Toward Standardized Groups

June 5 marked the death knell for my conquest for world domination through Eclipse committer groups.

Before then, I was in a whopping 62 different linux groups on dev.eclipse.org, coming in third behind Kim and Sonia (80 and 79, respectively).

However, with Karl and Matt actively cleaning up these duplicate and often empty groups & standardizing the names, my numbers have dwindled to a mere 55. Sadly, I'll lose 4 more when we standardize GEF...

Still, consistency is better than world domination, right?

If your project needs some housecleaning, Karl's looking for volunteers to work with him on this effort. If you are interested, I'd recommend starting with a shared spreadsheet (eg., [1], [2]) to document your before and after states.

Kernel Panic!

Yesterday a very nasty linux security hole was uncovered & shortly thereafter, fixed.

Tonight I attempted to upgrade my home systems and discovered that my desktop is immune (Kubuntu 6.06LTS, kernel 2.6.15-27-686 SMP i686) as this bug only manifests with kernel 2.6.17 or later.

My laptop (AntiX 7.0, 2.6.22-1-mepis-smp i686) decided to kernel panic when I upgraded to 2.6.22-3-686 & restarted. But that upgrade was pointless anyway, as the only Debian fix yet available is kernel 2.6.18 for Debian 4.0 (Etch).

So, switching to the Ubuntu repository, I found the fix I need. Here's a list of the kernel upgrades by *ubuntu version/name:

• 6.10 (Edgy): 2.6.17-12
• 7.04 (Feisty): 2.6.20-16
• 7.10 (Gutsy): 2.6.22-14

If you're like me and your AntiX/MEPIS/Debian/Kubuntu hybrid doesn't already have packages for these fixes, you can add these repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list by hand:

# Ubuntu Security Updates
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-security main restricted universe multiverse

However, if your system is anything like mine, it won't even bother to kernel panic on restart -- instead, you'll get a dead system with the caps lock light blinking on & off. Yes, that's definitely more secure than before. :(