Simplicity is a form of art...

Gentoo Handbooks almost moved to wiki
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Fri 12 December 2014

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
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Wed 10 December 2014

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
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 02 November 2014

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 …

Using multiple priorities with modules
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Fri 31 October 2014

One of the new features of the 2.4 SELinux userspace is support for module priorities. The idea is that distributions and administrators can override a (pre)loaded SELinux policy module with another module without removing the previous module. This lower-version module will remain in the store, but will not …

Migrating to SELinux userspace 2.4 (small warning for users)
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Thu 30 October 2014

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 …

Lots of new challenges ahead
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 19 October 2014

I've been pretty busy lately, albeit behind the corners, which leads to a lower activity within the free software communities that I'm active in. Still, I'm not planning any exit, on the contrary. Lots of ideas are just waiting for some free time to engage. So what are the challenges …

After SELinux System Administration, now the SELinux Cookbook
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Wed 24 September 2014

Almost an entire year ago (just a few days apart) I announced my first published book, called SELinux System Administration. The book covered SELinux administration commands and focuses on Linux administrators that need to interact with SELinux-enabled systems.

An important part of SELinux was only covered very briefly in the …

Showing return code in PS1
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 31 August 2014

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
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Fri 29 August 2014

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
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Tue 19 August 2014

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 …