Monthly Archives: August 2011

Arkose 1.3.1 released

Last week I was in Austin, TX where a bunch of people with interest in getting containers working on Linux were meeting for the Oneiric Container Sprint.
We all had a very productive week with a lot of work being done on LXC, the kernel namespaces and Arkose.

Right before the Ubuntu Feature Freeze last Thursday, I released Arkose 1.3 brining most of the features I wanted for Ubuntu 11.10.

Here’s a brief list of the new stuff Arkose can do:

  • All the UIs and CLIs now support translation with an initial (rough) french translation already available.
  • DBUS filtering is now included in Arkose and available through the wrapper. The gedit example profile is using it.
  • It’s now possible to temporarily modify a wrapper profile before starting it.
  • Device support has been changed to no longer be limited to /dev/video* devices.

Some bugs have also been fixed, most of them in Arkose 1.3.1 (released yesterday):

  • Make the Global Menu integration (dbusmenu) work with Ubuntu Oneiric
  • Update the test suite
  • Fix arkose-cli’s help to be a lot more accurate
  • Restrict LXC’s configuration to the bare minimal
  • Use point-to-point network configuration in filtered mode (rather than a /30 per container)
  • Make sure everything in the container gets properly killed on exit
  • Fix Arkose to handle command line parameters properly (instead of just ignoring them)

That’s all available in current Ubuntu Oneiric as well as in the arkose stable PPA for Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04.

Sadly one feature didn’t make it in time for Feature Freeze, that’s the advanced firewalling in filtered network mode. I’ll probably be working on it on the side and push it to a 1.4 branch that’ll be used for Oneiric+1.

I’ll now mostly be focusing on bugfixes for the remaining of the cycle and polishing some of the existing features. So please, test it and file bugs!

If you want to help with the translation effort, you can go translate Arkose on Launchpad or just send me a .po and I’ll do it for you.

For these who want to run the current upstream code, get the bzr branch:
bzr branch lp:arkose

Posted in Arkose, Canonical voices, Conferences, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Leave a comment

Introducing Arkose’s protocol aware DBUS filtering proxy

As part of my work on Arkose, trying to make desktop application containing easy, I’ve been working over the last month or so on a protocol aware DBUS proxy.

I based my work on Alban’s DBUS proxy for N900, made the proxy work with multiple connections and added support for logging and filtering of the connections.

The result is profiles like this one:
outgoing;org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties;/com/canonical/menu/*;PropertiesChanged
outgoing;com.canonical.AppMenu.Registrar;/com/canonical/AppMenu/Registrar;RegisterWindow
outgoing;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;LayoutUpdated
outgoing;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;ItemsPropertiesUpdated

incoming;org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties;/com/canonical/menu/*;GetAll
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;GetLayout
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;Event
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;AboutToShow
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;GetGroupProperties

Which in this case will allow the applications using the proxy to access the global menu DBUS API and receive events from the Global menu, but not for example dump your gnome keyring.

Here’s the output you’d get when running gedit using the above profile:
http://www.stgraber.org/download/gedit-dbus-arkose.log

Now that the proxy works as expected, I’ll work on integrating it into Arkose itself and expose it in the wrapper GUI.

To try the proxy, you can grab Arkose’s trunk branch at:
bzr branch lp:~arkose-devel/arkose/trunk/

Build the proxy (you’ll need glib and dbus) and then run it with:
./proxy /tmp/arkose_dbus profiles/dbusmenu.conf

Starting clients like this:
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/arkose_dbus gedit

Posted in Arkose, Canonical voices, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 6 Comments