Some time ago I’ve written an article named 16 GB encrypted candy file describing how to create encrypted filesystem within regular file. After quick research it became clear that cryptoloop is vulnerable and there is open exploit available on the web: see it here (thanks to everybody who commented that article). So I don’t recommend to use cryptoloop but instead take a look at truecrypt that makes it possible not only to encrypt whole storage but also to create encrypted file just like I’ve described in 16 GB encrypted candy file article.
Archive for the 'howtos' Category
Sh*t happens. There is no more applications to manage my 6th generation iPod Classic 160 GB under Linux/Ubuntu. I have to install Windows as the second operating system along with newly installed Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (it rocks but this is for another post) to run iTunes.
For rather long time I’ve been using gtkpod, amarok, banshee, exaile or rhythmbox to sync my ipod under Linux/Ubuntu and load my music collection there. As we all know The Elder Brother Apple fights with interoperability and makes ipod/iphone users to use iTunes only. Any other applications that can read/write to ipod data format are prohibited by Apple. This also concerns Rockbox and ipod4linux alternative firmwares — once Apple encrypted ipod firmware it became impossible to use them. It definitely sucks. At least due to the fact there are millions of Linux users who are real or potential customers of Apple products. Anyways these facts have been discussed in various forums, blogs like this and similar but this post about how to install Windows as the second operating system along with Ubuntu or any other Linux.
The first that we need to do is to create new partition for Windows and format it to NTFS. Exact steps to accomplish this depend on your HDD partition table e.g. there is one large ext3/ext4 partition for Ubuntu or there are several partitions for various distributions or mount points. Anyway you should use partition manager to create and/or format NTFS partition. I use gparted. It is graphical and it just works (use ‘sudo apt-get install gparted‘ if you run Ubuntu/Debian).
Second you should backup your MBR record and restore it after Windows installation that silently erases existing bootloader and installs windows one, use “dd if=/dev/sda of=/mbr.bin bs=446 count=1” to save MRB into mbr.bin file and “dd if=/media/sda/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1” to restore it from file to HDD.
To sum everything up here is the algorithm:
0. BACKUP ALL YOUR DATA!
1. Create NTFS partition using gparted.
2. Backup MBR using dd command e.g. “dd if=/dev/sda of=/mbr.bin bs=446 count=1″ (/dev/sda means your HDD).
3. Boot Windows installation CD and install it onto newly created NTFS partition.
4. Boot into Linux live CD e.g. Ubuntu Live CD.
5. Restore MBR using dd e.g. “dd if=/media/sda/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1″.
6. Reboot.
7. Select Ubuntu in grub menu and boot it.
8. Setup grup for Windows booting.
In order to accomplish the last 8th item you should add the following text block to the end of grub config (read this article for detailed information):
title Microsoft Windows XP
root (hd0,1)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
Good luck!
P.S. If something goes wrong or you need more details you can take a look at the following article at ubuntu.com: Recovering Ubuntu After Installing Windows. It’s written in rather tangled manner but still informative.
I hope many of you will agree that sometimes it’s really good idea to have some small amount of RAM mounted as a filesystem. It may be necessary when running some bash or perl script that handles, say, thousands of small files so it’s much more effective not to waste computer resources on reading/writing data on hard disk but keep those files directly in memory. This idea is known as Virtual RAM Drive or ramdisk and can be setup in Ubuntu or almost any other Linux distribution using the following commands under root (to become root in Ubuntu use "sudo -s“):
# mkdir /tmp/ramdisk; chmod 777 /tmp/ramdisk
# mount -t tmpfs -o size=256M tmpfs /tmp/ramdisk/
where 256M is amount of RAM you wish to allocate for ramdisk. It’s clear that this value should be less than amount of free memory (use “free -m“). BTW, if you specify too many MBs for ramdisk Linux will try to allocate it from RAM and then from swap so resulting performance would be very poor.
Hosts from LAN1 should be able to access hosts at LAN2 and vice-versa through GRE tunnel between R1 and R2. ISP doesn’t care what networks are behind R1 and R2 so the only way to establish connection between LAN1 and LAN2 is to use VPN, in this example we use GRE.
GRE setup example topology
Update: Using Ubuntu Lucid Lynx? Here is corresponding article for you:
Install Google Chrome (Chromium) on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.
One of the easiest way to try Chromium browser in Ubuntu Linux (Google Chrome browser for Unix/Linux operating system is named as Chromium) is to use daily binary builds at https://launchpad.net/chromium-project. Today Ubuntu is the most popular Linux disributions for desktops so there are daily builds available for the following Ubuntu versions: hardy, intrepid, jaunty, karmic.
First let your Ubuntu know where it should find chromium-browser deb package:
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
add the following lines:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
Replace jaunty with hardy, intrepid or karmic depending which version you run at your computer. If you feel this information is not sufficient for you, follow this link to get Ubuntu official information on this matter or follow Launchpad help.
The next step is to install Chromium browser:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
or
sudo aptitude install chromium-browser
Once you press enter Ubuntu will download around 18 MB of data from launchpad’s server and will install Chromium with gnome menu entries and shortcuts. Now you can go to System menu –> Internet –> Chromium Web Browser in order to launch Google browser.
Ubuntu Chromium Google browser (Google Chrome Ubuntu)
As you might know there is still no official release of chromium/chrome available for Linux, so these daily builds from launchpad are for testing/observations purposes only. For example, there is no flash plugin available so you will be able to see html pages like this one and no swf/flash content. Anyway thanks to Google for great browser which has all chances to become “browser number one” for Linux or even for the rest of operating system such as Windows or Mac. Who knows? 
You might also find this page using Google and the following keywords: Ubuntu Chrome, Google Chrome Ubuntu, Chrome for Ubuntu and others.
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