Episode 042 – Penguinarium

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Total Running Time: 1:31:13

Un-edited Live session – http://youtu.be/nAzWpFicpcc

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Summary

Kernel News: Mat
Time: 8:30
Distro Talk: Tony
Time: 9:46
Mary Convention sceen
Time: 17:38
Kevin O’Brien – OLF Promo

Mary Distro Review – What’s on SDA6
Time: 42:32
Tech News:
Time: 1:02:00
Is it Alive? – Mary
Time: 1:11:55
Listener Feedback
Time: 1:17:14
Outtro Music
Time:1:23:39
Penguinarium Pictures

Intro:

Tony Bemus, Mat Enders, and Mary Tomich
Intro Sound bite by Mike Tanner

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Kernel News: Mat

Time: 8:30

Release Candidate:

Mainline:

Stable Updates:
On Thu, 19 Jul 2012 13:16:41 Greg Kroah-Hartman
Released stable kernel 3.4.6
With 39 files changed, 459 lines inserted, and 155 lines deleted

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Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 9:46

Distrowatch.com

• 7-22 – Arch Linux 2012.07.15 – Since Arch Linux is a strictly rolling-release distribution, this release merely provides an updated system installer and it does not represent a new Arch Linux “version” in the traditional sense of the word.
• 7-23 – openmamba GNU/Linux 2.0.10.1 – an updated version of the project’s independently developed distribution featuring the KDE desktop and using the RPM package management format
• 7-23 – Peppermint OS Three – a major new version of the project’s lightweight desktop Linux distribution based on Lubuntu
• 7-23 – Linux Mint 13 “KDE” – the “KDE” edition of Linux Mint 13
• 7-25 – VortexBox 2.1 – a Fedora-based distribution designed to turn an unused computer into an easy-to-use music server or jukebox
• 7-26 – Bodhi Linux 2.0.0 – Ubuntu-based distribution and live CD featuring the latest Enlightenment 17 desktop
• 7-27 – LuninuX OS 12.00 – Ubuntu-based distribution featuring a customised GNOME 3 desktop
• 7-27 – Zorin OS 6 “Educational”, “Gaming” – Ubuntu-based distribution, designed for students and gamers
• 7-28 – BigLinux 12.04 – Kubuntu-based Brazilian distribution for the desktop (with support for Portuguese and English languages)
• 7-28 – Calculate Linux 12.0 – Gentoo-based distribution for desktops and servers

Distro of the Week: Tony

5. Peppermint – 1401
4. Arch – 1699
3. Ubuntu – 1715
2. Mageia – 2885
1. Mint – 4121

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Mary Convention sceen

Time: 17:38

Texas Linux Fest 2012, August 3 & 4, 2012
Norris Conference Center
San Antonio, TX

The TX Linux Fest covers a wide spectrum of Linux and open source software topics. One of the speakers this year is Joe (Zonker)Brockmeier who will speake about How to Create Your Own Cloud.
http://2012.texaslinuxfest.org/

Open Help Conference & Sprints, August 10-15, 2012
Newport on the Levee (Newport KY)
Cincinnati, Ohio

The Open Help Conference will bring together leaders in open source documentation and support, as well as people from across the technical communications industry interested in community-based help
http://openhelpconference.com/

12th Annual Linux Kernel Summit, August 27 – 29, 2012
Sheraton San Diego ·
San Diego, CA

The Linux Kernel Summit brings together the world’s leading core kernel developers to discuss the state of the existing kernel and plan the next development cycle. This is an invitation-only conference.

Linux Plumbers conference 2012, August 29-31, 2012 –
Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina
San Diego CA

The Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) is a developer conference for the open source community. The LPC brings together the top developers working on the “plumbing” of Linux — kernel subsystems, core libraries, windowing systems, etc.

http://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2012/

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Kevin O’Brien – OLF Promo

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Mary Distro Review – What’s on SDA6

Time: 42:32

Openmamba Review
±

The openmamba web site proudly announces its ready-to-use operating system for notebooks, desktop and server personal computers. Wow! What’s left? A lot. First the vitals…

Vitals:
Name: OpenMamba GNU/Linux
Maintainer: mambaSoft (opened to the contributions from a community of developers)
Distro Latest Birthday: 2.0.10.1 on 7/23/2012
Derivative: Independent but is rpm-based.
Kernel: 3.2
Review Desktop: KDE (4.7.4)

Obtaining/Downloading:

OpenMamaba has several downloads available: The latest, announced this past week on Distrowatch– is the LiveCD (2-2.0.10.1) with KDE.

Also available for download are liveCDs for Gnome and LXDE; the LiveDVD has KDE. There’s a USB-bootable image – more on that later.

Live Environment:

It’s the standard KDE plasma desktop (4.7.4)

A. Desktop Icons: Openmamba live rolls with four desktop icons: Trash, Install, Documents, Openmamba Boot Recover, which lets you repair or reinstall Grub.

B. KDE Task Panel: Left-side icons: desktop pager, KDE activities icon, the menu launcher. The system tray on the right side of the panel also contained standard KDE fare—mostly. Also present was the openmamba Control Center (OCC), which gave me access to two sub-menus: Software and Network.
Under software, there were Add/Remove Software Packages and Check for Updates. The third icon—Openmamba Components—will be covered later in the review. It’s used to install macro-groups and that was not done until later.

The network icon opens to configure a proxy or KDE’s firewall GUI. Although the firewall is “enabled” there are no rules listed. That part is up to you.

The live CD comes with a choice of two browsers: Chromium, Konqueror. However, there is no office suite, mail program

There was an openmamba menu, under System in the launcher. This category holds various install options including:
Base components installer
Support for debugging reporting
openmamba boot loader recovery
System start logs for last reboot, last shutdown, kernel init and system init messages
Network software installation folder which contained:
Broadcom 843 wireless firmware
Flash plugin
MS truetype core fonts
Skype
Win32 codecs
Virtualbox extension pack

There alos was a utility to create an openmamba bootable-usb drive. After I installed openmamba, I tested this function and it worked perfectly. Very impressive.

The Install Process:

The install process was mostly easy. It commences by kicking off an optional data integrity check of the CD. For the impatient among us, a convenient Skip Check button is on the right. I clicked it. There are the standard questions about locale, keyboard, etc. Openmamba intelligently guesses those choices for you.

I encountered a small glitch in the install when setting up the partitions. The process was a two-part affair: Gparted handles partition creation, deletion and formatting. The Openmamba installer handles partition assignment, root, home, etc. I clicked the Edit disk partitions button which launched Gparted. After creating my partitions, I was returned to the openmamba installer but I could not proceed because Next button was disabled. It wasn’t clear to me why because I received an OK from openmamba for all three of my partitions (home, root, swap). I returned to Gparted to make sure everything was configured and even set the boot flag just to be sure. I waited 15 minutes in case some prep process had not completed. It wasn’t until I checked Ignore SWAP partition check box that the Next button was enabled.

After the base system is installed, I rebooted to add a password for the root user and add a regular user.

Software selection and installation followed which required an active Internet connection. From Openmamba components, I could install package macro-groups for office, multimedia, games, audio, emulation and virtualization, server, base development. Think of it as a way to populate your launcher menu because the openmamba install just gives you the basics. I selected the kitchen sink option. Actually, there’s no “Kitchen Sink” option but I selected practically every package macro-groups except for server (apache, postfix, mysql, etc.), developer, and virtualization. Installed were the following package macro-groups: gaming, office, multimedia, audio/video, graphics. After install, each macro-group line item I selected was grey—not available

Installed Environment:

1. Package Management

Openmamba is rpm-based but, unlike Mageia where it was noticeable, openmamba handles all the business behind the scenes. packages, apt-rpm

Smart Package Manager – reminded me of a compact version of synaptic. Instead of the left panel with the application groups, you see a tree structure with installed packages denoted. Familiar-looking if you’re a synaptic user. You can set anything to install by right-clicking on it.

KpackageKit – The KDE version of PackageKit, which provides a graphical front-end for several package management utilities for maintaining software.

Openmamba components – For macro-group package management for the groups I mentioned earlier. One interesting thing I learned about openmamba components is if I uninstalled one package from a macro-group using another tool, the line item was activated –and the checkbox was unchecked. I decided to “reinstall” the macro-group and checked the box. After the process completed, I checked the install log which showed several warnings for applications that were already installed. Other than that, there were no other negative indications. It did reinstall the program I removed and the line item returned to its grey state. I could install a set of packages but it appeared that I could not remove the same set of packages

Installing software opened KPackageKit Because it requires administrative permission, I was prompted to enter what I thought would be the admin password but it was my user password that the system wanted.

2. Interesting Apps, Etc.

I’ve already mentioned several useful and interesting apps/utilities. There were a few others.
openmamba has stocked the Wine cabinet with some interesting selections: Wine Internet Explorer, which looks to be IE6 because I installed it, Registry Editor, Wordpad AND Notepad.
Windows wireless drivers (a wizard that takes a Windows inf file and installs it.)

HP Device Manager which let’s you set up printers and other HP devices.
AMD Catalyst Control Center
…and quite a few others.

Note that the forums are mostly Italian. I use Google translate to ask a question and use the translated version for the forum.

Rating: I really like this distro!

4.5 cups of good quality coffee.

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Tech News:

Time: 1:02:00
Chrome OS Using Cinnamon Desktop Environment

On July 27th they announced the immediate availability for download of Chrome OS 2.1.1145. This new version features Linux kernel 3.4.2, the Cinnamon 1.4 desktop environment, Chromium 21.0.1145 web browser, LibreOffice 3.5 office suite, and Wine 1.4 along with many more. The requirements for the new release are:

• CPU: Intel Pentium, Atom, Xeon or newer; AMD Duron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron or newer;
• RAM: min. 512 MB;
• Hard disk: min. 1 GB;
• Graphics card: most of graphics cards with 3D hardware acceleration.

Chrome OS is a live CD distribution built around the Google Chrome web browser and based on the openSUSE operating system. Their aim is to provide a lightweight Linux operating system for the best web browsing experience on any Chromebook, x86 PC or notebook. Chrome OS is NOT related to Google and the Google Chrome OS.

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Android Phone Vulnerable To Near Field Communication Attack

NFC offers the promise of interacting with parking meters, vending machines or any other device requiring payment. It also offers a means for simple data transfers. This makes for a very inviting target for the black hats out there. Charlie Miller, a security researcher, detailed and demonstrated new vulnerabilities in NFC. This technology is currently available in about fifty smart phones.

Miller then showed some videos of his research where he tried to read an NFC card that was inside another persons wallet. NFC is only active when the phone is awake. You can however wake phone up with a phone call or a text message. He ran more than 50,000 tests the Galaxy Nexus looking for NFC flaws. One of the features of NFC on the phone he was testing is the ability to “beam” a file to another phone. I order to “beam” a file the sender has to click send but the receiver needs to do nothing. The limited number of applications that ca receive a file includes the Android browser. When you combine that ability with an existing vulnerability in the version of webKit used in the Android browser. This results in you getting full root shell access on the victim phone. Granted this is a webkit bug and not an NFC bug but it is triggered by the victim phone accepting a file willy nilly.

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NSA Chief Gives Keynote At Defcon

General Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Chief of the Central Security Service (CSS), and Commander of the United States Cyber Command, walked on stage to deliver the keynote speech he was wearing blue jeans and a defcon kids tee shirt. He started out his speech with this statement:

“We can protect the network, have civil liberties and privacy — and you can help us get there… We can do both and we need to do both.”

He went on to say:

“This is all about our future, we can’t sit on the sidelines or let others that don’t understand this space tell us what to do… That’s why I came here, to solicit your help.”

The NSA has projects, to try and see those future risks. One of which is a project with industry called DIB (Defence Industrial Base) Pilot. DIB Pilot is about getting tips from private industry about potential attacks by sending log files from network security devices into the NSA.

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Is it Alive?

Time: 1:11:55

Is It Alive (or is it a French distro)?

During this segment of the show, I challenge Mat and Tony to identify whether a Linux Distro is alive or dead? This week is a french twist, S.V.P., when I challenge Mat and Tony to decide if the named distro is French. The items for the July 28 show:

====================================
: Alpine Linux
Alpine Linux is a community developed operating system designed for x86 routers, firewalls, VPNs, VoIP boxes and servers. It was designed with security in mind; it has proactive security features like PaX and SSP that prevent security holes in the software to be exploited

MAT: No
TONY: No
VERDICT: No

====================================
Geexbox –

GeeXboX is a free and Open Source Media-Center purposed Linux distribution for embedded devices and desktop computers. GeeXboX is not an application, it’s a full-featured OS, that one can boot as a LiveCD, from a USB key, an SD/MMC card or install on its regular HDD. 

MAT: No
TONY: Yes
VERDICT: Yes

===================================
LinuxConsole
This project started in 2002, first t o make a liveCD with 3D drivers and free games, then becomes an original linux distribution (doesnt’ depend of other distros). LinuxConsole is an original ditro, it aims to be innovative. It was the first linux distro to have 3D enabled on liveCD, the a great work was done to install it safely from Windows (95 to vista), and now the jukebox makes customized livecd/liveusb very easy to build.

http://www.linuxconsole.org/

MAT: No
TONY: No
VERDICT: Yes

===================================
PapugLinux
PapugLinux is a minimal GNU/Linux live CD based on the Gentoo Linux distribution for x86 computers.

The live CD allow you to run the operating system without installing anything on your hard drive

MAT: Yes
TONY: Yes
VERDICT: Yes

===================================
Pear Linux
Pear Linux is a French Ubuntu-based desktop Linux distribution. Some of its features include ease-of-use, custom user interface with a Mac OS X-style dockbar, and out-of-the-box support for many popular multimedia codecs.
Pear Linux 5 is a fast, stable, and powerful operating system for everyday use. It’s completely free to use, study, and share.

MAT: No
TONY: No
VERDICT: Yes

===================================
PureOS
PureOS and PureOSlight are GNU/Linux live CDs based on Debian’s testing repository. These are desktop distributions that can be used as live media (CD or USB) or as full-featured operating systems i
http://pureos.org/

MAT: No
TONY: Yes
VERDICT: yes
===================================

Mat: 2
Tony: 4 (Winner)

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Listener Feedback show (at) smlr.us or 313-626-9140

Time: 1:17:14
Denning – super computer running suse linux
Door – The Kontron does have a sat port
Chattr – Texas Linux Fest – and Mars Science Lab (Curiosity)
George – Your excellent Podcast and Distro Reviews

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Outtro Music

Time: 1:23:39
Wire by Chris Merritt

Penguinarium Pictures

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.