Since a unit’s size is an important feature, how much juice can you realistically expect from the form factor? Find the list of which models last the longest after the jump.
Do you only use unix once in a blue moon, need to setup crontab and can’t quite remember the order? (Without peeking at the image on the left)
Try out this handy cron job crib sheet which you can paste directly into your crontab as a reference each time you make a scheduled job change.
Programming project: construct a program that can listen to perimeter traffic and construct http proxy-like logs. The weapon of choice? libpcap! The app will need to listen for both DNS (udp port 53) and HTTP (tcp port 80) traffic to accomplish this.
First up is determining where all the interesting bits in each layer of the OSI stack are located within each packet. In logical order:
With all that reference material, you might think this is a lot of reading! Okay, fine how about a copy and paste job? Tcpdump is the perfect place to exercise your mouse wheel click skillz to get all the data structures and defines you’ll need.
One last useful tool that should be in every network programmers tool belt is of course, Wiershark (aka ethereal). In this case, it comes in handy to double check your program is disassembling the packets the same as Wireshark.
A BPF is used to speed up the filtering of interesting packets from useless ones and is passed in to the program as follows:
dns_sniffer “udp port 53″
When writing any network aware application, the best place to start for documentation is always going to be the applicable RFC for whatever protocol you plan to speak.
When figuring out what bitmasks were needed to mask out specific bits (namely the first two bits for parsing DNS compression) Conversion Table came in handy. I also found this handy page if you need to brush up on bitwise operations (I sure did, since I hardly use them.) And don’t forget your ASCII-Table!
Have you ever wondered how your lonely little-endian wintel laptop / desktop is able to communicate over the same IP network to a big-endian speaking SPARC system? It certainly kept me up at night! See for yourself how it is able to work.
More to follow… (you know, like source code)
Information Security, Internet, Linux, My Ideas, Programming
Updated 5.15.08 7:30PDT – Thanks AnotherBrick
It’s here!!!
Fedora 9 is the latest release from the Fedora Project team, released today, May 13th 2008. Sulfur sports yet another slew of new and exciting features, as well as some big package updates. I’d like to highlight some of the new packages I care about and give an initial opinion on each.
New Stuff
GNOME 2.22 is included. (Evolution 2.22.1 along with IMAP for Gmail, it also supports read/write Google Calendar integration!)
KDE 4.0.4, which has been completely migrated to the default kde install (no more of that kde3 and kde4 side by side nonsense.)
Open Office 2.4 long feature update and bug fix list. Haven’t used extensively yet.
The shiny new 2.6.25 kernel.
A smaller memory footprint Perl 5.10.0.
PackageKit, a cross-platform front end for yum, is the new default ui for package management.
Firefox 3 beta 5 feels much smoother and quicker, and is already pretty stable. Many UI improvements. Many security enhancements such as a new malware protection and anti-phishing warning, as well as the infamous green EV-SSL Cert location bar. I’d like to highlight some of the neat new visuals:
Reported Phishing Site? Big Red box? Very nice.
A pop-up window asking to remember a password that isn’t modal?? *Gasp* Now where have I seen this before…
IMHO, this SSL Cert pane looks much cleaner than IE7’s equivalent.
I dig the new suggestion tab in the add-ons window.
Finally! Firefox 3 now saves open tabs even if it isn’t crashing. Hazzah!
It’s just too bad that many of my favorite add-ons aren’t ff3 ready yet. No dinged points however, as this is still beta software. (no foxmarks! nooooo!)
Work has also gone into segregating firefox’s plugins from the remainder of the OS using SELinux. Fedora’s SELinux policy guy, Dan, has some background on his blog. To try it out in Sulfur, issue this command:
setsebool -P allow_unconfined_nsplugin_transition 1
Installation
My Installation went smoothly, nothing to report. (Always a good thing, especially since I chose the 64bit flavor.) I went with the default Gnome Window Manager, and will try out the new KDE4 release later. I like the new wallpaper theme, which just like Fedora 8, will change depending on the time of day. Also like in Fedora 8, the Compiz powered desktop effects checkbox worked flawlessly on my ATI AGP X850Pro card – Feels faster. The updated “Update System” UI is much easier to use, and feels much faster too.
If you plan to browse the internet or play multimedia, you’ll need to add the livna repo. Here is the command I used:
su -c ‘rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm’
Once that’s done, you’ll likely want Flash (the proprietary adobe package isn’t up on livna yet for 64bit so gnash will do), and mp3 support. I added it simply with:
su -c ‘yum install gnash-plugin gstreamer-plugins-ugly’
Summary
I’m coming off as a broken record, but I have to admit everything “feels” snappier. I have no scientific proof to back up this feeling, but I would bet that much effort went into performance tune ups for this release.
It’s only day one, but I’d already like to give Fedora 9 the thumbs up!
