techiehenry

It’s been five days since I installed it on my machine.

So far, so good…

I have yet to explore every nook and cranny to give a full-blown review, but as far as the user experience is concerned, this is one step up from Edgy Eft.

I’ve been waiting since this morning on the Ubuntu webpage for the official announcement — that the final release for the latest Ubuntu Linux is available for download. It’s past 10 o’clock in the evening here in Manila when I saw that the ISO images, as well as the repositories for those who want to do an apt-get dist-upgrade, are all ready.

At the moment I’m downloading the ISO image from the Japan mirror site, so that I can send copies of the CD to friends who wanted to try Ubuntu on their machines as well. A lot of other people may have been downloading as well, I’m getting an average of 24K/s download speed, very far from my usual 80+K/s.

A lot of good things have been included in this release, as noted in their release notes.

You can get Feisty Fawn by visiting the Ubuntu website. The site isn’t in its usual layout at the time I’m writing this post, as what’s being displayed right now is a list of mirrors where you can download the latest release.

Go ahead, download it and try it!

I’ll be posting my thoughts about it once I get it installed.

Found out about this while lurking at Distrowatch for updates to my favorite Linux distributions.

“After 21 months of constant development” Debian 4.0, named Etch, has been released. Quite long for an open source project, and roughly 4 months late for its intended December 2006 release.

I don’t know whether to feel excited by this development for Debian or not. Talk about problems within the group were spreading across the internet for a time, its founder Ian Murdoch is now joining Sun, and several Linux distributions based on it are getting really popular (even a local distribution joined the fray).

At least what’s still good about this distribution is that all packages contained in it is free. Free as in freedom, not free as beer, mind you.

This dawned on me just a while ago.

After installing Kubuntu 7.04 Beta on my machine and trying to reconfigure Enigmail for Mozilla Thunderbird. I wasn’t really noticing that I made a big mistake because I can get my public key. However, when I tried to encrpt messages, that’s where I started to realize that I cannot recover the private (or secret) key when it’s lost!

Retracing my steps, I lost it when I reformatted a partition during Kubuntu’s install process. Apparently the secret key is stored in my home directory, on one of the database files gpg made during key generation.

So I am now going through the inconvenience of creating another set of keys, uploading the public key to the keyservers, and then reconfiguring my Launchpad account to accept the new key and cancel the old one. Apparently I cannot create a revocation certificate for the old public key since it needs the private key to create it, so I just have to inform everyone I know that I changed my public key.

(I will not discuss the process of creating keypairs and uploading them to the keyservers anymore, since a lot of utility programs can do this.)

How do we get along with creating a backup set of keypairs?

1. Use gpg --list-keys to get a list of the keys stored on the machine. To store this to a file, redirect the output to your desired path and filename:

gpg --list-keys > /path/to/<filename>

2. Take note of the ID of the key you want to backup. The output file in the previous operation should contain a line where it shows something like: pub 1024D/1234ABCD... The hexadecimal code following the slash character is the corresponding key ID, 1234ABCD in our example. We will use this value to indicate the key ID in the succeeding steps.
3. Get the public key using the following command. You should be able to view the contents of the public key when you open the specified file:

gpg -ao /path/to/<filename> --export 1234ABCD

4. Get the private key using the following command. You should be able to view the contents of the private key when you open the specified file:

gpg -ao /path/to/<filename> --export-secret-keys 1234ABCD

5. Create a revocation key using the following command. You need this in case you want to revoke the corresponding public key:

gpg -ao /path/to/<filename> --gen-revoke 1234ABCD

I make sure that these files are placed somewhere else on my hard disk (and removable media), to avoid not being able to restore them after a reformat.

To restore the keys, we need to do the following:

gpg --import /path/to/<filename>

Now we don’t have any reason to say that we lost our keys again, do we?

As I’m writing this post I’m downloading an ISO image of the latest in the testing series for the upcoming release of Kubuntu Linux, which was made available just a few hours ago.

It is labeled 7.04 LTS, which indicates that the final release will be on April 2007, and it will be shipped with Long-Term Support. LTS would mean that support for the software will be provided for a 3-year period for desktops and 5 years for servers.

Prospective testers and early adopters are encouraged to try out the current beta release, which can be obtained from here. Instructions on how to provide feedback and report bugs can also be found in the same link.