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Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

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Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#231

For anyone like myself who isn't a big fan of the Unity interface, check out Ubuntu MATE[0]. The MATE desktop environment is very similar to pre-Unity Ubuntu. It seems like the final 16.04 release hasn't landed yet but I'm sure it will later today. Ubuntu MATE is also one of the derivative distros that has been granted LTS status by Canonical. [0] https://ubuntu-mate.org/

Or, though not everyone's cup of tea, I quite like Ubuntu Gnome[1], which is aggressively not retro or Unity.

1: http://ubuntugnome.org/

Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#232
post #50

Mozilla will release Firefox directly via snaps https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/21/firefox-d...

Using binaries provided by Mozilla is not a good idea (unless they do things differently with the snaps). They are not hardened in any way; ie. no PIE (rendering ASLR pretty much useless), no stack canaries, no relro, ..., making it a lot easier to exploit any given sec-related bug.

  $ hardening-check ./firefox
  ./firefox:
   Position Independent Executable: no, normal executable!
   Stack protected: no, not found!
   Fortify Source functions: no, only unprotected functions found!
   Read-only relocations: no, not found!
   Immediate binding: no, not found!
Absolutely ridiculous given the amount of vulns likely to linger in its codebase.

It should also be noted that Firefox is one of the few packages that Canonical keeps aligned with Mozilla releases (even 12.04 LTS has the latest firefox), and:

  $ hardening-check /usr/lib/firefox/firefox
  /usr/lib/firefox/firefox:
   Position Independent Executable: yes
   Stack protected: yes
   Fortify Source functions: yes (some protected functions found)
   Read-only relocations: yes
   Immediate binding: yes

Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#233
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love the part about simplifying packaging via 'snap'. Bleargh. More container bullshit, now with even less control over it by end users. Now each tiny library update (think OpenSSL security fixes) will pull hundreds of "snaps" instead of a single package… assuming the developers even realize they have to rebuild their snaps.

While I see your point, the idea that I as an end user have any real control now is absurd. All I can do is hope the people who package stuff for their distribution know what they are doing. If I want to install software that's outside the stuff that the packagers have prepared, like Firefox with correct KDE integration on Kubuntu, I am relying on a number of hard to track things working correctly together. Which teh…

> If I want to install software that's outside the stuff that the packagers have prepared, like Firefox with correct KDE integration on Kubuntu, I am relying on a number of hard to track things working correctly together. Which tehy have regularly failed to do for me in the past.

Firefox isn't that hard, all considered. KDE is necessarily hard because of how invasive that is – but no container fuckery will save you from that, because it has to be invasive to work in the first place! Either every container has to ship a full KDE, or you do it like OSX does it, and only have One Desktop To Rule Them All. (That's why Canonical and Gnome are both interested in app containers, presumably, to get rid of that filthy freedom of choice.)

> Contrast to the OSX install experience: An application is a folder which contains everything related to the application that the base system does not provide.

The difference is that OSX (and Windows) provides a lot, and you only have applications building on top of that huge, stable code base that's diligently updated by Apple (/Microsoft). OSX/Windows apps only have to keep their few third party dependencies updated.

Linux app containers have to literally ship everything outside the kernel to work, because the kernel ABI is the only stable interface in the Linux ecosystem. Everything else, up to and including the libc, varies between distributions, and versions of the same distribution, and will be incompatible. An openssl update would trigger a repackaging of every single app container. And where it doesn't, users are at risk. In contrast, without containers, I upgrade one package and the whole system is secured.

(On servers, it's a bit more nuanced, because here operations is in charge or repackaging docker/lxd/nspawn containers, and can start that process whenever they want.)

> As a user I feel more in control of the process than with apt.

That's more because apt is bullshit, even by Linux standards. pacman and other package managers not made in the 1990s are much nicer to deal with.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#234
post #136
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use 14.04, you usually upgrade at the first point release to 16.04.01, not now at 16.04.00. Only 15.10 will immediately suggest an update. Is this outdated or not applicable to servers?

That is correct, upgrades are not enabled between LTS releases at this time, also for servers AFAIK. Either way, personally I would never upgrade a server in place these days. Treat your servers like cattle not pets: Rebuild from new base image, validate, put into LB/proxy, terminate old stack.

This. Our upgrade path was changing a variable in our packer config.

Literally the easiest upgrade ever.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#235

For anyone like myself who isn't a big fan of the Unity interface, check out Ubuntu MATE[0]. The MATE desktop environment is very similar to pre-Unity Ubuntu. It seems like the final 16.04 release hasn't landed yet but I'm sure it will later today. Ubuntu MATE is also one of the derivative distros that has been granted LTS status by Canonical. [0] https://ubuntu-mate.org/

I like some of the features of their window managers but I don't think Xubuntu and MATE have much support for HiDPI yet and, in general, seem to lag behind stock Ubuntu.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#236
post #19

For anyone packaging software on Linux, this now means every major distro - Debian, RHEL/CentOS, Arch and now Ubuntu - supports .service files. No need for bash scripts, custom watchdog and daemonise tools, etc.

> No need for bash scripts Friends don't let friends write shell scripts targeting bash. For context: Bash is not available|installed everywhere, and has some inter-version weirdness. Write clean, posix-compliant shell scripts (i.e. target /bin/sh commonly referred to as bourne shell) and you're in a much better position. On Debian your script will be run by Dash, on OS X it will be run by Bash, on Ubuntu or RedHat i…

Depends on the use case. There are cases where I don't know how I'd live without arrays/associative arrays. Performant regex matching is also quite nice.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#237

For anyone like myself who isn't a big fan of the Unity interface, check out Ubuntu MATE[0]. The MATE desktop environment is very similar to pre-Unity Ubuntu. It seems like the final 16.04 release hasn't landed yet but I'm sure it will later today. Ubuntu MATE is also one of the derivative distros that has been granted LTS status by Canonical. [0] https://ubuntu-mate.org/

I'm a small breed of people that actually really like Unity. I used to use Awesome WM and tiling WMs for pretty much my whole Linux 'career' but now I quite like how my desktop looks like with Unity. It's my favorite DE at the moment.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/nvsf24E

Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#238
post #124
post #104

They should just stop publishing MD5SUMS for new releases. By now, everybody should have gotten the word that MD5 has been broken. The security of the MD5 has been severely compromised, with its weaknesses having been exploited in the field, most infamously by the Flame malware in 2012. The CMU Software Engineering Institute considers MD5 essentially "cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use". [1] [1]…

You're conflating collision attacks like the Flame malware with a preimage attack that would be necessary to produce a malicious Ubuntu release with the same MD5SUM. I.e. what's "broken" about MD5 is if you have a lot of CPU time and I allow you to give me two unrelated blobs, you can craft those blobs to have the same MD5 sum. What's not "broken" (beyond a theoretical 2^123.4 attack) with MD5 and not broken at all f…

What? Pretty sure you're wrong.

Yes, MD5 preimage resistance is not broken (to a reasonable degree).

If you have the Ubuntu 16.04 ISO (you do), and if you have its hash, the attack to craft a different ISO with the same hash is a collision attack.

A preimage attack is if you had some hash y where y=H(x) where x is some file/whatever, and trying to find out possible values of u that give rise to y when you do H(u), without the knowledge of x.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#239
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using the sputnik "developer edition" or the standard retail version of the XPS 13?

The Sputnik version. That indeed reminds me I swapped the wifi card for an Intel one. Because they are better supported and it was cheap. The original one was definitely working though.

I was just about to ask what wifi card you had working there. It took me quite a while to get my xps13's broadcom card working with 15.10 and I'm not sure I even remember how I did it. It's putting me off upgrading.

Re: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

#240
post #50

Mozilla will release Firefox directly via snaps https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/21/firefox-d...

What is the significance of this? Doesn't Canonical already update the package (lagging a day or two behind the official release) for the lifetime of the Ubuntu version?

Firefox is going to be used as a testbed for snap packages.
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