Proving that it’s never too early to be talking about Christmas, ReeCreate, in association with the Rotary Clubs of Lutterworth are proud to announce that we are once again managing the website and online applications for The Great Lutterworth Santa Fun Run. Now in its 4th year, the 2012 run is expected to be even bigger and better than ever, with the Rotary Clubs of Lutterworth hoping to once again smash their own records for charitable donations raised by the event’s enthusiastic “runners”.

This year’s event will be held on December 2nd and the new route map has already been approved and added to the site. After the monumental success of our online application system last year and the overwhelming number of runners opting to apply using this method, we will once again be providing online applications, which will become available nearer the event.

See you on the run!

First, we need to examine the image using parted:

$> parted 2012-06-18-wheezy-beta.img

We’ll need the offset and file system of our partition. The offset is actually the “Start” position in bytes. Put parted into “Byte” mode:

(parted) unit B

Now display the partition table:

(parted) print

In the case of the Raspberry Pi Debian Wheezy image I’m using here, the output looks like this:

Model: (file)
Disk /home/rees/Downloads/2012-06-18-wheezy-beta.img: 1939865600B
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 4194304B 62914559B 58720256B primary fat16 lba
2 62914560B 1939865599B 1876951040B primary ext4


As you can see, we have two partitions inside the image with the offsets (“Start” positions) listed above. To mount the fat16 partition, we can issue the following command:

sudo mount -t vfat -o loop,offset=4194304 2012-06-18-wheezy-beta.img /media/raspi

And to mount the ext4 partition:

sudo mount -t ext4 -o loop,offset=62914560 2012-06-18-wheezy-beta.img /media/raspi

Perfect!

Starting today, Magento users have started seeing a message regarding an important security update when logging in. This sever vulnerability in the Zend framework allows an attacker access to any file stored on a server running unpatched versions of Magento, and an official patch has been issued.

In an unfortunate oversight, the patch comes without instructions of any kind. Due to the severity of the issue we have decided to make this information available to all. These instructions apply to users running Magento community Edition on a Linux / other *nix server.

Note: These instructions include commands to download and apply the patch – downloading it in advance is not necessary.

Applying The Patch

1. Connect to your web server using SSH in the usual way.
2. Navigate to the root of your Magento site (e.g. /var/www/site_name.com/public_html/)
3. Run one of the following commands, depending on your Magento version:

Magento CE 1.4.2.0:

wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.7.0.2/CE_1.4.2.0.patch && patch -p0 -i CE_1.4.2.0.patch

Magento CE CE 1.4.0.0 – CE 1.4.1.1

wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.7.0.2/CE_1.4.0.0-1.4.1.1.patch && patch -p0 -i CE_1.4.0.0-1.4.1.1.patch

Magento CE 1.5.0.0 – CE 1.7.0.1

wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.7.0.2/CE_1.5.0.0-1.7.0.1.patch && patch -p0 -i CE_1.5.0.0-1.7.0.1.patch

The above commands may fail if you do not have the “patch” utility installed on your server. To install it, you may need to:

apt-get install patch

or:

yum install patch

Depending on the distribution.

Disclaimer: Commands in this blog post were taken from Magento’s own support forums here and are provided for information only. They have been tested and confirmed by us, however you use them at your own risk.

If you would like us to apply the patch for you, please get in touch.

Dell has announced today that it will soon begin offering an early version of its Project Sputnik 13″ ultrabook to web developers for evaluation and internal testing purposes. The upcoming system is based on the XPS13 ultrabook with tweaks designed to add features aimed at the development community, specifically for web applications designed to run in the cloud.

Existing XPS13 users can download the install image, based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and begin testing the software side of things immediately. For everyone else, the application page seeks developers from established web companies and is offering the system at a discounted price in return for their contribution. The programme will also contribute to other efforts towards offering Ubuntu Linux as an officially-supported desktop platform on future Dell systems.

Canonical has just announced the latest release of its Linux-based desktop and server operating system, Ubuntu, and it’s slightly ahead of schedule (traditionally, Ubuntu releases happen at 21:00 UTC). The latest Ubuntu, codenamed “Precise Pangolin” is an LTS or “Long Term Support” release, meaning that it will be supported with updates for 5 years from today. Recent policy changes at Canonical mean that this applies to both desktop and server deployments, and, as always, the OS and all future updates are  completely free.

So, what does Precise Pangolin bring to the table? On the user interface side there’s the excellent new HUD, and in the background there are marked improvements to performance and power management. In addition to the HUD, there have been numerous other incremental improvements to Ubuntu’s Unity desktop interface. Of course, all of the applications you’ve come to know and love have also been bumped up to their latest versions.

We’ll have to wait until 12.10 to see any major overhauls – LTS releases are traditionally more conservative and aimed at coporate users who value rock solid Linux reliability over the latest shiny toys. We’ve been testing 12.04 internally since the early betas, and as long time Linux (and of course Ubuntu) users on both the desktop and in the server room, we can confidently say that this is the best Ubuntu yet.

You can download Ubuntu 12.04 with your Torrent client (32-bit / 64-bit), or the usual way from the Ubuntu website, which unfortunately seems overloaded at the time of writing. The image can be written to a USB stick or a CD and booted up into a full-blown desktop environment without making any changes to your computer. That’s just about as good a trial as you can get.

ReeCreate are pleased to announce the launch of our latest and greatest – Myria J Creative Hair Company! Myria is a hair salon in Leicester specialising in a complete range of hair and beauty treatments. We first created the site as flat HTML and later converted it to the Concrete5 Content Management System when it was decided that CMS features would be required. We worked with local designer Little Old Me on the look-and-feel of the site.

To celebrate the launch of the website and their new salon they are giving away free gift vouchers – simply visit the website’s “Special Offers” section to claim £5 off a cut and blowdry or restyle, £10 off any colour treatment, or half off any beauty treatment when purchased with a full price hair treatment.

The site is a landmark launch for ReeCreate as it is our first experience with Concrete5, and thanks to the system’s fantastic ease of use and deployment it certainly won’t be our last!

If you’re interested in a CMS, eCommerce, or any other type of website please do get in touch.

92.242.132.15 – does that IP look familiar to you? It’s the IP used by “BT Web Address Help” (pictured above), BT’s “useful” service provided to its broadband customers when attempting to connect to something that doesn’t resolve correctly through their DNS servers.

Apart from the fact that it’s not actually very helpful, it breaks things, including Firefox’s ability to search from the address bar under certain conditions, VPNs and various other services that rely on getting a proper response when an address is unavailable.

Fortunately it’s really easy to disable – just click on this link to go to BT’s own opt-out page.

So, you’re here because you’re trying to set up Eclipse for Android development under a Linux environment and it’s throwing up the following error:

Failed to get the adb version: Cannot run program "/home/[user]/android-sdks/platform-tools/adb": java.io.IOException: error=2, No such file or directory

You’ll also find that you’ll have problems creating / opening / running Android apps. But help is at hand!

This is an error which occurs using certain combinations of packages and is dead easy to fix. Here’s the solution for Ubuntu 11.x and Mint 11 / Mint 12:

First, check that you’re running Eclipse version 3.6 (Helios) or greater. The info you need is in:

Help -> About Eclipse Platform

If so, we need to add a repository, install some packages, and reconfigure Java. It’s about 300MB worth of download in total and took about 5 minutes on our test machine. The commands are as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

You’ll then need to reconfigure Java to point it at the Sun version, rather than the OpenJDK version that’s installed by default. That’s done with the following command:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

Then simply select the java-6-sun version which should look something like the below:

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

Finally, fire up Eclipse and the “Failed to get the adb version” error should be gone!

This fix has been tested in the following:

• Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)
• Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)
• Linux Mint 11 (Katya)
• Linux Mint 12 (Lisa)

SSH is a fantastic protocol which allows an administrator to control a Unix-like (Linux in this case) server remotely using a secure, encrypted connection. It also allows use of the wonderful scp command for secure file copies.

The basic SSH command looks like this:

ssh user@remotehost

Where user is the user on the remote server and remotehost is an IP address or DNS entry which resolves to said server.

If the remote host has an SSH server running (known as sshd) and accepting connections, you’ll then be prompted for the user’s password. This may well be fine for a one-off connection, but after repeated connections to remotely administer things it will soon get old!

The solution to this is to use public key authentication – in this scenario, a secure key is generated on the client: the key comes in two parts, private and public, and by copying the public part to the remote server we can allow secure remote access from the client.

There are a few different methods, but I find that the following method is the easiest way. This post assumes that you are also running openssh on the client – a Windows command line version of openssh is available.

Prerequisites

First up you’ll need to make sure you have sshd up and running on the remote host – if the command listed above fails, you may need to install it. If you’ve made SSH connections successfully in the past you can safely skip this step.

Bring up a command line on the host (either through direct physical access to the machine or another remote method such as VNC). The following commands will install sshd.

For Debian-based distributions: (Debain, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.)
apt-get install openssh

For RedHat-based distributions: (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, SuSE, etc.)
yum install openssh

Generating The Key

First up, on the client we need to generate ourselves a key with the following command:
ssh-keygen -t rsa
(In this example, we’re using “rsa” for the key name, but you can call it anything you like)

Importing The Key

Again, from the client, here’s how to transfer the key to the remote server:
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_{dsa,rsa}.pub user@remotehost

Where remotehost is the hostname or IP address of the remote server and user is a valid user on that server. You’ll then be prompted for the user’s password (hopefully for the last time!).

…and we’re done!

Troubleshooting

One more thing to note: while 99% of Linux distributions out there should have this enabled by default, sometimes public key authentication can be disabled for security reasons. If you’re having trouble authenticating, have a look in /etc/ssh/sshd_config for the following line:

Protocol 2
PubkeyAuthentication yes

Obviously, if the line ends in “no” or is nonexistent, correct it to the above and restart sshd.

ReeCreateon

Now you can follow ReeCreate on Google+ thanks to their newly-added “Pages” service. Use the link above or to the right to follow ReeCreate!