cygwin's find

One problem I've found with putting cygwin\bin on the path is that it occasionally overlaps with some other command on the path. I had this happened with find and didn't realize that Windows had its own find command that was taking precedence, until I found this.

It seems that the only way around the problem is to fully qualify the path to cygwin\bin\find, which isn't a terrible solution, just inconvenient. At least now I can use a proper UNIX find on Windows.

Linux Kernel 2.6 local root exploit

I tried out this exploit in a few places. Most other networks I'm on are using something like Red Hat, as opposed to something like Ubuntu or Debian.

I was definitely able to break into a few Ubuntu boxes using it. Fortunately you can only get in through a user account on the system, so you really only need to fear the users already on your system, unless someone happens to compromise one of those user accounts. Still, I consider this an egregious exploit, and I'm surprised it went as long as it did without someone fixing vmsplice.

Ubuntu accessing folders and files

I click on mp3 files and the orange music note icon turns into a white page with a fold on it. The file won't open.

If I click on a folder it says:

The folder contents could not be displayed. Sorry, couldn't display all the contents of "foldername".

It should be noted that this happened soon after I had problems with Totem Movie Player, which doesn't like it when I try to change the position in a music file.

It's hard to say which piece of software is at fault.

Update: I later decided to search around and found out this is actually a problem with nautilus

Ubuntu x11 problems

Ubuntu had gone into screen saver mode. I moved my mouse, but instead of ending the screen saver, the screen saver froze. However, I could see my mouse pointer, and move it around. There was no response to any keyboard or mouse input, so I did a hard restart.

When the login screen came up, I tried my username and password. I accidentally put in the wrong password and the screen froze, so I tried CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE. Now I have a screen that says:

The greeter application appears to be crashing. Attempting to use a different one.

I pushed ok a few times and finally it got out.

Django

I installed Python 2.5.1, a pretty painless process other than uninstalling the Cygwin version of Python.

Then I downloaded the MySQLdb package, the Python interface to MySQL. Also painless.

Next I downloaded Django-0.96.1 and ran setup.py install and I got this error:

C:\Django-0.96.1>setup.py install
running install
running build
running build_py
error: package directory '\django' does not exist

People have reported this multiple times to the Django Project, and they don't consider it a bug.

I don't know what else I would call it when an official release has an installation script that doesn't even work. If it was me, I would have file the problem as a deployment bug, added the solution to the bug, and pointed any further questions there.

Regardless, I did downloaded the dev version from svn and copied over MANIFEST.in and setup.py, and the installation worked.

So far I've made it through the first tutorial. The console mode is interesting but I don't know how likely I would be to use that. It seems like a lot of work to learn all those new commands when I already know sql.

The model creation system seems nice, I like how it shows me the actual SQL it's using before it executes the command.

Cygwin deployment

Let me preface this by saying Cygwin is an excellent tool that has made my Windows slavery tolerable. The ability to have a full UNIX command line in Windows with very few bugs makes my life way better.

The one place where I have problems with Cygwin is deployment. The installation program is very clever in that it lets you download a small executable, and then select which modules you want to install, not forcing you to download all the libraries. The problem comes in when you want to reinstall or uninstall a module.

Today I needed to uninstall the Python inside Cygwin, as I was installing the Windows binary version of Python. I went to uninstall Python, and Cygwin tells me there's a dependency from some other module. Fine, I find the module, and I say I want to uninstall that too. I run the uninstall process, and Python is still there!

I try to uninstall Python again, still nothing. Finally on the third try it uninstalls.

I don't know what causes this, but I've had similar problems in the past. It's even worse when you have a really old version of Cygwin, and you try to install a bunch of new libraries. I had to deal with that a few years ago, and that was a nightmare.

It's definitely improved in those few years, but it still has its problems.

At least it's better than Windows Powershell, ug.