The Ubuntu Guru

Add some secret ninja power to your Ubuntu system today with Easy Crypt. With only a right click you can open or close a ‘top secret’ file, protected by military grade encryption (AES 512-bit Whirlpool). Easy Crypt is a cute little menu which brings the power of TrueCrypt to your system tray. No terminal commands necessary.

If you produce or store any personal data on your desktop or notebook that needs privacy, you should set this up (himmm… that’s just about everyone, isn’t it?). It takes only a few minutes and just might save you from financial fraud, divorce, or getting fired. If ever your notebook is lost or home robbed, you’ll be wishing you had secured those precious files. TrueCrypt creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. The encrypted file system is cross compatible with Linux and Windows, which is advantageous for both portability, and file recovery in case of a system crash. TrueCrypt has been around for a few years, but lacked an easy to use graphical interface on Linux until recent (a slightly more complex GUI is forcefield). I tried using TrueCrypt on Ubuntu in the past, but found it annoying to be entering terminal commands several times a day to access the encrypted file. I find Easy Crypt to be a speedy, practical, and easy to use interface on a daily basis.

With the basic Easy Crypt setup, your locked files are saved as a hidden file in your user directory, located at /home/username/.easycrypt-crypt (although using the ‘expert’ mode you can choose to use a crypt saved at any location, including a usb key).

What I like about using Easy Crypt, not only is it easy to set up and use, but it’s simple to frequently make a backup copy on a CD-RW or DVD-RW on a regular basis. Just drag and drop the file. You may however wish to rename the backup file to something less descriptive than ‘.easycrypt-crypt’.

You can keep a copy of your important personal documents on CD (insurance documentation, financial spreadsheets, and so on) at another location than your home, in case of fire. Keep it at work, or another family member’s house. If anyone takes the CD and tries to open the files, you can be confident it’s secure.

Easycrypt Setup:

You’ll be finished this easy 5 step setup in less than 5 minutes. For the current version (0.2.1.16), here’s what to do:

1) Launch Synaptic and enter the following repository:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stevenharperuk/ubuntu feisty main restricted universe multiverse

Click reload and search for ‘truecrypt’; mark both truecrypt and easycrypt packages for installation, then apply, and quit Synaptic. (If you don’t know how to use Synaptic Package Manager, the author has posted some installation instructions on his website here. You could also just instead install the .deb file from the author’s website, but this way it will also auto-update to newer versions in the future. )

2) Next, find Easy Crypt in your Applications –> Accessories menu, then run it. The icon will show in your system tray; right click to bring up the menu. You may wish to set the preferences to ‘auto start’ on login so it will always remain in the system tray.

3) If you’ve never used it (or TrueCrypt) before, you’ll need to create a new crypt. Click ‘recreate crypt’, and it will come up with a warning about “destroy the contents–are you sure?”. Since this is our first crypt, this doesn’t apply to us, so click yes.

4) Choose a good password, better yet use a good passphrase. The more random the better. But make sure you remember it well– once you’ve locked yourself out, the information you’ve saved is as good as gone. Try using 7 or more characters mixed with various case letters and numbers. Make up an acronym to help yourself remember, for example “1mnstB4n” could mean “one must not spill the BEANS for now”. If you’re worried you’ll forget it, you could write it down and keep that in a safe place… treat it like your house key…. just don’t write what it’s for beside it!

5) Choose your file system size. If you’re planning on frequent backing up on CD-RW you should choose 700MB. For a DVD (-R / +R / +RW / -RW) sized file, use 4480MB (I understand all DVD media will hold up to this size). I find using the keyboard arrow keys easier to get it exact. Click new to start generating the encrypted file system and wait a few minutes until it’s done. It takes about 3 minutes on my Pentium 4 system to make a 4480MB sized crypt.

Now your encrypted file system is set up! Using it daily is easy peasy. With a mere mouse click on the Easy Crypt logo, the password entry window pops up. You enter your pass and the file system appears as a drive mounted on the desktop. You might consider making a ‘Places bookmark’ in your nautilus side pane for convenience. Start copying those important files over to your encrypted file system now! Be sure to always close crypt when finished, and make burn your backup after you’ve copied a bunch of new files over to it.

It’s some good kung fu for you and looks like Easy Crypt has a bright future in Ubuntu. It will become included in the upcoming Ubuntu release 8.04. Kudos to Steven Harper for coding this lovely gem! For further discussion, the main Easy Crypt thread on Ubuntuforums.org is located here.

In just a few short days since it began shipping, this little devil is a huge hit (”selling one every six seconds”). The Eee PC 4G is available in Canada through Canada Computers for $399 (Currently out of stock), The Source, pccanada.com, infonec.com and NCIX.com (out of stock until Nov 14th). A few entrepreneurs are trying to ebay the unit for $450 to $500. Is this becoming the impossible-to-find-must-have of Xmas07?

There are some nice previews on YouTube showing just how darn small the machine is. (Dimensions: 22.5 x 16.4 x 2.15~3.5 cm. Weight: 0.92 Kg ) The windows XP boot time appears to be under half a minute. The battery life is listed at 3.5 hours. The display is 7-inches with 800×480-pixels, and has a 4GB flash hard drive. It appears to have a quite rare 2 year warranty.

Although it comes preloaded with Xandros Linux, Rupert Goodwins at ZDNet installed Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 on it. The wifi aparently needs ndiswrapper to work. He says that a full Ubuntu install uses up 2.3GB of the internal 4GB SDD.  Another user  reports that an Xubuntu install uses up only 1.4gb  of the SDD.

There’s a discussion forum at Eeuser.com for a step by step guide to loading Ubuntu on the Eee.

It would be interesting to benchmark the Eee PC runing Rescubuntu or Helix and doing a dd image from one external USB2.0 hard drive to another. It could be an ideal portable setup for forensics and data recovery.

I’m glad I started the upgrade process over the weekend.  It requires at least a free Gig on your system for downloading new packages and at least 12 to 24 hours.  I started at 10 am and it was still downloading by midnight. Currently the download servers are slower with all the upgrading users so I figured I’d be patient.

Have plenty of time available to complete the process, so plug that laptop in.  Don’t expect to be able to run synaptic to install anything until the upgrade is finished.   You should probably back up first, and consider this upgrading advice.

After all the packages had been downloaded several dialogs checked for ‘keep’ or ‘replace’, the whole installation halts until my response.   I chose to ‘replace’ for each, although I was rather puzzled as to if I’d made the right choice.   Then suddenly the upgrader crashes with 1 hour estimate to go… yikes!

I was afraid if I rebooted I’d be greeted by a totally corrupt system… I searched the forums until I read the terminal commands suggested for this are:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade 

sudo aptitude full-upgrade

That seemed to finish the installation. Upon rebooting, I needed to mess around with my wireless to get it working with the new broadcom 43xx drivers in guty.    So far I like the improvements I see and I think the upgrade process has been worth it, without encountering any major disasters.

It does appear there’s quite a large portion of  people who’ve experienced installation problems.  You can view the poll results.

Check your update manager. You should see it there, sitting all nice and pretty.

If you want the CD ISO you’ve got a few options available.

You can download it here, but it’s gonna be slow for a while, cause everyone ‘n their dog is tryna geddit!

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/gutsy/release/

Be nice and use bittorrent. When you’re finished leave it open to share with others. At the morning of release there was 200 seeders and 800 leechers!

http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/

http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/

http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.torrent -download mirror

Here's the checksum to verify the ISO accuracy:

d2334dbba7313e9abc8c7c072d2af09c *ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso

If you’re patient, use shipit! In 4 to 6 weeks you’ll find a package arrives by post with the official CD’s from shipit for free. Hand a few extra copies out to potential converts. (The official disc looks much less like a pirate warez CD chock full ‘a spyware ‘n viruses.)

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

If you’ve ever wanted to backup and restore a hard drive partition you may have come across partimage. It has a nice clean text interface and works fast because it only copies the used space in the partition (unlike dd or dcfldd). It also gives a great progress indicator, so you know how long it will take.

While working on resizing the partition on two different laptops, and trying out various LiveCD’s to do the job, I found that partimage appears to be a faster and safer method of resizing a partition when compared to using gparted. In the end I’m now thinking gparted is horribly slow for resizing because you should do a backup first anyway before resizing.

Here’s the situation. I keep all my /home directory on a separate partition with Ubuntu, and it was 96% full (too many episodes of scrubs I’ll bet!?). I was going to resize it using gparted on a liveCD, but thought I’d start making a backup copy of the 15 Gb partition.

I’d found a lovely 500GB (half terra!) Seagate Freeagent USB2.0 drive for only $140 bucks Canadian on redflagdeals. My first try was this new sexy liveCD Partedmagic1.8 which gave me only 8mb/s and everything slowed to crawl. I think there’s a problem with that distro when using a USB drive. It was going to sit there forever, I’m guessing, cause dd is annoying in that it doesn’t display an ETA with estimated time and progress… (dcfldd does a better job at this).  So I cancel and try something else.
I try SystemRescueCD again, which booted this time with the USB drive. When I copied the parition with partimage, I got a blazing 1.4GB/minute and was done imaging the partition in only 12 minutes.

I made my backup copy first, just in case gparted dies during the resizing process… or end up choosing to cancel part way through. Which is what I ended up doing…. It appeared to move the partition, and do a filesystem check and 15 minutes later I start to get an ETA for completing the task… and it tells me that it’s going to take at least another hour to do a read only test of copying the filesystem separately. What!? Probably another 2 hours to actually do it?! Augh! No time for this nonsense. I cancel the process impatiently, and feel smug that I’d actually backed up my partition first before risking losing everything. Now to test if it actually worked. The actual /home partition is now totally messed up with my canceling the gparted resizing process… so I delete it. (I felt brave and hopeful with my new partimage file on the new half terra segate drive. BRING-IT-ON!)

I make a new partition in it’s place, twice as big and restore the partition data with partimage at a blazing 1.63Gib / min a total of 15GiB in less than 10 minutes. In the time it takes me to drive up to the corner store for some eggs, I’d completely imaged, resized and restored my /home partition! SWEET!

The key is that I needed to use gparted to perform a filesystem check on the partitition after it’s been restored so that the filesystem is made to match the partition size.
After imaging and restoring, use gparted or resize2fs to adjust the files system to match the new partition size. Otherwise you’ll have problems with fsck or parted saying “Warning; partition is 18.5 Gib but file system is 16.8GiB” and so on.

In a little over 20 minutes I’d made a backup copy of the partition and restored it.

I’ve been working on reformatting my old Toshiba ‘laptop’ (a Satellite 1900… replaced HD, replaced motherboard, dead battery, always overheats even with the fan on 100%, and sigh no USB 2.0 and what a hog! it weighs like 12 pounds.) I think it might have new life as a media player for the TV using the svideo out… So I begin the long arduous process of what to delete in the 5 different partitions… and what to copy off the unit. I want Ubuntu feisty on it with only one main partition.

At one point in this self-imposed challenge I find myself messing with Gparted on the Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 live CD. 99.9% of the time I’m telling myself and everyone this linux distro is the creme-de-la-creme. And while I’m trying to resize the ext3 partition /dev/sda3 (the one with the Ubuntu system installed on it)… I find that gparted won’t let me expand to use the empty space in front of the partition. What? My amazing Ubuntu Feisty live CD has got some limits after all?! Most of the time Ubuntu’s perfection is enough to convince anyone to join the cult.

So I try a ‘work around’ of resizing the partition down enough so that I can copy paste it into the empty space in front….. All seems to be going alright until Ubuntu automatically remounts the new partition in mid process and the copying process stops a half hour later without being verified ok. Sigh… I try a second time.. same problem… So a little reading online and I learn it’s only got gparted v .25 and now theres a new gparted v.33 …

Bring on Gparted live cdv 0.34-8 …and it won’t even boot beyond loading some Adaptec RAID driver where it freezes over…. wow.. at least Ubuntu Feisty loaded!

Bring on System RescueCD v 0.37 … and it doesn’t even boot beyond loading some generic CDRom driver.. .where it freezes…. wow some rescue attempt that is…. at least this distro has boot codes to try and work around the problem…. I try them all…

I check the forums… at the top of each a users post of same problem I have, with no solution found yet… (except try the latest version.. ohh ohh have you tried a boot code?)

Now folks this is not some 64 bit computing project where I need some latest greatest super liqui-cool fiber optic shnazzy dazzy distro… this laptop was made almost eight years ago! The hours are draining away with little progress being made.

And then I find partedmagic v1.8, something I’d never even heard of before … at it actually boots (the audience gasps in awe). It has gparted v 0.34… which allows me to resize the Ubuntu system partition to use the free space in front (where that slimy NTFS partition used to be a few years ago).

I have to say I likes the looks of this one…I could load it into ram, eject the CD, and (I haven’t tried it yet) but use the burner?! This is a whole new level of linux ‘live’ distro… the RAMdisk…

It has a light weight (but attractive) GUI, and useful set of utility programs. Among others it has; dd, dcfldd, dd_rescue, testdisk, shred, xfburn, partimage, rsync, ntfs3g, and of course gparted. I’m certainly adding this sucker to my tool kit… (maybe install it on a USB key for true ninja power?

EDIT:  I found the critical flaw  with partedmagic 1.8 it doesn’t appear to work for me with USB 2.0 drives at a full speed… it’s agonizingly slow like theres something really wrong with it.  Until this is fixed I’d avoid trying to do anything over an external USB hardrive.  It sure looked promising.. so hopefully this gets fixed soon to be more ‘plug n play’ userfriendly.

Over the past few years I’ve been using Ubuntu, one of the types of programs I found ‘lacking’ in synaptic was stock market programs to help manage your portfolio, and stock charting programs.  After taking another look around this week, I’m pleased to report back that I’ve found a few worth mentioning, that others may wish to also check out.  Happy trading!

Visit aiotrade.org and try out their java program.    All I needed to  do was download the zip file and  extract it, and right click on the file  aiotrade in the bin folder to set the properties, permissions , execute checkbox to ‘allow’.     My first glance at it leaves me quite impressed at the quality of the  program.   After adding a symbol to the list, it automatically downloads the data from the net and displays a beautiful looking  chart,  with 20 technical indicators available.  It appears to have support for real time charting through IB if you trade with them.  It gives a large set of trend line drawing options , tabs to quickly switch from daily to weekly or monthly time periods, and zoom in or out with the keyboard.   Possibly the best linux stock trading software I’ve seen yet?  If only it had a portfolio manager… sigh.

SMTM is found in synaptic, and is launched with ALT-f2 smtm command.  It’s quite easy to use to manage your stock portfolio.  I found the font was set to a messed up bitmap, and ugly to look at.  It took me a few tries to figure out the date of purchase should be entered in YYYY-MM-DD format.  A right click on the stock and it loads a chart.. well it *should* but doesn’t always.

Grism is quite promising, user friendly, attractive to look at,  but I’ve often found it buggy and a work in progress being only at version 0.81.  Eventually I hope the finished product will be ready to install in synaptic.  One of the best up and coming!  Something ubuntu desparately needs!

Just when you thought computing world hated Microsoft to the max… wait for it.. there’s more. The evil empire just won’t quit. This time, they have threatened to fight out patent disputes in court with any nonprofit software group, or company in the linux and open source world of software. They claim it violates 235 of its patents.

Obviously the growth and success of linux and the open source community has got Micro$oft feeling a little threatened. They’ve come out swinging, launching a full out assault against the ‘enemy’. Perhaps they feel it’s now become a fight or die situation? You’d have thought the anti-trust lawsuits of yesteryear against Microsoft would have taught them a lesson and maybe smarten up a bit. It was only a couple years ago that companies like Microsoft tried this same stunt in Europe… until because of the large public protest, the ’software patent bill’ was thrown out altogether.

There’s a few people who disagree, but Microsoft seems to believe they never copy Apple’s original innovation, or rip off intellectual knowledge from Sony. They’re innocent of all misdoings… aren’t they? Microsoft would like the world to accept that “mouse clicks”, “toolbars” and “menus” can be owned as intellectual property. They’d probably be happiest if all global computer use was rented by the milisecond from Microsoft.

Follow the ongoing reports here.

In this era of high speed information flow it would seem absurd for anyone to try and censor a tiny sequence of 32 letters and numbers from being posted online, in an attempt to remove it from the internet. Thats exactly whats happened when a HD DVD key code was posted online earlier this week. Unknown to the average person, a massive online ‘revolt’ erupted online this week after the popular site digg.com tried to censor user postings after being threatened with a lawsuit by lawyers from ‘big media’ in the entertainment industry.

Perhaps the average consumer is too busy with their everyday lives to care/notice about issues with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the new Windows Vista. But the next time John Q legally purchases audio and video media, and comes home to find out he is forbidden to play it on ‘unauthorized’ equipment he might get pissed-off enough to hack the protection. It’s inevitable.

Ubuntu is founded on the principles of sharing information, openness, and freedom. The right to share information, and practice freedom of speech is “ubuntu” at it’s essence — humanity toward others. For many of us using Ubuntu has been a refreshing return to sanity. Microsoft and big media corporations are increasingly scaring us away, with their ‘police state’ attitude towards consumers. It appears Google, Cafe Press, and WordPress are all working overtime to censor anyone who shares this silly little sequence of 32 characters. So freedom of expression doesn’t mean much to these companies… or at least not as much as their profit margin does…

What is it about this little sequence of 32 letters and numbers that’s so dangerous for people to write about? That sequence of 32 characters isn’t protected by copyright, Trade Mark, nor is that sequence a form of ‘patented technology’. Yet somehow this key code is ‘banned’ content, and the thought of it making its way into the hands of the general public is absolutely terrifying isn’t it?

An event like this helps the people of society to see whats real, because for a moment the veil is pulled back. It’s happening in plain view for all to see… the corporate power of high tech and media companies trying to take control over the first amendment of the Constitution–the right to freedom of speech.

If exercising your civil liberties is important to you, and if you like having constitutional rights that actually mean something…. you should get involved! Show your support and help protect peoples right to freedom of the press! Copy the little banner logo to your website, join the GIMP key code jam session, post-it, email signature it, T-shirt it, bumper sticker it, and whatever it as you see fit. Let’s let the ‘big media’ know that freedom of expression is a human right recognized by the UN.

And so, for what it’s worth, I’ve included here a little reminder for everyone, just in case some people have forgotten:

THE FIRST AMENDMENT of the CONSITUTION

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Today’s BBC Business News Headline reads, “Dell to use Ubuntu on Linux PCs“. Wow! I’m simply blown away at this historic news! It was just the other day I read that Michael Dell was using Ubuntu on his own laptop. I thought that was pretty cool, but this is simply incredible!

Only a short while ago, I had nothing but bad things to say about Dell’s attitude towards us consumers who’d rather not use Windows. I was shopping for a new laptop to use Ubuntu with when I looked closer at Dell. Asus had some nice barebones systems that came without an OS, but cost more than Dell’s similar compact notebook models.

I’d heard before of Dell selling PC’s with linux on ‘em. My impressions of this in the past were that they cost more than the same version with windows (despite having to pay the $100 ‘Microsoft Tax’), and that the linux ‘option’ was sorta hidden, deep within the dark corners of the Dell website. I’d also read about people who had actually managed to get a refund for the cost of Windows if they returned it to Dell demanding a refund.

I tried to do the same in January and wrote about my experience on ubuntuforums.org. I tried to buy a Dell laptop without windows on it, and avoid paying for that ‘other’ OS I don’t like, want or need. I contacted my ‘personal sales advisor’, Wajid at Dell Canada. I asked, “Do I have to pay for Windows, or can I get a refund on the windows OS if I don’t use it?”

Wajid replied, “We don’t refund if you don’t use OS.”

It wasn’t Wajid’s fault for not knowing, but the truth is that they had done, and did do for other customers in the past.. who made enough of a stink. It was such a landmark event that the BBC reported the news. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Microsoft would try to put Dell out of business if they made it any easier than that to get a refund.

It all revolves around that wonderous book-length End User License Agreement (EULA ) that’s presented in a tiny little window the first time you start up your shiny new PC or freshly install a new copy of the OS. The EULA is that legal agreement no one ever reads, but usually agree to anyway. When you buy your new computer, you don’t own your Windows OS, you have purchased a license that gives you the rights to use it. The EULA could very well require that you’d happily give up your first born for the opportunity to kiss the feet of Sir. William Gates, but who’d know for sure anyways–when’s the last time you read the entire document? The Microsoft EULA is an ongoing issue that consumers have fought for many years. Consumers are now reporting that the EULA for Vista is simply downright evil.

The bottom line is that customers do have the right to refuse the agreement and to return the unused product. If they’ve paid for it, then its only fair they should be refunded the cost of it. Eventually I came across Dell’s ‘Total Satisfaction Return Policy’ where I found that they do provide for the consumer the following option:

“For customers who want to return, for refund or credit only, either application or operating system software that has been installed by Dell, the whole system must be returned, along with any media and documentation that may have been included in the original shipment.“

This is of course at the customer’s expense for shipping, insurance and being without your newly purchased PC for the next few weeks. It was enough to discourage me from wasting my time. I wasn’t up for taking on that activist battle… in that way… but the war is far from over!

Perhaps I’m being too complicit with the evil empire? But in the end, being such a technology geek, I decided to buy a new piece of Dell hardware, the XPS M1210 . I was convinced that it was an excellent price for the degree of sophistication and quality. There appeared to be many pleased reviewers with few complaints about the notebook.

We’ll there is mine, I guess… I had to buy it with Windows. But ‘the times, they are a’changin’, and it sounds like Dell is starting to listen to consumers requests. I wonder if that means I’ll ever get a refund for that OS I ended up deleting from my new laptop. Hey Dell? Michael? I hear you’re feeling ‘feisty’ lately…

Well at least in terms of google searches it is.  I was curious to see with all the fuss over the new release of feisty just how popular ubuntu was becoming on google trends.

Not only that, but aparently “Ubuntu” is as popular as “intel” and more popular than “mazda” or “spain”.  See for yourself!
Now technically,  there’s other factors to consider… that “ubuntu” is an african word used to refer to other things than the OS, and “spain” has other spellings in other languages… but it’s still pretty darn sensational stuff!

Google trends doesn’t yet show the increase in searches for the release day of feisty, but I must say I’m curious to see what it will look like when it does (to the moon baby, to the moon!)

Happy Release Day ! Assuming you weren’t one of the hard core thousands lined up all night long to download feisty the second it was released, you’re hoping to hold a freshly baked ISO of the world’s greatest OS pretty soon.

So you’d like to download feisty, but can’t find a working server, or it’s really slow because everyone is downloading feisty right now, or you don’t know which bittorrent file to choose and you’re not sure which one is still the old beta and which is the new ‘official’ release of feisty… Relax, don’t you worry!

Chances are you’re looking for “ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso” for your typical PC. You can download the torrent file here.

Last I checked theres over a thousand  4000 people seeding it, so its a nice and fast download. (Once you’re done downloading, it’s helpful if you leave bittorrent running for a while to share with others.)

Once you’ve downloaded the ISO, how do you know if you’ve got the correct version, or just some old incorrectly labeled file? Just to prove I’m honest, check the MD5SUM–you can read how to do it here.

The MD5 sum for the new release of feisty is:

e296e3468358789904097fc8df29609a

(for ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso)

How do you find out the correct MD5 sum, like the one I just included?

Go to one of the Ubuntu download mirrors; choose one here

open the “feisty” folder and then look for a file called “MD5SUMS”.

For example you can check this one.

If you go there quickly before Microsoft makes them ‘edit’ the web site you can read it for yourself….. Michael Dell uses Ubuntu Feisty on his laptop at home….

see it here

In a couple days people will be able to download the latest version of Ubuntu, codenamed “Feisty Fawn”. I was curious if I would be able to simply “upgrade” from my version 6.10 “edgy” to feisty, or if I’d need to do a full reinstall / backup / file migration.

If you’re curious there’s some instructions posted here

Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to jump the cue and try upgrading my Edgy system to the beta release of feisty. Pretty easy stuff… I just needed to enter this command into the terminal.. and let it download for an hour or so.

$ sudo update-manager -d

Now with my desktop system which has version 6.04″Dapper LTS” installed… is there an option to upgrade to Feisty? You bet… you’ll need to upgrade to Edgy first.. same terminal command but with a -c as well

$ update-manager -d -c

If you wish to avoid the ‘double’ upgrade you may wish to read this Howto

Please Note: if you’re upgrading a portable, then be sure to plug it in, leave the lid open, and don’t let it go to sleep or hibernate. If it shuts off during the upgrade your system could get totally borked, and you’ll have a big job on your hands trying to rescue your ubuntu system.

What are the new features in Feisty to look forward to?

Top Four Feisty Features

Here’s a list of a dozen or so features

DEFT v1.0

You may wish to check out DEFT (”Digital Evidence & Forensic Toolkit”) v1.0 by Stefano Fratepietro which was released recently  on March 28, 2007. It’s a nice security / forensics Live CD distro built on top of Kubuntu.

It contains the Sleuth kit & Autopsy frontend, the afflib “Advanced Forensic Format” tools, dd rescue, foremost, hex dump, ophcrack - a windows password recovery tool, qtparted, testdisk, vinetto (examine Thumbs.db files), readpst (examine MS-Outlook pst files), kismet, wireshart, ettercap, airsnort, and other network sniffers.

One downside of this distro is it appears to require 256mb of ram and won’t work on systems with 128mb.
Personally, I need a live CD distro that can easily run on legacy systems that I frequently need to work on.

Another ubuntu based live CD security distro you may wish to check out is nubuntu.

Backtrack 2

Another recently released (March 6th, 2007) security live CD distro with some forensics tools is Backtrack 2.  It is based on top of slackware/SLAX, and uses a KDE or Fluxbox windows manager.   Apparently two other security distros, WHAX and Auditor, were combined to make this excellent tool.   It’s main focus is penetration and network security testing, and has broadcom driver support too! It contains hundreds of tools, to numerous to list, however some of the forensics tools include;  the Sleuthkit and Autopsy, allin1 - automation frontend for sleuthkit, dd_rescue, dcfldd - an updated an enhanced version of dd), foremost, magicrescue - scan a block device for known file types, mboxgrep - searches a variety of types of mailbox folders, vinetto, pasco - to examine IE’s cache files.  Highly Recommended!

HELIX

Helix v 1.8 was released in October 2006, and is based on customized distribution of the Knoppix Live CD.   It is likely the best data forensics Live CD distro out there to date.  It is more compatible with legacy hardware, using an XFCE window manager and runs nicely on only 128mb of ram (perhaps less?).    A excellent beginner’s guide in PDF is on the site, as well as user support forums.  Here’s a listing of the tools from the HELIX website:

sleuthkit : Brian Carrier’s replacement to TCT.
autopsy : Web front-end to sleuthkit.
mac-robber : TCT’s graverobber written in C.
fenris : debugging, tracing, decompiling.
wipe : Secure file deletion.
MAC_Grab : e-fense MAC time utility.
AIR : Steve Gibson Forensic Acquisition Utility.
foremost : Carve files based on header and footer.
fatback : Analyze and recover deleted FAT files.
md5deep : Recursive md5sum with db lookups.
sha15deep : Recursive sha1sum with db lookups.
dcfldd : dd replacement from the DCFL.
sdd : Specialized dd w/better preformance.
PyFLAG : Forensic and Log Analysis GUI.
Faust : Analyze elf binaries and bash scripts.
e2recover : Recover deleted files in ext2 file systems.
Pasco : Forensic tool for Internet Explorer Analysis.
Galleta : Cookie analyzer for Internet Explorer.
Rifiuti : “Recycle BIN” analyzer.
Bmap : Detect & Recover data in used slackspace.
Ftimes : A toolset for forensic data acquisition.
chkrootkit : Look for rootkits.
rkhunter : Rootkit hunter.
ChaosReader : Trace tcpdump files and extract data.
lshw : Hardware Lister.
logsh : Log your terminal session (Borrowed from FIRE).
ClamAV : ClamAV Anti Virus Scanner.
F-Prot : F-Prot Anti Virus Scanner.
2 Hash : MD5 & SHA1 parallel hashing.
glimpse : Indexing and query system.
Outguess : Stego detection suite.
Stegdetect : Stego detection suite.
Regviewer : Windows Registry viewer.
Chntpw : Change Windows passwords.
Grepmail : Grep through mailboxes.
logfinder : EFF logfinder utility.
linen : EnCase Image Acquisition Tool.
Retriever : Find pics/movies/docs/web-mail.
Scalpel : Carve files based on header and footer.

Powered by ScribeFire.

This week I played around with some great digital forensics tools in ubuntu. I had an old laptop hard drive to try out, which I wanted to recover some old deleted data from. Last weekend I finally found an adapter to attach a 2.5 inch laptop hard drive to a desktop IDE: an HX-IDE-K adaptor I found in a surplus store for $8.

I booted the desktop pc using an xubuntu liveCD. The other hard drive I had plugged in was an old 8GB hard drive that was formatted ext3 to copy the recovered data to from the old dying drive. I used dd to make an image of the laptop drive. The commands I entered in terminal went like this:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/backup
$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/backup
$ sudo dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/backup/image.raw

It copied the 6.5 GB hard drive in about 15 minutes at about 7.4 mb/s. I could then set aside the failing laptop drive and work from a hard drive image file on another good hard disk.

When I got home I needed to attach the 8GB IDE hard drive containing the drive image file to my ubuntu laptop that I was going to use for doing the data forensics work. I used a spare external IDE hard drive enclosure to plug in to my laptop through a USB 2.0 cable.

I installed some new ubuntu (versions 6.10 - edgy or newer) packages for data forensics:

$ sudo apt-get install autopsy sleuthkit afflib

Sleuthkit is a bunch of command line tools for data forensics, and autopsy gives a nice graphical interface that runs through a web browser. Using autopsy I was able to easily search through all my old files.
All I had to do was enter the file type or keyword and all the
relevant files would be listed. Even deleted files could be listed at
the click of a button, and searched through by keyword or file type. (Using a tool like this only demonstrates further how important it is for a drive to be wiped with random data several times before being given away or disposed.)

Along the way I ran into the AFF format… I knew that some people used bzip2 to compress the drive image for better storage, but programs like autopsy would require the image to be decompressed first. But autopsy can use drive images compressed in the AFF format… I’d never heard of this before.

I used afconvert to convert the raw drive image made with dd into the AFF format (advanced forensics format). This allows compression (uses the LZMA algorithm) and for random data seeking with programs like autopsy. On my duo core 2 laptop, the 6.5GB image was compressed (at the maximum compression setting) to 3.8GB and written to disk in about 30 minutes.

$ sudo afconvert -X9 -o /root/image.aff /media/usbdisk/image.raw

I was impressed how I could then burn the drive image file to a DVD+RW. Great for doing a backup. I’m curious how large of a hard drive image could be fit in the compressed AFF format onto a 4.6GB DVD. Often the hard disk contains alot of empty space–and if that empty space is filled with zeros before, possibly a half full 10GB hard drive partition could be backed up onto a DVD quite easily?

Another variation of the AFF file; large AFF files can be broken into multiple AFD files which can be more easily moved around.

There doesn’t appear to be currently much information out on the net about using the aimage command to create a AFF drive image. It has many features worth investigating, like intelligent error recovery, similar to what is in ddrescue. Where dd is the good old classic standby, aimage provides many newer more sophisticated features; compression and error recovery just to start.

Had I known about this before I would have used aimage to image the drive to the AFF format, (although it would probably have taken much longer to image the drive using a PIII than it did using dd.)

Here’s the man page:

aimage 1.6.31

usage: aimage [options] INPUT1 [OUTFILE1] [INPUT2 OUTPUT2] …— image indev to outfile
INPUT may be any of these:
A device (e.g. /dev/disk1)
- (or /dev/stdin, for standard input)
listen:nnnn Listen on TCP port nnnn
OUTFILE may be:
outfile.aff — image to the AFF file outfile

General Options:
–quiet, -q — No interactive statistics.
–batch, -Y — Batch output
–silent, -Q — No output at all except for errors.
–readsectors=nn, -R nnnn, — set number of sectors to read at once (default 3276
–version, -v — Just print the version number and exit.
–skip=nn[s], -k nn — Skip nn bytes [or nns for sectors] in input file
–no_beeps, -B — Don’t beep when imaging is finished.
–logfile=fn, -l fn — Where to write a log. By default none is written
–logAFF, -L — Log all AFF operations
–preview, -p — view some of the data as it goes by.
–no_preview, -P — do not show the preview.

Existing File Options:
–append, -a — Append to existing file
–zap, -z — Erase outfile(s) before writing

Raw Output Options:
–raw=fname, -r fname — write block-by-block output to fname.

AFF Options:
–outfile=fname, -ofname — write an AFF file.
–image_pagesize=nnn, -S nnnn
– set the AFF page size (default 16777216)
(number can be suffixed with b, k, m or g)
Also sets maxsize to be 2^32 - image_pagesize if not otherwise set.
–make_config, -m — Make the config file if it doesn’t exist
Config file is aimage.cfg by default
and can be overridden by the AIMAGE_CONFIG enviroment variable
–no_dmesg, -D — Do not put dmesg into the AFF file
–no_ifconfig, -I — Do not put ifconfig output into AFF file
(Currently unset)
–no_compress, -x — Do not compress. Useful on slow machines.
–compression=n, -Xn — Set the compression level
–auto_compress, -A — write as fast as possible, with compression if it helps.
sets compression level 1
–maxsize=n, -Mn — sets the maximum size of output file to be n..
Default units are megabytes;
suffix with ‘g’, ‘m’, ‘k’ or ‘b’
use ‘cd’ for a 650MB CD.
use ‘bigcd’ for a 700MB CD.
–setseg name=value, -s name=value
– Create segment ‘name’ and give it ‘value’
This option may be repeated.
–no_hash, -H — Do not calculate MD5 and SHA1 of image.

Error Recovery Options:
–error=0, -e0 — Standard error recovery:
Read disk 256K at a time until there are 5 errors in a row.
Then go to the end of the disk and read backwards
until there are 5 erros in a row. Then stop.
–error=1 -e1 — Stop reading at first error.
–retry=nn -tnn — change retry count from 5 to nn
–reverse, -V — Scan in reverse to the beginning.

Other:
–help, -h — Print this message.
–fast_quit, -Z — Make ^c just exit immediately.
–allow_regular, -E — allow the imaging of a regular file
–title=s, -T s — change title to s (from IMAGING) and disable blink
–debug=n, -d n — set debug code n (-d0 for list)
–use_timers, -y — Use timers for compressing, reading & writing times

Examples:
Create image.aff from /dev/sd0:
aimage /dev/sd0 image.aff
aimage -o image.aff /dev/sd0

Create image0.aff from /dev/sd0 and image1 from /dev/sd1:
aimage /dev/sd0 image0.aff /dev/sd1 /image1.aff

Wow, this quick and easy to use package saved the day! Mark this one down for your future emergency reference just in case. This disaster story has a happy ending!

What happened to me was that I started off with using the cp command to copy files directly from a ntfs drive to a usb drive (which had a brand new ext3 partition). The transfer started nicely, however the speed was quite slow and to copy 100GB was going to take about 4 hours by my estimates.
So I restarted with a faster solution. I used the helix boot CD to run AIR: Automatied Image and Restore (a graphical frontend for dd). DD managed to transfer at about 25MB per second. Copying the 180GB hard drive took about 2 hours and 10 minutes. It copied the data nice and fast but I guess in the process I probably did it wrong and borked the partition table.
So I move my usb hard drive to another computer and plug it in. Not only does it not autodetect the drive when I plug it into ubuntu, but when I try to mount the drive as NTFS I get the error: “mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb”. I try out the dmesg | tail suggestion and I read this error message in the output : “[17190438.380000] NTFS-fs error (device sdb): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Primary boot sector is invalid.” Yikes, what to do… good thing I just didn’t delete the old data on the other pc yet! I look around on the net for a solution. Is there a fsck.ntfs out there? Not that I can find. How about a package to fix the partition table I wonder…. Someone else had posted on a forum that testdisk had ’saved their butt’ too many times to retell. I read on about teskdisk to find out more. Sure enough testdisk is described as :

…powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. It works with the
following partitions: FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, Linux, Linux swap (version 1
and 2), NTFS (Windows NT/W2K/2003), BeFS (BeOS), UFS (BSD), JFS, XFS,
and Netware.

Sounds just like what I needed. So I ‘sudo apt-get install testdisk’ and run it. Pure magic! Idiot proof! It took a few minutes to detect and scan the partition I write the fixed partition table and get on with my day. Thanks to Christophe Grenier!

Visit the home page of testdisk here

Just the sound of ‘computer security’ is often enough to intimidate the average pc user from even bothering…. it just sounds too complicated. But its not to hard to give yourself a little peace of mind on Ubuntu. By simply adding this feature to your file manager (nautilus) you can simply right click and “shred” the document instead of choosing the usual “move to trash”.

You wouldn’t dump private financial records out in the street trashbin without first shredding them, but far too often people will leave rather private documents sitting in a “trashbin” on a computer with several users. Even after the files are finally “deleted”, they still largely remain recorded on the hard drive for some time, possibly years after they were supposedly erased. Eventually many of those same well used computers are then sold, dumped, or donated to be further used by unknown people and potentially snooping criminals.

Choosing to shred the file instead of moving it to the trash is a much safer option for files that you’d regret falling into the wrong hands. Here’s how the author explains it:

This action uses the “shred” command to delete a file and make it unrecoverable. It overwrites 10 times and then overwrites with all zeros to hide the shredded file.

Installation Instructions:

In synaptic or terminal install “nautilus-actions”:

$ sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions

Then download the File Shredder script . Go to the menu System–>Preferences–>Nautilus Actions Configuration. Click import and select the shred.schemas file.

A Cautionary Note:

While although this simple tools is helpful, and much better than ‘move to trash’, it is most likely not a 100% secure method of data removal. Note that the man page for shred, has a caution warning that journaled file systems like ext3 render this less effective. You can read further debate about this issue in this thread on Ubuntu forums. Also, the SecuriTeam website has instructions to demonstrate the insecurity of shred. You may wish to read further information about ’secure erase’ on this page from Stanford University.

Some linux alternatives to shred which may be more, less or similarly successful include fwipe, ya-wipe, and srm. 

Ideally a harddrive should be totally ‘wiped’ clean before being passed on to strangers. A topic for another day…

The list of linux live cd’s has grown large in the recent years. Security distros are becoming ever more popular. I can’t resist but to download a few ISO’s and burn them, since I always enjoy learning about computer security and data forensics.

But hold on. I start to consider; just how safe is it to run any old linux distro on my PC? I feel comfortable to trust ubuntu not to contain malicious code, since it is peer reviewed with a large and wide following of users. But with any of these other numerous unknown distros, how can I know if after booting the CD it doesn’t run some evil adware/spyware/virus/trojan/rootkit and install it on my system without my knowlege?

So I ask around on IRC for peoples opinions… “that’s the chance you take” is one reply. So what to do? Just forget the whole idea because the integrity of my Ubuntu system has become practically sacred and I’m not about to risk it? Do I watch for the hard drive light to flash in case it starts writing over my hard drive with zeros? Curiosity gets the better of me and I try a little experimentation.

I have enjoyed using virtualbox, and knew that I could boot an ISO file or CD-ROM in it. I figure, why not test it first on my virtualbox windows 2000 install to take a look at it first to see it if it’s actually any good. Then it dawns on me–I can do a checksum of the virtual disk before running the distro, then compare the results afterwards to see if the virtual hard drive has changed at all. I also can simply make a backup copy of the virtual hard drive and delete the compromised copy if I need to.

So here’s what I do in the terminal, and a few seconds later I get my checksum:

dimeo@laptop:~/large-data-files/virtualbox-windows2000$ cksum virtualbox-windows2000.vdi

21930562 1515201024 virtualbox-windows2000.vdi

So then I run virtualbox and set it to boot the iso. file for my freshly downloaded security distro, Backtrack 2 that I’m wanting to try out. It works great under virtual box and I get to try out all kinds of port scanners to test the security of our networks. No luck with the data forensics programs for some reason. Feeling content that the distro looks worth the 50 cent CD-R, I quit virtualbox and pull out my cakebox of blank discs. But first a quick check to see if it touched my hard drive. I run cksum again at the terminal and look at that…

21930562 1515201024 virtualbox-windows2000.vdi

I’m pleased to find my virtual harddisk data is exactly as it was at the start– undamaged by my wonted messing around with software of questionable origin.

I’ve been doing a little bit of research into the best compression method to use in Ubuntu. There’s so many compression types when I right click –> create archive. Keep in mind that I’m simply using the default compression values right from the desktop, there’s no special tweaking involved here. Mainly, I want something quick and easy for every day file management. Many of these formats, I’ve seen before and had heard some were ‘better than others’; some faster, and some compress more. I really wasn’t sure what’s the best option.

I often have large data files (hudreds of megs or larger) that I like to make backup copy of, but would rather store them in a compressed format. I also don’t want to wait around forever to get the job done. I’m working on a fast machine (duo core 2) with a gig of memory.

So what’s gave me the ‘best’ results when compressing my 1.4 gb file? It’s a virtualbox .vdi file, essentially the entire HD for a windows 2000 virtual machine. The results could be very different on a collection of lots of small little files… something I might test later. In the mean time there’s a good study already published here.

Here’s my test results of several different formats on the file:

Best compression - size in MB.

1. 7z 493
2. rar 523
3. bz2 592
4. lzh 607
5. gz 614
6. Z 614
7. zip 614
8. .arj 615
9. lzo 737
10. zoo 890

Best Time in seconds

1. zip 175
2. zoo 186
3. arj 253
4. lzo 295
5. Z 300
6. gz 344
7. lzh 657
8. bz2 706
9. rar 840
10. 7z 896

Conclusions:

It came as a surprise to me that plain old .zip to which I am quite familiar with already, is still a better choice for high compression of large data files in a short amount of time.

.arj and .Z and .gz all compress about as much, but just not as fast as .zip

I’ve heard really good things about .7z and it’s ability for high compression, and it does show in the results.  Both .z7 and .rar are able to use the duo core processor better (cpu use at 77%-90% compared to 55% for the others) yet take much longer than anything else to compress. If the file were being uploaded onto the internet, perhaps I would choose for the highest compression even it it takes 4 times longer.

I had read that .lzo and .zoo were good (some people claimed they were better) and fast with high compression, but I just don’t see that here at all.  They’re way off the mark.

So whats the best option?

.zip for quick and compatible compression.

.rar for high compression and compatiblity, when you have the time to wait.

.z7 for maximum compression when you have the time to wait.

Just like insurance you start out figuring you get it later, if you think you actually need it. It’ll never happen! Eventually, you will have put in a few hours into setting up your Ubuntu system. You better back that sucker up soon, just in case something goes wrong. It’s better to be safe than sorry. If it’s not backed up, you don’t want it.

sbackup is an easy to use simple backup package. Whats nice about it is that it makes incremental backups automatically at scheduled times. Incremental means that it only copies to the backup what’s changed since last time, rather than copy everything all over again. It becomes a very quick job to do nightly or weekly backups.

The restore features are just as nice, as you can select individual directories, or individual files to restore. You’ll need to do one for each of the root directories, as I don’t think however there’s a one click “system” restore.

Start Your Backups!

In synaptic download sbackup or enter in the terminal

$ sudo apt-get install sbackup 

In the menus go to System—>Administration–>Simple Backup Config

If you’re on Dapper, you’ll need to install it. Use synaptic or in the terminal enter:

$ sudo apt-get install sbackup

A nice guide ( with pictures) that will help you set it up is located: here

Remember that to protect your data against major disasters like fire, robberies, or hardware failure then you should copy your backups onto removable media by hand.

Configure your /home backup to fit on a 4.7gb DVD-RW. That *should* be enough for copying frequent snapshots of your /home directory. Set up another for your system /var /etc /usr/local.

    Being the most popular distribution of GNU/Linux for several years now, Ubuntu is increasingly often the first experience of linux that someone will have.  I felt like Santa Claus at work the other day, handing out a half dozen free copies of Ubuntu to my associates who are somewhat computer savvy enough to be interested.  I can imagine all these millions of new Ubuntu users around the world who are going to try this new thing out for the first time, and enter a whole new world of computing.  What they do know about computers (often a fair amount) can be entirely based on their experience of using Microsoft Windows.

Where do you even begin?  How do you know what software package(s) to install, out of the thousands that are available?   Here are some quick reviews and introductions to some of the top packages you can install in Ubuntu.

 Packages Explained: no more .exe files?

The Ubuntu Guide : all you really need to get started.

Lifehacker’s Top 10 ubuntu apps and tweaks  
Restricted Formats:   no, not that dirty adult prOn, but all the awesome media formats you’re wanting!

Mark Pilgrim’s Essential software list 

The Linux Desktop: 13 things you should do immediately after installing Ubuntu

The top 200 most downloaded applications fpr ‘Gnome’, the window manager in ubuntu.

Native Games:  games designed for linux and unix
How to install anything in Ubuntu 
 Making the Change: stepping out of windows

 Tweak Ubuntu for Speed

Beginning Ubuntu for $30 you can buy a great 600 page guide.

I’ve been using Ubuntu for over a year now, which hardly qualifies me as a guru… Actually I’m pretty much a total nOOb compared to those hardcore linux hackers. But every day I’m learning something new about this wonderful OS. Feel free to join in.

This month I got a new Dell XPS m1210 notebook. It was time for a change since my old Toshiba was really falling apart at about 6 years old.  Being about 12 lbs it was more like a ‘portable desktop’ than anything.  This time I went for something small, light, with good battery life.

The first thing I did with it was put Ubuntu Edgy on it.