Posted
over 3 years
ago
Steve
McIntyre announced that the Debian project has been accepted for this year's Google
Summer of Code. During this
Google sponsors the creation and future development of Free
Software. A Wiki page has been set up to coordinate
... [More]
the participation and to collect ideas
and proposals for possible projects. The list of accepted student
applications was published on April 9th. [Less]
Posted
over 3 years
ago
The leader of the IT
department of Germany's Federal
Foreign Office, Rolf Schuster, reported that they
have seriously cut their IT costs by consequently using Free Software. Driven
by the urge to save money on license fees and to
... [More]
escape from update cycles the
office started the move in 2002 and has since then connected 230 embassies with
the secure intranet gateways.
More than 300 laptops of diplomats also run a specialised distribution based
on Debian GNU/Linux. [Less]
Posted
over 3 years
ago
Welcome to this year's 5th issue of DWN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Roland Mas announced that Alioth users can
use Mercurial for version
control. Robert Millan announced
version 0.4.0 of the Debian loader
for
... [More]
Windows operating systems including Vista. Joey Schulze reported that security updates are available via IPv6 from
official servers as well. The new release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 is celebrated all over the
world. [Less]
Posted
over 3 years
ago
The mechanism that allows to subscribe to bug reports in the Debian BTS
has been broken for some time (how long exactly is unknown).
The problem only affected bug reports for which no "mailing list" existed
yet. Basically what this
... [More]
means that if you subscribed to a bug report but
never received a mail asking to confirm the subscription, you were not
subscribed and will have missed any mails sent to that bug report.
Note that if you did receive a confirmation for your subscription
to a bug report, you will not have missed any mails for that bug
report due to this issue.
The system works again now. You will need to subscribe again for any
subscriptions that were lost. You may also want to review the bug history
in the BTS for those bug reports.
We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.
Frans Pop
Debian Listmaster [Less]
Posted
over 3 years
ago
Several local and remote vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux
kernel that may lead to a denial of service or the execution of arbitrary
code. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the
following problems:
Posted
over 3 years
ago
It was discovered that the webmail package Squirrelmail performs
insufficient sanitising inside the HTML filter, which allows the
injection of arbitrary web script code during the display of HTML
email messages.
Posted
over 3 years
ago
Entry submitted by William Tracy. We are running out of articles ! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like !
MPEG is the JPEG of the video world. It is a format that plays everywhere, and has built-in lossy
... [More]
compression. Unfortunately, that means that, also like a JPEG, if you open and edit an MPEG you will lose more and more quality with each save. Worse, since video files tend to be large, many people will take MPEG compression as far as it will go, creating files that look yucky to start with.
Mpgtx is a partial solution to the problem. It allows you to slice and splice videos without re-compressing them. The video quality and bit-rate (ratio of file size to the length of the movie) stay the same while you chop off the last thirty seconds of your home video or you stick two videos back to back.
This is a command-line utility. For example, mpgtx -j movie1.mpg movie2.mpg -o movie3.mpg creates a file movie3.mpg that consists of movie1.mpg and movie2.mpg back-to-back. mpgtx -s movie1.mpg [30-1:00] -o movie2.mpg creates a file movie2.mpg that includes everything in movie1.mpg from the thirty-second mark to the one-minute mark.
Support
Mpgtx is a shining example of what is so wonderful about Debian. The last update on the upstream website is over a year old —but new patches continue to go into the Debian package.
Several months ago, I ran into a bug in Mpgtx. My digital camera created MPEG files that caused Mpgtx to segfault. At first, I thought I was out of luck when I saw that the application’s maintainer had disappeared. Then I tried filing a bug report via Debian’s reportbug. Lo and behold, I got a response from the package’s maintainer, Erik Schanze. Within a few weeks, I had a working patch piping hot from the oven that fixed my problem. Mpgtx 1.3.1-3, which fixes my bug, is now available in Testing and Unstable.
Conclusion
Mpgtx is a handy little program. It isn’t useful for serious video editing, but it very nice for quickly hacking some already-compressed video that was supposed to be already "finished". It deserves a place in the tool-belt of any command-line-savvy multimedia artist.
Packages and Links
Mpgtx has been available as a Debian package since May 2001; it is present in Sarge, Etch and Lenny (I can’t find info about older releases). It is also present in every version of Ubuntu. For some reason, the package is under the "Sound" category, so look for it there with Aptitude or Synaptic.
Website: http://mpgtx.sourceforge.net/ [Less]
Posted
over 3 years
ago
As Moray blogged
last week, there are spare beds in the hostel block booking. If you
haven’t already written in ask for one, and you would like to stay
with the sponsored DebConf attendees, please write to
... [More]
accommodation@debconf.org
now. The plan is to close this option in about 24 hours, so please
be prompt.
The spare beds will be allocated to people in the order emails are
received; the price per night will be £12 (currently â¬17.60),
which is a special reduced rate due to our large bookings. [Less]
Posted
over 3 years
ago
Entry submitted by Benoit Peccatte. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !
Are you a kde user? If you are, you should have this one, if you aren’t you should try it!
Klipper is a tool for associating an action to any
... [More]
content you put in the clipboard. It decides what action to activate based on a regular expression match. Thus you can associate actions to URLs for software that don’t support opening an URL, you can associate a path to your file browser…
Usage
This tool puts itself into the task bar waiting for your input. It is disabled by default. Note that the default settings are reasonable. Let’s look at an URL example. First activate the actions by clicking on the tool and select guess what.
Now select something like “http://test.com” with your mouse. A menu appears that suggests some action. Just point and click.
Configuration
Clipper is as simple to configure as it is to use. You just have to know what a regular expression is.
Here, “^https?://.” means anything that starts with “http://” or “https://”, then at least one character.
Klipper is available in Debian since Sarge, and in Ubuntu since Warty. [Less]
Posted
over 3 years
ago
It was discovered that the PoPToP Point to Point Tunneling Server
contains a programming error, which allows the tear-down of a PPTP
connection through a malformed GRE packet, resulting in denial of
service.
