Linux

Advantages using aptitude instead of apt-get

apt-get is a command-line package handling utility while aptitude is a high-level interface to the package manager. There isn’t much difference between the two except aptitude will remove unused package dependencies automatically whereas with apt-get you have to do it manually. Neither removes dependencies as that would cause problems. Dependencies are packages that are depended […]

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Linux

Debian backports and pinning

I’m running Debian Etch because I prefer the stable Debian package tree. This is all great but the software is a little outdated compared to other distributions like Ubuntu. That is where backports come in. Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will […]

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Linux

Enable DVD playback on Ubuntu 7.10

Open a terminal window. Execute the following terminal command to install the necessary packages sudo apt-get install totem-xine libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdread3 Execute the following terminal command sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh After you have done the above excercise, insert a DVD into your drive. Totem will open and the movie will be played.

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Linux

Making /tmp non-executable

Many simple exploits that are used against machines, (via vulnerable PHP applications or local users, etc), rely upon being able to execute commands in /tmp. If this is a seperate partition or file system you can gain some protection by marking it non-executable. The common problem with this is that apt-get fails to work with […]

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Web

Install Geo::IP Perl Module on Debian Etch

This post describes how to install MaxMind Geo::IP perl module on Debian Etch. You need the GeoIP C library (that includes also the free GeoLite Country database). This is fortunately available in the Debian repositories. apt-get install libgeoip1 libgeoip-dev To install the GeoIP perl module, we need to download the perl module locally from MaxMind […]

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