Software: debputy, cloud-init, Python, LibreOffice, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 25, 2024

• Niels Thykier: debputy v0.1.21

  Earlier today, I have just released debputy version 0.1.21 to Debian unstable. In the blog post, I will highlight some of the new features.

  Package boilerplate reduction with automatic relationship substvar

  Last month, I started a discussion on rethinking how we do relationship substvars such as the ${misc:Depends}. These generally ends up being boilerplate runes in the form of Depends: ${misc:Depends}, ${shlibs:Depends} where you as the packager has to remember exactly which runes apply to your package.

• Dougie Richardson: Multipass cloud-init

  Multipass is pretty useful but what a pain this was to figure out, due to Ubuntu’s Node.js package not working with AWS-CDK.

  Multipass lets you manage VM in Ubuntu and can take cloud-init scripts as a parameter. I wanted an Ubuntu LTS instance with proprietary trap AWS CDK, which needs Node.js and python3-venv.

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 24.04 Gives ‘App Center’ a Brand New Icon

  App Center, Ubuntu’s Flutter-based replacement for the Ubuntu Software app, has picked up a redesigned app icon in the latest Ubuntu 24.04 daily builds. This isn’t the first icon change that the App Center has received in recent months. An updated build of the software installation frontend rolled out a few months back, and it unintentionally swapped the full-colour, 3D Yaru icon for a flat, 2D, solid orange icon with transparent elements. While a subsequent update fixed the issue some users say they still see the ‘wrong icon’.

• Stuart Langridge: The Matrix has you, part 2 [Ed: Dumping Microsoft's proprietary spyware]

  I’ve recently switched back from vscode to Sublime Text, which means that after all the time I spent training my fingers to type “code somefile.txt” instead of “subl somefile.txt” I now need to undo all that conditioning and go back to subl again. So I thought, hey, maybe I should dump a little shell script called code in my bin folder which admonished me in some amusing way, thus Pavlov-ing myself into learning to do it right.

  And then I thought, hey, what’d be cool is if I had that Matrix-esque “raining code” effect in the Terminal and then it was superimposed with a box saying “STOP TYPING code AND USE subl INSTEAD”, like the “SYSTEM ERROR” message at the end of the first movie.

• Didier Stevens ☛ Update: metatool.py Version 0.0.4

  metatool.py is a tool to help with the analysis of Metasploit or Cobalt Strike URLs.

• SANS ☛ Tool updates: le-hex-to-ip.py and sigs.py, (Sun, Mar 24th)

  [...] it can handle both the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses instead of my kludgy handling of the IPv6.

• dwaves.de ☛ LibreOffice “hurray” it’s libre + open source but why did it get THE SAME security problems than MS Word? #wtf?

  “execute built-in macros without warning” https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-6186 why copy bad concepts aka mistakes?