Category: linux

Mailman chronicles

ok, so you know mailman? But how to fetch a subscribers list without using the admin interface?

Mailman does not use a database nor does it store a list’s subscribers in some plain text format. So how to start? I searched the mailman mailinglist archive and didn’t find a clue. I looked a bit at the code, but it’s hard to get started if you’re not into python. 😉
By searching the mailman dir I found a .pck file.. It’s a pickled file. 🙂 This seems to be the Python term for serialization. So I found a mailinglist in its pickled state which seemed to contain the subscribers. Mmm, okay, let’s download the mailman source and find the usages of the pickle library.. Got it! 🙂 So hooray, fire up that python eclipse plugin that I’ve been eager to try out on a real piece of code, open up those nice python references and let’s unpickle!

Ehrm.. wait a second.. Apparently, downloading the source code can reveal other interesting parts of mailman. Like, for example, a script that lists all subscribers? =)

Another lesson learned with open source projects: FIRST download the source, before you try to hack it in yourself 😉 Okay, looking at the mailman installation dir would have been sufficient too, but who likes to search some custom installed linux distro over some crappy remote connection? 😉

There is still one step to do: how to get that script’s output on a webpage? One could try cgi or php for example. I looked at how mailman does it, but I guess it uses some precompiled ‘trusted’ executables for that hooked up to apache. After writing a php script, I realised it wouldn’t run on a normal user account, d’oh 🙂
The problem is not the mailman script itself, but the mailman databases it tries to open. The pickled mailing lists are only readable for users in the mailman group. I didn’t want to open a security hole (everyone has already enough spam), so I set up a cron job which executes the mailman script and puts the output readable to the normal user. It is not as cool as having the actual data, but having it on a daily basis is sufficient.

openSUSE 10.1 reloaded!

(open)SUSE is a wonderful distro, but with its latest release, 10.1, there definitely was something wrong. In trying to overhaul the whole packaging/updating system, they messed up pretty bad. I reinstalled my 10.1 about 5 times so far, and am still not satisfied 😉 The updating process is simply a pain the ….. back.

However, suse fans all over the world, please rejoice! as the openSUSE team has rereleased a fully patched 10.1! 🙂 openSUSE team, I love you! 🙂 I am really happy the suse team bravely admitted that this updating issue was a major showstopper and that they did something about it!

thanks David for reporting this important news so fast 😉

wine copy protection

When reading through the WineConf 2006 Summary , I was really excited to read that there finally could potentially be some progress in the area of supporting copy protection schemes.. I quote:

As far as 1.0 goes, […] copy protection would be really nice to get in the tree and Ivan Leo Puoti reiterated that he had patches available. Alexandre responded that there are some critical parts of the design that need to be fleshed out because “the Wine maintainer is a pain in the ass.”

[…]

I overheard a conversation between Ivan and Alexandre about copy protection that basically laid out a roadmap for getting it into Wine. There’s quite a bit of work involved since Alexandre would like to see a services.exe created that can be used to load the Safedisc drivers. In turn, that means there needs to be some communication with it, most likely via RPC, and that will require quite a bit of interface design.

Why do I care? 🙂 I believe it’s one of the main showstoppers for running windows games on linux. Okay, there’s always a lot of work on the DirectX emulation and stuff, but there are a lot of people able to help there. Supporting the ‘dark routines’ or intricacies of windows, which copy protection schemes rely on, seems like a lot more difficult , so less people commit themselves..

I don’t buy many games, but I do own Trackmania Sunrise, which I think is a marvelous game, yet simple in design. I believe it would run pretty well in wine, but right now it’s impossible due to the starforce protection… which I find a real pity! It is even more a pity when you realise the Trackmania Nations edition is even a free game but still has the copy protection applied!
So the day Wine will support Trackmania, I’ll be a happy linux gamer 😉 Please vote! 😉

KDE apps

ehrm, today I got the silly idea to run through all kde apps releases at kde-apps.org released in 2006… There were more than I anticipated! 😉 (around 850)

A few weeks ago, I started to compile a list of linux alternatives for all important windows applications I use in daily routine. Since KDE is my favorite desktop environment, kde-apps.org was a nice source of information. Most of the apps I’ve already heard of, but it was just a matter of writing it down once, in order not to forget and possibly be useful to migrating people.
Since I’m on windows right now, I’ll wait to publish the list until I have verified and tested all apps. Since there are some new ones, their quality still has to be proven. 😉 Also I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to only post these I finally actually use in the end. 🙂 but that would delay the whole thing a lot, since this can only be decided after a lot of testing — dilemma.. 😉

A few years ago, I tried to make a similar list and concluded I just wasn’t ready for linux due to the lack of a lot of GUI tools I’m used to in windows. Today, I’m pleased to see the situation has a lot changed! The only programs left I had trouble to find alternatives for, were TCPview and filemon, 2 monitoring tools for network connections and file access respectively. Still, I found an interesting blog post about network connection monitoring. So I might wanna try something out myself. 😉
As far as file monitoring is concerned, the case seems a bit harder, but not impossible. 😉