Christopher Fikes » Fedora

Fedora Sandbox

cfikes — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:24:37 +0000

Fedora 12 demonstrates sandbox for desktop applications

Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) specialist at RedHat developer Dan Walsh (not from Americas Most Wanted) has souped up the security mechanisms in Fedora and SELinux by adding a desktop sandbox which he’s calling “sandbox -X”. Users can run desktop applications of their choice inside his sandbox, which then protects the underlying system from any posible damage.

SELinux extends the standard Unix privilegs concept to add a role-based privilege model which, in principal, allows a user to forbid a PDF viewer from, for example, sending email. Currently, however, SELinux is mainly used to wall off server services.

Dan Walsh is now looking to change this and has designed a desktop sandbox. This can, for example, be used to run Firefox in an isolated environment, consisting of temporary directories, a unique X server instance – forwhich he uses Xephr – and a special profile which defines the revelent privileges. Currently this must be called manually.

sandbox -X -t sandbox_web_t firefox

Sandbox -X is already in Fedora 12 (+OneMillion for Fedora), scheduled for a November release, so interested users can already have a play. It is likely to be a while before it becomes genuinely user-friendly, with the sandbox currently forgetting all user settings each time it is run and also being unable to copy and paste into the host system.

Looks to be some amazing software for the security conscious Fedora user.

Enough is enough.

cfikes — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:21:53 +0000

Over the past two days I have received over 2000 emails, all from one sender. You might ask yourself, why don’t you just block this sender? I would, but I am required to be a member of this mailing list. The mailing list is the Fedora FreeMedia Mailing List. It sends out every ticket request, and update to everyone on the list. I can see where this was useful long ago, but this has got to stop. We at the Fedora Project need to at the bare minimum have two mailing list for this program, one for discussions, and one for tickets. Make the discussions required, and the tickets not. I’m sure most everyone on that mailing list is like me and have come complacent and just flat ignore the emails that come from this address, they don’t go to my blackberry anymore, that was a disaster. Give me one of your blackberry email addresses and let me send 2000 messages to it. It becomes very, very, VERY unresponsive and useless. Also, syncing on IMAP the deletion of 2000 messages takes a really long time.

The point, we don’t all need to see every action that takes place in the trac system sent out in an email. Lets just be responsible and check the trac system daily, I and most already do.

Fedora Document Management

cfikes — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:56:35 +0000

Fedora Document Management Login

Well, its Thursday and my wife has to do homework for her masters program. I think I will continue working on my little pet project, Fedora Document Management. PHP and MySQL based, this web based application will feature document revisions, document templates, document sharing with permissions, document locking, and some other things not thought of yet. Of course there will be a way to authenticate with LDAP before you ask. If you are a PHP programmer and would like to help, just use the contact form at the top, or heck, leave a comment, or even email me at cfikes@fedoraprohect.org.

Thank you . . .

cfikes — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:55:46 +0000

A gentleman that received a disc from the Fedora FreeMedia Program wrote me and said:

Thank you sincerely for the copy of Fedora you sent, I appreciate it. I just wanted to tell you that it was very much appreciated. I will be installing it, then passing the disc along to someone else who may want to install it.

This is why we do it, spreading Open Source.

Fedora

Friends | Freedom | Features | First

This is FANTASTIC !

cfikes — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:49:32 +0000

This is just fantastic!!! The FreeMedia Program with the Fedora Project has had over 300 media request just over the course of today. WAY TO GO GUYS! I will start sending out my media tomorrow. I am so glad to see the interest in this new release booming. This is truly the best Fedora release yet.

Request your FreeMedia here.

Just check out the Fedora Project here.

Stomper Template

cfikes — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:02:41 +0000

Hey guys out there in the FreeMedia Program, I created this layered template for the StomperCD Labelling system so you can use some cheaper labels in your burning. Its in the XCF format, so you will need to have Gimp installed, but that shouldn’t be a problem for the Freedom Crusaders in the Fedora Project.

Download

If there is a problem with it, just let me know. THANKS

My New Toy

cfikes — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:58:10 +0000

ShevaPlug Developement Kit

And yep, it runs Linux. Ships with a version of Ubuntu 9.04, but you bet I am putting Fedora ARM on there. Thanks guys for the awesome ARM release. I will keep you posted on the toys I build with this.

More info: GlobalScale Technologies

Fedora 11 Released!!!

cfikes — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:23:09 +0000

Just wanted to scream out to the world that Fedora 11 has been released.
WOW, what a wonderful release.

Go grab a copy at http://fedoraproject.org today!