Simplicity is a form of art...

Old Gentoo system? Not a problem...

If you have a very old Gentoo system that you want to upgrade, you might have some issues with too old software and Portage which can't just upgrade to a recent state. Although many methods exist to work around it, one that I have found to be very useful is …

Gentoo Handbooks almost moved to wiki

Content-wise, the move is done. I've done a few checks on the content to see if the structure still holds, translations are enabled on all pages, the use of partitions is sufficiently consistent for each architecture, and so on. The result can be seen on the gentoo handbook main page …

Sometimes I forget how important communication is

Free software (and documentation) developers don't always have all the time they want. Instead, they grab whatever time they have to do what they believe is the most productive - be it documentation editing, programming, updating ebuilds, SELinux policy improvements and what not. But they often don't take the time to …

No more DEPENDs for SELinux policy package dependencies

I just finished updating 102 packages. The change? Removing the following from the ebuilds:

DEPEND="selinux? ( sec-policy/selinux-${packagename} )"

In the past, we needed this construction in both DEPEND and RDEPEND. Recently however, the SELinux eclass got updated with some logic to relabel files after the policy package is deployed …

Migrating to SELinux userspace 2.4 (small warning for users)

In a few moments, SELinux users which have the \~arch KEYWORDS set (either globally or for the SELinux utilities in particular) will notice that the SELinux userspace will upgrade to version 2.4 (release candidate 5 for now). This upgrade comes with a manual step that needs to be performed …

Showing return code in PS1

If you do daily management on Unix/Linux systems, then checking the return code of a command is something you'll do often. If you do SELinux development, you might not even notice that a command has failed without checking its return code, as policies might prevent the application from showing …

Gentoo Hardened august meeting

Another month has passed, so we had another online meeting to discuss the progress within Gentoo Hardened.

Lead elections

The yearly lead elections within Gentoo Hardened were up again. Zorry (Magnus Granberg) was re-elected as project lead so doesn't need to update his LinkedIn profile yet ;-)

Toolchain

blueness (Anthony G …

Switching to new laptop

I'm slowly but surely starting to switch to a new laptop. The old one hasn't completely died (yet) but given that I had to force its CPU frequency at the lowest Hz or the CPU would burn (and the system suddenly shut down due to heat issues), and that the …

Some changes under the hood

In between conferences, technical writing jobs and traveling, we did a few changes under the hood for SELinux in Gentoo.

First of all, new policies are bumped and also stabilized (2.20130411-r3 is now stable, 2.20130411-r5 is \~arch). These have a few updates (mergers from upstream), and r5 also …

Gentoo Hardened July meeting

I failed to show up myself (I fell asleep - kids are fun, but deplete your energy source quickly), but that shouldn't prevent me from making a nice write-up of the meeting.

Toolchain

GCC 4.9 gives some issues with kernel compilations and other components. Lately, breakage has been reported with …