Re: Fwd: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Umit 0.8.2-testing release

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 01:56:42PM -0300, Adriano Monteiro wrote:
> > I downloaded umit-0.8.2.tar.bz2 and was glad to see that it was only
> > 971K.  I was also pleased to see a README file in the tarball giving
> > installation instructions.
>
> I can considerably reduce this size if I make specific packages for
> umit (like a deb or rpm), by removing some unused icons (in a Linux
> box with PyGTK 2.6 or higher Umit doesn't use the png files).

That may be useful at some point (and for reasons beyond size), but
971K is a perfectly fine size for now.

> > The README has "Default (source) Installation" which involves running
> > umit.pyw and "GNU/Linux Installation" which involves running setup.py.
> > I first tried running umit.py.  It didn't have the execute bit set and
> > so I had to chmod 755 it first.  But even after that, umit.py failed
> > with the message "ImportError: No module named pysqlite2".  Indeed I
> > don't have such a package installed on my updated Fedora Core 5 system,
> > but I do have "python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2".
>
> That's right... The import error is due to the lack of the pysqlite2
> module that is used for search purposes.

Well, Umit did run with whatever I have when I installed it with
setup.py.  I didn't try advanced search though.

> This installation process is done by the python's distutils module,
> and I don't know if you can select the installation path (but I
> believe it's possible). I'll manage to explain that on the README file

Thanks.

> Psyco is a module that speeds up Umit execution. You don't need it,
> but I recomend its use if you want to boost the application
> (http://psyco.sf.net). I'll change this error to a warning message,

Good idea.  The message "ERROR - RUNNING WITHOUT PSYCO!" looks pretty
dour.

By the way, I think the main umit script should simply be called
'umit' instead of 'umit.pyw', at least on the UNIX platform.  Or you
could just make a symlink at install time from 'umit' to 'umit.pyw'.
Users don't normally have to type extensions when running applications
from their path.  For example, /usr/bin/firefox on my system is a
shell script, but they don't call it firefox.sh.  Similarly, I should
be able to type 'umit' rather than 'umit.pyw' when I want to start it
up.

> Yes... It's surely an usability issue. I'll put there a default
> profile, and a error dialog to avoid problems.

Great.

> Well, if no dialog appeared asking if you were sure about closing the
> tab, is because the tab content is already saved, and had no changes
> on it, right?

That is a good feature.  In my case the scans were still in progress
when I accidentally closed the tabs.  Can you easily add the dialogue
for that case too?

> use those buttons. I think that because of these buttons in GTK, it's
> not possible to make it be like in firefox, unless if I create a new
> widget or reimplement it.

That's too bad.  We probably don't want to reimplement tabs, so we may
just have to live with this unless and until the GTK folks can be
pursuaded to take a more user friendly approach.

> Well... Did you tried the new compare mode? The text mode is a legacy mode now.

How does one enable that mode?  I used the "Compare results" toolbar
icon and also "File -> Compare Results" and only got the text mode.

A minor bug: The two scans tabs on my screen were named "Scan 2" and
"Scan 5", but in "Compare results" the same scans were called "Scan 1"
and "Scan 2".

> Sure! I don't know if you remember, but profile editor is fully
> customizable by the user through the profile_editor.xml and
> options.xml files (the wizard can be customized also by editing the
> wizard.xml file). In the future, I'm thinking of doing a kind of
> profile customizer to ease this task and avoid xml editing by the
> user. I wrote a tutorial some time ago on how to do that:
> http://umitproject.blogspot.com/2005/12/oh-god-dont-have-latest-nmap-options.html

I'm glad it is easily customizable!  I doubt end users will do this
often, so just letting the expert users and maintainers edit the XML
directly make be fine as long as it is clean and well documented.

> It is too large because it has the Umit dependencies embeded. Umit has
> the same code base for any platform (even for Nokia 770), so the Umit
> code has the same size as on Linux. The Umit installer that doesn't
> have those dependencies is about 1.2mb
> (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/umit/Umit-0.8.2.exe?download)

It would be great if we could reduce that somehow.  Adding 17MB of
dependencies to a 1.2MB tool is pretty substantial.

> There are something that must be improved on this installer. Umit
> doesn't have an icon yet, so the icon is very ugly and doesn't
> transmit good feelings to the user. I'm working on having a good icon
> and a better installation process for Umit to the stable release.

Sounds good.  BTW, the normal UMiT sunglass logo (
http://umit.sourceforge.net/umit_project.png ) looks fine to me.

> > seconds before the hourglass disappeared and nothing pops up.  What
> > would you like me to run to debug this?
>
> Hum... Did you installed it on c:\nmap\umit-0.8.2 ? When you click on
> it, the process hangs for a while and die without showing the poup-up?

As mentioned previously, this was a fals alarm.  I apparently just
didn't wait long enough for UMIT to start up.  I suppose the speed
relates to those tens of megabytes of dependencies.  Maybe that
loading time can be improved (or at least give some feedback, like
show the UMIT logo quickly, so the user doesn't give up).

> Sure! I'm working on making it ready for production use, and I won't
> rest until it. I think that maybe this is going to take more time than
> the SoC, but don't worry, I'll keep working on it until we get it good
> enough for end users.

Great!  It is already much better than NmapFE IMHO.

Cheers,
-F

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