A weird tale of SELinux, Firefox and Jaunty Remix woes

Foreward
Here is an unusual story I experienced many months ago. First let me tell the reader what you are about to read is not normal. I have never heard of SELinux behaving like it did with me here, and I have used it for several years before and since this incident with no problems. (Though I have switched to using AppArmor based on recommendations from Ubuntu). I have also never had this problem since it happened.

The Story
Back on April 7th 2009, I installed Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04 KDE3 remix.

I did all the update and upgrades and grabbed all the new kernal goodness. Then I installed SELinux and rebooted. Upon reboot, I found something (SELinux I can only guess) had DESTROYED all the Japanese text in my filenames. It turned them into complete garbage and I don't know why, because this has never happened before. (I assume it did this during its scan of my hard-disks.)

In general I favor running SELinux and I don't believe this behavior is normal (especially since I have run it before and since with no more problems). I am thinking it was perhaps a problem with the package of SELinux itself from Ubuntu.

This type of file corruption would be a major catastrophe except that I am such a good person for backing files up, so I was able to recover from most of it.

Ubuntu Jaunty - No Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace for You!

So Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty has by default disabled the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace keysequence for restarting the X Server. For some advanced Linux users, this might be completely offensive. But let's remember that Ubuntu us targeting both existing Linux users in addition to newbies.

To Reverse / Fix

KDE 3.5
If you are using KDE 3.5 in Jaunty, you reverse this change to normal behavior by adding this code to your xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
 Option  "DontZap" "off"
EndSection

KDE 4
1) Install the “dontzap” package (hopefully this step can be skipped in the future):

sudo apt-get install dontzap

2) Launch “systemsettings” and select the “Display” module

3) Click on the checkbox labeled “Ctrl+Alt+Backspace restarts the xserver” and press the apply button.
After that, type in your password. You know the drill.

Thoughts
Sometimes I wonder about things like this begin cropping up in future releases. But honestly, as far as I am concerned, so long as I have the power to re-enable whatever feature was taken away, I don't see a problem here. Others may disagree, but overall I feel confident that this will be a non-issue.

Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE3.5 released!

Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE3.5 has been released! Get your ISO images here.

For some reason, the torrent never worked for me, despite fiddling with my settings quite a bit. I had to download the ISO file in the end, but that was very fast.

For more details on the release, go here.

KDE3.5 an official option for Kubuntu Jaunty

So the Kubuntu team, in their wisdom, is offering an official "remix" version of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty pre-setup to use KDE 3.5 instead of KDE4. This is pretty cool in my opinion. I know a lot of users, myself and many of my friends included, are still using KDE 3.5.

The official news posts about it is here: https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty

I like I have said before in my previous posts, I won't give KDE4 a serious try until their release of KDE4.3 scheduled for June sometime. Prior to this news, I was planning on installing Ubuntu and then throwing KDE3.5 on top. In the meanwhile, this Jaunty with KDE3.5 release saves me a bunch of work.