From the IPcop website: Some changes have been introduced since rc2 related to NTP (fix ntp user with ntpdate), Squid upgraded to 2.6.STABLE17, timezone upgraded to tzdata2007i, Snort rules permissions again.

The update has been split into two part to accommodate free space limitation related to the numerous new packages added since the recent releases. A way to recover some free spaces has been created, allowing to select one of the two ‘kernel type’ installed. Most of the work has been made on bug fixes and update interface changes.

You can read the rest of the release notes here for more information.

From the release notes:

“The improvements in GNOME 2.20 include: Improved support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; convenient new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; enhanced browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; efficient power management and incredibly accurate laptop battery monitoring. Developers receive more help with application development thanks to a new version of the GTK+ toolkit, improved tools, and a great new documentation web site.”

From the IPcop website: This release fixes some bugs, update glibc, Net::DNS and capi for security reasons. Upgraded packages are squid, snort, e100, r1000… As usual, this version can be installed as an update from previous v1.4.x versions or with a ready-to-go ISO or usb bootable images or pxe for a fresh install. Files are available on ‘IPCop’ package at Sourceforge.

Read the rest of the release for further details.

The GNU GPL is the most widely used free software license worldwide: almost three quarters of all free software packages are distributed under this license. Version 1 of the GPL was released in 1989, and version 2 in 1991. revision of the GPL for version 3 began In January 2006.

I am assuming that since you are trying to create a grub splash image that you are using some variation of Linux and have the gimp & gzip installed.

Creating The Grub Splash Image

To begin you need to either create your image or find one you like. Once you have an image, open it up with the gimp and resize it to 640 x 480. To do this go to Image > Scale Image and then enter the width 640px & the height 480px and then click scale. now you need to reduce the amount of colors used in the image to 14 to do this select Image > Mode > Indexed Colours and then where it shows maximum number of colors set this to 14 and click ‘ok’.

Now save the image with an .xpm extension by selecting File > Save As then entering the name of you new grub splash image followed by .xpm (mygrubsplash.xpm) or you can select the file extension from a list by selecting File > Save As then clicking Select File (Type By Extension) then just click save, but it is probably easier just to type the .xpm extension after you enter the file name.

The last step to creating your custom grub splash image is to gzip it. Just as long as you remembered where you saved it, if you are using Gnome (not sure about KDE) you should be able to right click on your new .xpm file and select create archive then select the .gz file extension from the drop down list and click create. If for some reason you are unable to do this, then you can do it all through the command line as a normal user, just make sure to change to the directory that your splash image resides in first.

$ cd /foo/bar/
$ gzip -c mygrubsplash.xpm > mygrubsplash.xpm.gz

Installing The Grub Splash Image

Now you can install it. All you have to do is move your .xpm.gz file to /boot/grub/, You can do this through the command line but you must be root, so either su - or sudo like so:

# su -
# mv /foo/mygrubsplash.xpm.gz /boot/grub/

or

# sudo mv /foo/mygrubsplash.xpm.gz /boot/grub/

You then have to edit a file called menu.lst which is located in the same directory /boot/grub/menu.lst and adding this line: splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/mygrubsplash.xpm.gz to it where mygrubsplash is the name of your.xpm.gz file. first check to see if this is already present in your menu.lst file, if so just edit the name of the .xpm.gz bit to match your own.

I’m using Vi to edit the file, because it’s pretty much the default text editor for most Linux distros. Feel free to use a text editor you feel more familiar with.

# vi /boot/grub/menu.lst
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/mygrubsplash.xpm.gz

Quick tip if you have never used Vi to edit with, you must first press ‘i‘ to start editing and when you are done editing press the escape key in order to save the changes to the document you must press ‘:wq‘ that will save changes and exit the document. if you just want to quit without saving the changes press ‘:q!‘.

Also you may want to change the default background colour and text colour to better suite your new splash image. You can do so by adding the text below to your menu.lst.

foreground = ffffff
background = 000000

If you are using Debian like me, you may want to comment out the default colours first before you add your custom colours. You can comment them out using the hash ‘#’ symbol.

#Pretty colours
#color cyan/blue white/blue

Hopefully if you followed everything correctly you should have your custom grub splash installed and ready. You should now be able to view it the next time you reboot. Have fun .

Upgrading:

Gaming:

Created by the guys at truenuff.com way before Novell did their version these have to be some of the funniest ‘I’m a Mac’ spoofs ever. They have recently made many more new additions since the two Spoofs above, which are around a year old now, You can check out the rest at http://tv.truenuff.com/mac/

Installation of DHCP is fairly straight forward. Simply install the DHCP server from your nearest repository.

# yum install dhcp

After the installation script has finished running, the configuration file will need to be edited to suit the needs of your enviroment.

# vi /etc/dhcpd.conf

An example of standard DHCP configuration file follows.

ddns-update-style none;
deny bootp;
authoritstive;
subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0
{
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name "example.com";
option routers 192.168.0.1;
option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.10;
option netbios-name-servers 192.168.0.2;
range dynamic-bootp 192.168.0.60 192.168.0.120;
default-lease-time 31200;
max-lease-time 62400;
}

OK lets explain the above DHCP configuration. Any machine that connects to the server will recive a dynamic IP address between 192.168.0.60 and 192.168.0.120 and a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

The server will dish out the default DNS servers for the client of 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.10 along with the default domain name suffix of example.com. The configuration also specifies a default WINS server of 192.168.0.2. This is useful if there are Microsoft Windows clients connecting to a Samba Server on the network.

The default lease time is 520 minutes (counted in seconds) and the maximum lease time is set to 1040 minutes (again, counted in seconds).

Once the DHCP server has been configured, and the file saved, it can be started by executing:

# /etc/init.d/dhcp start

Make sure that once everything is working correctly, and you are satisfied with the configuration, you make sure the dhcpd init script is set to start on system reboot.

# chkconfig dhcpd on

These updated software versions: Apache-2.2, php-5.1.6, kernel-2.6.18, Gnome-2.16, KDE-3.5, OpenOffice.org-2.0, Evolution-2.8, Firefox-1.5, Thunderbird-1.5, MySQL-5.0, PostgreSQL-8.1.

Better desktop support with compiz and AIGLX.

Download: i386 | x86_64

Avant Window Navigator (Awn) is a dock-like bar for Gnome which sits at the bottom of the screen (in all its composited-goodness) tracking open windows.

There’s a lot more information on the project site http://code.google.com/p/avant-window-navigator/ & some good video footage of it in action on the developers blog.

Awn is currently under development, however you can try it out by either downloading the latest release from the downloads page or you could try downloading from the SVN.

The code name for the next major Debian release after etch is lenny.