Niels Horn's Blog

The third Beta release for LibreOffice 3.3.0 happened about a week ago, but only now I had some time to resubmit the SlackBuilds and create the packages.

As with the previous Beta2, I created the packages from the binary RPM distributions and uploaded packages for the base LibreOffice suite and for the en_GB, pt_BR and nl Language Packs.

The SlackBuilds have been submitted to SlackBuilds.org and the packages have been uploaded to my site.

Another week has passed, so it’s time for some news on nHex-Ed

The third alpha release of nHex-Ed offers several new features, bringing it close to what I had in mind for the first “real” release of this little hex editor.

The following items are new or improved:

• Completely rewritten menu routines, with shortcuts and direct-access keycodes that can be used without entering the menu itself
• Rewritten “forms” routines, with ins/del/home/end keys and “radio-button” style choice between hex/ascii or hex/decimal entries for searching and entering addresses
• Improved search routine, remembering the previous search string the way it was entered (hex or ascii)
• Improved “goto” routine, remembering preference for hex or decimal
• Added -j startup option to jump directly to a specific address in the file
• Recalculate number of columns and rows if the terminal window is resized
• Several bug fixes (thanks to all who gave feedback!), including a rare segfault and some odd behavior in Xfce Terminal

Here is a partial screenshot showing the new menu with the shortcuts and direct-access keycodes:

The new tarball is available for download from nHex-Ed’s homepage.

Version 0.4.3b of Fritzing was released already some time ago, but only now I had some time to take a look and create the new packages

The main improvements of this version are:

• much easier on the eyes, faster, and smaller files: reduced rats nests
• no more jumper wire/item confusion (got rid of the legacy ‘wires’)
• new parts:
• Netduino
• GLCD
• 9V battery
• GogoBoard
• Arduino Ethernet Shield, Digital Potentiometer, Barometric Pressure Sensor, Flex Sensor
• and many bug fixes…

Here is a simple screenshot of the new version:

As always, the updated SlackBuild script have been submitted to SlackBuilds.org and the pre-built packages for Slackware and Slackware64 are available for download on my site.

Version 0.4 of Hebe, the KDE GUI for Hercules, was released recently.

It brings the following improvements:

• New Image tool bar with actions similar to the Linux console panel
• New improved, bigger status bar with CPU selector
• If a suspend file is found, an option to resume is offered

Here is a screenshot of the new version, running the standard Hercules setup and my Slack/390 installation simultaneously:

The two virtual machines are shown as tabs and you can easily switch between them.

The updated SlackBuild script has been submitted to SlackBuild.org and pre-built versions for Slackware and Slackware64 are available on my site.

Windows XP and newer versions have the standard feature of “sharing” access to the desktop from remote computers. This is very easy to set up and no extra software is required on the computer that is sharing or the one that is accessing the desktop – as long as they are both running Windows…

I needed to access a remote Windows XP desktop, but I don’t run Windows here on my computer. I do have a netbook that came with Windows pre-installed, so I first set it up there, but I wanted access from the computer I use every day, which runs Slackware.
Enter my quest for a Linux-based solution…

1. FreeRDP

First I found FreeeRDP, a fork of the original rdesktop project, in active development. There was no SlackBuild for it, but it was straightforward enough to write one and I had it up-and-running in no time.
FreeRDP is completely command-line based – something I actually like – and after a quick look at the man-page I was able to connect to my Windows desktop typing:

xfreerdp -g <width>x<height> -u <user> -p <password> <ip-of-desktop>

And I was connected:

2. Remmina

Having a working solution was nice, but I wanted something something to connect fast without typing all the parameters. I could write a simple script or – look for a GUI.
I found a SlackBuild for Remmina, which seemed to work with FreeRDP and give a nice menu to configure all the parameters and desktops I want to connect to.

I soon found out that I needed updated versions though of Remmina and Remmina-plugins. The newest FreeRDP version (0.8.2) is no longer compatible with the versions the Remmina SlackBuilds were written for originally. Compilation of the plugins crashed completely, complaining about missing struct members and other errors, like 'RD_PEN' has no member named 'colour', 'RD_BRUSHDATA' has no member named 'colour_code', expected declaration specifiers or '...' before 'RD_HCOLOURMAP', etc., etc.
A simple version bump to Remmina-0.8.3 and Remmina-plugins-0.8.4 solved all problems though.

After building and installing it, simply start Remmina from the “Network” menu and configure your remote desktop:

Fill in the parameters and your new remote desktop will show up in the list:

Now click on the connect button and we’re there:

Remmina has some nice features, like full-screen with a floating bar, just like the Windows connection has, tabs for several concurrent remote connection, etc. What I’m missing though is some more flexible screen resolutions, so that I can mimic the exact same resolution I have on the real desktop. Well, I’ll send this suggestion to the authors and who knows, in the next release…

3. Installing it on your own system

Remmina needs libssh and libunique. You can download the SlackBuilds for these and for remmina and remmina-plugins from SlackBuilds.org and build the packages.
For freerdp, which is still in the pending queue for approval on SlackBuilds.org, you can get the SlackBuild script from my site, where you can also download pre-built packages for all these.

The beginning of this month a new version of Snort was released – 2.9.0.1. The companion Data Acquisition library (daq) was also upgraded to version 0.3.

I updated my SlackBuilds and installed the new versions on my server. I waited a bit before releasing the packages as there had been some reports on a new “Unknown record type” in Barnyard2, this time with record type 110. Read my previous posts here and here to learn more details about this problem.

For the “110″ record type the workaround is disabling the “inspect_gzip” option in the snort.conf flie, while the authors of Barnyard2 work on a new release.

For daq-0.3 and snort-2.9.0.1 I submitted the new SlackBuilds and pre-built packages for Slackware, Slackware64 and ARMedslack are available on my site.

Work continues on my little hex-editor…
Although a lot still needs to be done, I decided to release a second alpha version, as the first one has been downloaded quite a few times already.

This second test version brings:

• A “find” function (still not the way I want it, but for now it’s working)
• “Goto” to jump directly to a specific position in the file
• “Save As” option
• Some small bugfixes
• several small cosmetic changes

I’m currently rewriting the menu functions. The idea is to create something very flexible that can be used both with the ncurses interface as with gtk (yes, that’s where it will go eventually).

A tarball can be downloaded from nhexed’s homepage.
If you want to browse the sources, you can check them out on my public github page. But remember that sources from git are constantly changing, so be extra careful when using intermediate versions.

After my post about the “Unknown record type 104″ problem in Barnyard2, I received several e-mails recently about a new error that started popping up:

ERROR: Unknown record type read: 110

I had not seen this one myself, but did some quick investigating and found out that it is a new record type in Snort 2.9.0
This new record type is called “Unified2_Extra_Data” and is used for gzip and XFF data.

Barnyard2 will need to be adapted to recognize these new types and this will hopefully happen soon…

Only a few days ago I mentioned my work on nHex-Ed, the rewritten hex-editor.
I managed to get the code in a reasonable state this weekend and it is now available for download from its new homepage.

Feel free to take a look, compile it using the normal configure / make / make install sequence and tell me what you think of it!

For now it only has the basic functions that the original Hex-Ed had, with the exception of the “Find” feature, as I’m still rewriting it (I was never too happy with the way it worked…).

It already has some new features as well, as multi-level undo (up to the last 1000 changes) and it can now edit files of up to 4GB in size.

This is what it looks like:

HN_Hex-Ed

I wrote about my little Hex Editor before, but somehow this subject still comes back… It is still being downloaded several times a day (more than 2.000 downloads only this year!).

Evolution

Although I haven’t done any programming in Windows for years, and Hex-Ed has received it’s last update in 2004, I still receive requests once in a while for new features for Hex-Ed. I thought about simply transforming it in Free, Open Software, publishing the code on my site, but the code is a bit messy, since I never thought about publishing it when I originally wrote it. And the base for Hex-Ed was written decades ago…

Fresh start

So recently I started to re-write it from scratch, but using several parts of the original code (especially the “internals”, that haven’t changed for years), including comments where helpful. The difference is that this time I’ll write it as an open-source project, to be compiled with gcc. The idea is to create a portable project that can be built & run under Linux, Windows and maybe even other systems. I have lots of ideas for improvements, but too little time to realize them all.
For now I have a version in “alpha” state – here is a basic screenshot of the ncurses version:

I’ll post updates on the progress whenever I have some time