blog
Firefox[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 26 October 2006 at 20:37 |
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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| Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation, and a large community of external contributors. Firefox, officially abbreviated as Fx or fx and popularly abbreviated FF, started as a fork of the Navigator browser component of the Mozilla Application Suite. Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, under the direction of the Mozilla Foundation.
Firefox is our choice of web-browser here at Organic Design, and this article lists the extensions and configurations we like to include with it. Note that browsers are inherently risky by the fact that any site you may visit can contain malicious code, and you are also trusting all your installed extensions. For this reason it's a very good idea to install FireJail which gives you super easy sandboxing capability. See below for more detail. |
Mumble[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 24 June 2013 at 21:01 | |||
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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Mumble is a VOIP system composed of a client package and a server package that provides channels for groups to do voice communications together. It's designed to work very clearly with very low latency and can also work in very low bandwidth conditions if necessary. I've installed this on our server so we have a means of doing voice chat together without needing Skype which is not private and has also degraded a lot in quality having very high latency and breaks up a lot. Installation[edit]Installation was very simple on Debian involving an installation of the mumble-server package on the server side and the mumble package on the client side (on Ubuntu you'll need to add-apt-repository ppa:mumble/release and update before installing the mumble package). The server required practically no configuration (I pointed it to our web-server SSL certificates and kept everything else as default), and the client required only minimal configuration to calibrate the microphone and bandwidth conditions and to add our server to the list of available connections. See also[edit] |
ContentsBitmessage[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 14 June 2013 at 15:06 | |||
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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Bitmessage is a peer-to-peer communications protocol based on the Bitcoin crypto-currency used to send encrypted messages to another person or to many subscribers. It is decentralized and trustless, meaning that you need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. It uses strong authentication which means that the sender of a message cannot be spoofed, and it aims to hide "non-content" data, like the sender and receiver of messages, from passive eavesdroppers like those running warrantless wiretapping programs. If Bitmessage is completely new to you, you may wish to start by reading Setting up and using Bitmessage by CryptoJunky, or you could go straight to the whitepaper. Installation[edit]Installation is very simple on modern GNU/Linux based operating systems. You may need to install python-qt4 first, then simply git clone it as shown here. And create a desktop launcher for it as shown in our GNOME article. Using Bitmessage from the command line[edit]For use on servers or for testing local applications that use the Bitmessage via its API you can install the PyBitmessage-Daemon which can just be unpacked into the same location as PyBitmessage. When the PyBitmessage-Daemon/daemon.py script is run it will connect to the local Bitmessage service using the API use and password found in the key.dat file of the Bitmessage's configuration. Note that the key file is found by checking the home directory's .config/PyBitmessage location so if you run Bitmessage under an unprivileged user you'll need to use the sudo command to run the script first. Also for some reason they've used "python-2.7.x" in the shebang statement at the start of the script so you can't run the script directly, you need to call it via python2.7. For example if we're running as the unprivileged user bmuser we would run it as follows: You can then type the command apiTest to see if the connection to the local Bitmessage is working properly, and if so, do help to see a list of available commands you can issue. Use your mail client as the UI with bmwrapper[edit]Brilliant little script that sets up a basic POP3 and SMTP server on localhost to give Bitmessage an email interface for example that Thunderbird can connect to. This means the messages can be organised in a local folder structure or easily coped to your IMAP structure.
Bitmessage + Open Transactions[edit]A very interesting thread started in BitcoinTalk here about joining Bitmessage with Open Transactions to produce a completely p2p anonymous transaction system far superior to Bitcoin or Ripple in terms of security, anonymity and the power of financial instruments it provides. See more on the Open Transactions article. Bitmessage gateway[edit]I've been finding Bitmessage difficult to run especially as our net connection can be very low bandwidth, so often I won't run it for days at a time and then miss out on messages. When I do run it I have to wait a long time before messages will arrive. So I've decided to run it on the server as a daemon (using these settings to start it automatically as a service), and then integrate it with Exim so that I can receive the messages in my usual inbox. This is quite secure because both sending and receiving is done over encrypted channel to our own server. I've made a couple of Python scripts, bm-gateway/in.py and bm-gateway/out.py which utilise the functionality of bmwrapper on hosts that already have a running mail server and acts as a gateway between the local Bitmessage instance and the mail server without starting up an additional SMTP and POP server. Incoming Bitmessage messages are now sent to a local email address, actually any email address would do, but if it's not local, then the security of using Bitmessage would be compromised. The email address that correspond to each Bitmessage address in the "addresses" section of the gateway configuration file in the form foo@bar.baz = BM-xxxxxxx. If an incoming Bitmessage's address does not match any of the email addresses then the first is used as a "catch all". Outgoing messages are sent to a local user account that is configured to forward the messages to Bitmessage. The email address of this account is defined in the "settings" section of the configuration. For example using Exim a filter can be set up in the local user's .forward file that uses the pipe command to send the message to this script for forwarding to Bitmessage. This user account is also the user under which Bitmessage should be running, and all them (PyBitmessage, PyBitmessage-Daemon, bmwrapper and bm-gateway) should be located in this account's home directory. Installation[edit]First set up an unprivileged user account to run Bitmessage and all the scripts under. Install Bitmessage, Bitmessage-Daemon, bmwrapper and bm-gateway into this user's home directory. Ensure that daemon and API are enabled in your .config/PyBitmessage/keys.dat configuration file for Bitmessage. Set up a .config file in the bm-gateway directory containing a "settings" and a "addresses" section. The first section contains a "gateway" value with the email address of the user running the scripts, and the second section contains mappings of each of your email addresses to Bitmessage addresses, including the address of the account through which all outgoing messages will be sent, e.g. Set up an email account for this gateway user which will be the generic account through which all outgoing Bitmessage messages will sent, in the example configuration above, this email address is assumed to be "bitmessage@foo.com". You'll need to set up a way for the emails to be sent to the bm-gateway/out.py script instead of to standard delivery. For Exim this can be done by using a filter in a .forward file in the user's home directory that uses the pipe command. Here's an example filter which uses a condition to check that it's a Bitmessage recipient incase the user also has normal mail delivered too. The bm-gateway/in.py script will need to be called on a regular basis to check for new incoming Bitmessage messages and forward them to the appropriate local email account. You can add something similar to the following to your crontab to achieve this: Usage[edit]Nothing needs to be done to receive or reply to messages, they just arrive in the inbox and can be replied to in to in the normal way. Sending messages to Bitmessage addresses that isn't a reply is done by using the following format for the To field: where the name portion is the recipient Bitmessage address, and the email address portion is the address of the account that was set up to receive all the messages for the gateway to forward to Bitmessage - in our example above, bitmessage@foo.com Note that users on the same gateway cannot sent messages to each other via the Bitmessage network, because Bitmessage doesn't allow a user to send to one of their own addresses, and in the case of the gateway, all the local user's addresses are on the same Bitmessage instance. If this is attempted, the script will raise an exception, and in the case of Exim the message and the exception details will be returned to the sender. See also[edit]
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ContentsDebian[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 8 August 2008 at 07:34 |
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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 In June 2013 we decided to change from Ubuntu to Debian for our workstations as well since Ubuntu is increasingly becoming the "microsoft of the free software world" with pay software and services at every corner and compulsory spyware riddled throughout system, see Debian legacy issues for notes about various issues and solutions encountered back then. But then in early 2014 we changed to Linux Mint for our workstation machines, mainly due to the fact that they're very up to date with their choice of Linux kernel version which allowed me to use my touch-screen on my Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro (XE700T1C) and fixed a long-standing bug on Beth's Lenovo Ideapad S10-3 which prevented it from resuming from standby. As of mid 2019 we've moved back to Debian again because Mint's Cinnamon desktop is stuck on an insecure path through its dependence on Xorg whereas most desktop managers are now moving to the more secure and slim Wayland display server. With the recent release of Debian 10, I decided to move back and give it a try! Gnome3 extensions and addons[edit]
Keyboard shortcuts[edit]I like to add some keyboard shortcuts for simple window management. The gTile extension is required and must be set to simple 2x2 grid. This will allow the super with left or right keys to move the currently focused window to occupy the left or right half of the screen, and then using super with up or down will move it to the top of bottom half vertically.
Packages[edit]Issues & gotchas I've had before[edit]
See also[edit]
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Linux kernel[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 8 August 2008 at 08:17 |
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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| Linux is the name usually given to any Unix-like computer operating system that uses the Linux kernel. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development: typically all underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone.
The name "Linux" comes from the Linux kernel, originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The system's utilities and libraries usually come from the GNU Operating System, announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The GNU contribution is the basis for the alternative (and more correct) name GNU/Linux. At Organic Design, we use two different GNU/Linux distributions, Debian on our servers and Ubuntu on our workstations. See also[edit] |
GNewSense[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 3 May 2013 at 17:36 |
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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 Free software is software that respects your freedom. You can use it without restrictive licenses, make copies for your friends, school or business. To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting your rights to learn and to share what you learn with others. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community and sponsored by the Free software foundation (FSF). We've decided to test out if gNewSense is going to work well on our laptops as a replacement for Ubuntu after the made the awful decision to begin disrespecting their user's freedom and rights by including spyware and corporate DRM software in their distribution. See also[edit]
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MariaDB[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 14 April 2013 at 15:59 | |||
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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| "When Oracle purchased Sun, many in the open source community were bleak about the future of MySQL. According to MySQL co-creator Michael "Monty" Widenius, these fears have been proven by Oracle's attitude to MySQL and its community. In the wake of the Sun takeover, Monty forked MySQL to create MariaDB, which has picked up momentum (being included by default in Fedora, Open SUSE and, most recently, Slackware).
It's fair to say that MySQL creator Michael "Monty" Widenius is not a fan of Oracle. When the company announced in April 2009 that it was purchasing Sun, Widenius saw a bleak future ahead for the (still) wildly popular open source database, which Sun had snapped up in 2008. The day the Sun purchase was announced, Widenius responded in the tried and true open source fashion — he forked MySQL, launching MariaDB, and took a swathe of MySQL developers with him. By Widenius' estimates there are now 1 million MariaDB installations, and the decision by RedHat's Fedora and SUSE's Open SUSE Linux distributions to include the newer database by default will bring this install base close to 10 million by the end of the year. Slackware announced on 23 March that it was ditching MySQL in favour of MariaDB.
Organic Design move to MariaDB[edit]We moved to MariaDB on 4 April 2013 when we upgraded to the new German server. Our 2GB of MySQL 5.1 database export imported into Maria without a hitch and has been running smoothly for a couple of weeks at the time of writing this. Note: you should now you php5-mysqlnd instead of the usual php5-mysql package since the latter uses the old Oracle license and is hard-coded for older MySQL headers which can produce warning messages in some cases. Documentation[edit]See also[edit]
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ContentsNginx[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 11 March 2011 at 00:23 | |||
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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 Nginx uses an asynchronous event-driven approach to handling requests, instead of the Apache model that defaults to a threaded or process-oriented approach. Nginx's event-driven approach can provide more predictable performance under high loads. Another reason we're moving over to Nginx is due to the recent interest in Perfect forward secrecy (PFS) coming from articles such as this. PFS is an obscure feature of SSL/TLS and requires at least OpenSSL version 1 and Apache version 2.3.3, but Nginx has supported it for quite some time now.
Installation[edit]All our local installation documentation is in the install a new server procedure. The selecting a good set of ciphers section covers more detail about the perfect forward secrecy issues and installation. Note that the cgi.fix_pathinfo directive which used to be a critical security patch for Nginx has been redundant since about PHP version 5.3. Our URL rewriting rules[edit]The OD server uses a rather complicated URL-rewriting system that allows all the wikis under all domains to run from a singe "catch-all" server block - or actually two, one for plain and one for SSL. This was quite difficult to replicate on Nginx such that it could work in exactly the same way and thereby be "web server agnostic". The catch-all wiki rewrite rules apply if no other domain-based patterns have matched such as requests with an svn or webmail sub-domain prefix. Our configuration is rather "if" heavy which is strongly discouraged by Nginx gurus, but they're ok as long as they're not inside location context or contain only rewrite last directives or other non-content-handling operations such as set. Our ones here that are inside location context contain only set directives which should be safe. See this article for more detail about how the "if" directive works and why it can be so tricky to use in practice. This first block sets variable called $wiki which will be used by other following conditions and location blocks (note that even if the .php block is included prior to these settings in the file, they are actually evaluated after them as these blocks are all outside of location scope. $wiki is the directory in which the wiki's file structure resides, i.e. one of the symlinks in /var/www/domains which are named to match the domain of the request. It is used in the following rules in the main scope and also by the nginx.php.conf include for setting the fastcgi_params. Note that this condition always applies and sets $wiki.
Stand-alone and local wikis[edit]For wikis that have their own code-base directory instead of using the shared code-bases of the wiki farm can use a block similar to the following example to do their friendly URL's. Block processing order[edit]
See also[edit]
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Byzantium[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 4 June 2012 at 15:06 |
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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The goal of Project Byzantium is to develop a communication system by which users can connect to each other and share information in the absence of convenient access to the Internet. This is done by setting up an ad-hoc wireless mesh network that offers services which replace popular websites often used for this purpose, such as Twitter and IRC. These services and web apps were selected because they are the ones most often used by activists around the world to find one another, exchange information, post media, and organize. They were also selected because they stand the best chance of being easy to use by our intended userbase, which are people using mobile devices like smartphones, MP3 players, and tablet PCs. Unlike most mesh implementations, a Byzantium Mesh requires no specialized equipment that may not be easy to get during an emergency, just an x86 computer with at least one 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless interface.
See also[edit]Video[edit] |
Fossil[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 30 May 2012 at 12:59 | |||
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This post has the following tags: Libre software
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Migrating a repository from Subversion to Fossil[edit]Fossil is able to import and export from Git so first we migrate our subversion repository to Git. svn2git is a tiny utility for migrating projects from Subversion to Git while keeping the trunk, branches and tags where they should be. It uses git-svn to clone an svn repository and does some clean-up to make sure branches and tags are imported in a meaningful way, and that the code checked into master ends up being what's currently in your svn trunk rather than whichever svn branch your last commit was in. First we install svn2git as follows:
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