Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Update: "Testing stuff with QEMU"-articles published so far:

• Part 3: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
• Part 2: MenuetOS, a tiny OS written in 100% assembly language
• Part 1: SELinux support in Debian unstable

Here's a quick HOWTO to get you started with the QEMU emulator, the Debian installer (etch beta 3), and SELinux. If you execute the following steps you'll be left with an SELinux-enabled Debian unstable QEMU image, but not with a complete working and perfectly configured SELinux system. A more detailed article about SELinux will probably follow...

Basic Debian unstable install in QEMU:

1. Install QEMU:
   apt-get install qemu
2. Download the latest Debian etch installer ISO image (etch beta 3, currently):
   wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/etch_di_beta3/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-binary-1.iso
3. Create a QEMU image which will hold the Debian installation:
   qemu-img create -f qcow /path/to/debian.img 5000M
4. Boot directly from the ISO image and install Debian into the QEMU image (I won't go into the details of the installation itself; Wolfang Lonien has nice HOWTOs for that: part 1, part 2, video):
   qemu -hda /path/to/debian.img -boot d -cdrom debian-testing-i386-binary-1.iso
5. After the installation is done, configure the system, tweak /etc/apt/sources.list if needed, and then dist-upgrade to the latest stuff:
   apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
6. That's about it for the basic Debian install, you can now shutdown the OS and QEMU (type "halt" in the emulated Debian, wait for the shutdown to complete, press CTRL+ALT+2 to switch to the QEMU console, and type "quit").

Creating a QEMU overlay image:

QEMU has a nice feature called overlay images which allows you to "clone" an image, where the new (overlay) image will only store the "diffs" to the original one, thus saving lots of space. This also allows you to remove the overlay image at any time and restart from the original image (which is nice for testing stuff which may break).

1. Create an overlay image based on the previously installed Debian image:
   qemu-img create -b /path/to/debian.img -f qcow /path/to/debian_selinux_overlay.img
2. Now boot into the new overlay image:
   qemu -hda /path/to/debian_selinux_overlay.img

Basic SELinux setup:

1. SELinux wants to label all the files on your system (all inodes actually), so your filesystem(s) need the so-called extended attributes (xattr) and "security labels" (both are kernel options) which most modern file systems now support. For ext3 (for example) you need these config options:
CONFIG_EXT3_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_SECURITY=y
Luckily the Debian kernels are xattr-enabled by default so we don't have to do anything at all here.

2. Install the basic SELinux packages and the source package of the SELinux reference policy:
   apt-get install checkpolicy policycoreutils selinux-policy-refpolicy-src
3. I noticed a bug in the current Debian packages (the setfiles utility is in the wrong place, see #384850), but there's a simple workaround:
   ln -s /sbin/setfiles /usr/sbin/setfiles
4. Now we can (re-)label the file system:
   cd /etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/policy
make relabel
   This will build the reference policy from source and relabel your file system (this will take a while).
   There might be some warnings (and maybe you'll notice further bugs), but they seem not to be critical.
5. We can now (almost) enable SELinux, but before we can reboot we need to work around another bug (#384852), otherwise SELinux will not be enabled when we reboot:
   ln -s /etc/selinux/refpolicy/src /etc/selinux/targeted
6. Now reboot the emulated Debian system, and at the GRUB console add the kernel option selinux=1 to enable SELinux in the kernel (press "e" to edit the boot options).
7. You'll get tons of SELinux log messages while the system boots, that's normal at this point, don't worry.
   Then you can type "sestatus", which should print some information on the running SELinux system. If it says "SELinux status: disabled" something went wrong.

Congratulations! You now have a QEMU image with minimal SELinux support and you can start playing with it, tweaking the policy, finding and reporting bugs, reading tons of documentation on how SELinux actually works etc. etc.

As SELinux is (half?) a release-goal for Debian etch, it would be nice if many people could test it before the release, and this is one method to do so without breaking your production systems.

Update 2006-08-28: You don't really need user_xattr support for SELinux, only xattr support (for security.selinux xattrs) for the filesystem you use, which is available per default in Debian kernels (thanks Russell Coker).

OK, so Goole has finally released a first version of Google Earth for Linux (beta, of course).

Well, maybe this time they really mean it when they say "beta"...

Here's some quick observations:

• Of course, it's not open source, you basically get a bunch of *.so files and an executable.
• It uses a bunch of open source software packages, though, e.g. libcurl, OpenSSL, libjpeg, libPNG, libtiff, libmng, zlib, Expat XML Parser, FreeImage, and a bunch of other things. All the licenses of those projects are contained in a README, though.
• The installer seems to be (based on) the Loki installer, at least a ~/.loki directory is created with some stuff in it.
• The maps cache, and some other files are stored in ~/.googleearth.
• The ~/.googleearth/crashlogs directory contains log files which are generated when the application crashes, and sent to Google upon the next restart of the application automatically. The README says that you should basically chmod 000 ~/.googleearth/crashlogs if you don't want that. They say these files don't contain personal information. I haven't seen one yet (didn't crash, yet), so I cannot tell if that's true.
• The EULA says that Google Earth will phone home (they call it "check for available updates to the Software"), and that you automatically agree to that when you use it: "By installing the Software, you agree to automatically request and receive Updates".
• When I start Google Earth, I get a popup window which tells me to install Bitstream Vera Sans fonts or things might look strange. No idea which fonts extactly they mean, I've got the Debian packages ttf-bitstream-vera, and ttf-dejavu, but the warning still appears.
• After Google Earth connects to the server(s) I get to see something resembling a globe, but not really what I (or Google possibly) expected. There's simply no textures for anything, I just see (broken) wireframes (see screenshot), but that's about it.

I'll have to play around with it a bit more, maybe it's an issue with the NVIDIA drivers or something. But as I don't have the source I can basically just make stupid guesses...

(via Golem, and a bunch of other sites)