You may encounter this message while connecting to a remote server through ssh.
Generally, you also have these lines :

IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is

To prevent from having this error again, there are solutions :

1) Edit the following line  ~/.ssh/known_hosts and remove the line containing the hostname of the remote server in question.

2) Sometime, the file ~/.ssh/knwon_hosts may be hashed. To regenerate the key properly,as a non-root user, please type the following command :

fool@localhost:~$ ssh-keygen -R hostname

I know I promised to try to do a links post each week but last week I was only able to post a few specific articles so since I actually have a little time this afternoon (I will not ask how that happened) and thought I’d post some of the links I’ve found in the last couple of weeks.

• Melissa Draper: How people get involved. A great little piece on getting involved in the Linux and open source community.
• Bodi.Zazen: Firewall Ubuntu Desktops. Windows users have gotten use to the idea that they should always use a firewall on their system (at least I hope they have). While it isn’t quite as vital on a GNU/Linux system due to the better inherent security some users still want to use a firewall, but it can be a bit of a pain in the posterior. Bodi has a nice, easy to follow article on using a firewall on Ubuntu.
• Danny Piccirillo: Can Ubuntu reach over 16,000 anime lovers in April? Danny and the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo Team have been busy getting ready to make sure people at next April’s Anime Boston know not only about Ubuntu but also about the Ubunchu! manga. If you haven’t been enjoying Ubunchu! yet the third episode has just come out so it’s a great time to get caught up. You can also check out Martin Owens’ interview on BBC Radio for info on Ubuntu, Ubunchu mange and Anime Boston.
• Roderick B. Greening: Copy playlist files to your Media player in Amarok. How is it that Amarok 2 doesn’t have a way to create a playlist and move it to your favorite digital media player? Actually that’s not true anymore, because Roderick has found a way to do it via Amarok scripting. I do believe Amarok may have just gotten even better, but I haven’t been able to get it running on my Ubuntu box since I moved to 9.10. I may have to look to see if the issue preventing me from using Amarok 2 has been resolved yet.
• Panji Nushantara: Guide to Karmic Koala (PDF). Panji has yet another great post for us as he tells us about a free PDF book with “almost everything you should know about Ubuntu, from partitioning to tweaking Ubuntu.” He’s right, it is a must have, and you don’t even need to shell out hard-earned money to get a dead tree edition of this great resource.
• Julian Andres Klode: Ubuntu Software Center coming to Debian. While it’s not universally loved, enough people love the graphical Software Center that it has been added to Debian unstable. I have to admit that while I usually use Synaptic for adding new apps I do use the USC now and then. I use it often enough, in fact,that I set up an alias for it in Gnome Do so I can launch it even more easily.
• Christopher Blizzard: why open video? Some people wonder what the big deal is about open video and why it’s important. Christopher has found a video that answers these questions quite nicely.
• Artem Nosulchik: 13 Linux lethal commands. There are commands that you should never, ever run in GNU/Linux. Artiomix has compiled a list of what they are and why you should avoid them like the plague. This article deserves to be added to your bookmarks so you can include them in your permanent reference collection.

Before I close out this post I have one more thing to share with you. A number of users of GNOME’s Evolution email client have been bitten by Launchpad Bug 27014: Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync. You know you’re affected by it if you switch folders and get an error saying something like

Error while Storing folder ‘Inbox’.

Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync

Zoran Mijanovic posted a possible fix for the problem.

Just delete file “folders.db” from ~/.evolution/mail/local and start “evolution”. In the first time the evolution needs more time to rebuild folders.db. After that, everything works fine.

If you have this problem you should try his solution to see if it resolves the issue for you.

There are several existing tools to check the ink level of your printer.
Let’s take two of them : ink and inkblot

Install them :

root@localhost:~# apt-get install ink inkblot

ink is a command-line tool whereas inkblot is an ink level monitor with a GUI.
Please verify that your printer is currently supported :
http://libinklevel.sourceforge.net/#supported

If your printer belongs to the list of the supported ones, you have to add read access to the device
which stands for your printer :

root@localhost~# chmod o+r /dev/usb/lp0

As a non-root user, to check the ink level :

fool@localhost:~$ ink -p usb

Here is the kind of result you could expect :

If you launch inkblot from your Gnome menu, then a icon will appear in your tray icon.
By left-clicking on it, you will get the status of your ink level within a pop-up.

More info :   man ink
                  man inkblot

Just found this while googling. Thought of sharing.

modprobe is a Linux program written by Rusty Russell used to add/remove a module to/from the Linux kernel (to add/remove a loadable kernel module).

The current version of modprobe is distributed as part of the software package “module-init-tools”, for Linux kernel version 2.5.x and later. It was previously developed as “modutils” for use with Linux versions 2.2.x and 2.4.x.

Modules are loaded when you boot the system. If you have a new hardware, e.g., a webcam, that is not recognized by the system, you have to check if the corresponding module was loaded.

which modules have been loaded?

$ lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
nvidia               9576524  28
autofs4                20544  0
binfmt_misc             7120  1
rfcomm                 30368  0
l2cap                  18120  5 rfcomm
ppdev                   6348  0
parport_pc             22420  0
lp                      8012  0
parport                31144  3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp
cpufreq_powersave       1292  0
cpufreq_userspace       2768  0
cpufreq_conservative     6256  0
cpufreq_stats           3520  0
rpcsec_gss_krb5         8640  0
nfsd                  204900  0
exportfs                3792  1 nfsd
nfs                   221580  0
lockd                  57972  2 nfsd,nfs
fscache                34440  1 nfs
nfs_acl                 2640  2 nfsd,nfs
auth_rpcgss            31416  3 rpcsec_gss_krb5,nfsd,nfs
sunrpc                163772  7 rpcsec_gss_krb5,nfsd,nfs,lockd,nfs_acl,auth_rpcgss
fuse                   47752  1
tun                    11208  0
acpi_cpufreq            7640  0
ndiswrapper           149420  0
appletouch              8904  0
loop                   13324  0
firewire_sbp2          12692  0
snd_hda_codec_realtek   178472  1
snd_hda_intel          22192  2
mbp_nvidia_bl           2712  0
snd_hda_codec          63580  2 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel
snd_hwdep               6120  1 snd_hda_codec
applesmc               20780  0
joydev                  8576  0
snd_pcm_oss            32232  0
snd_mixer_oss          12368  1 snd_pcm_oss
led_class               3852  1 applesmc
snd_pcm                62420  3 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_pcm_oss
input_polldev           3588  1 applesmc
uvcvideo               49308  0
i2c_i801                8564  0
i2c_core               20844  2 nvidia,i2c_i801
videodev               31040  1 uvcvideo
pcspkr                  2104  0
btusb                  10276  2
snd_seq_midi            5688  0
v4l1_compat            11416  2 uvcvideo,videodev
iTCO_wdt                9696  0
bluetooth              47060  7 rfcomm,l2cap,btusb
snd_rawmidi            18596  1 snd_seq_midi
evdev                   8028  9
hid_apple               5668  0
snd_seq_midi_event      6212  1 snd_seq_midi
bcm5974                 7532  0
snd_seq                42436  2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_timer              17436  2 snd_pcm,snd_seq
snd_seq_device          6136  3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq
snd                    49060  15 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device
soundcore               6184  1 snd
snd_page_alloc          8180  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
video                  18044  0
output                  2604  1 video
button                  5060  0
processor              34504  3 acpi_cpufreq
ac                      2960  0
battery                 6012  0
intel_agp              22900  0
agpgart                30836  2 nvidia,intel_agp
ext3                  107172  1
jbd                    41036  1 ext3
mbcache                 6924  1 ext3
usbhid                 31568  0
hid                    34528  2 hid_apple,usbhid
ide_cd_mod             24484  0
cdrom                  30316  1 ide_cd_mod
sd_mod                 28748  3
crc_t10dif              1632  1 sd_mod
piix                    5680  0
ide_pci_generic         3632  0
ide_core               88100  3 ide_cd_mod,piix,ide_pci_generic
ata_generic             4340  0
firewire_ohci          18952  0
firewire_core          37736  2 firewire_sbp2,firewire_ohci
crc_itu_t               2148  1 firewire_core
ata_piix               20848  3
libata                150904  2 ata_generic,ata_piix
sky2                   38636  0
scsi_mod              131800  3 firewire_sbp2,sd_mod,libata
ehci_hcd               29680  0
uhci_hcd               19132  0
usbcore               126004  9 ndiswrapper,appletouch,uvcvideo,btusb,bcm5974,usbhid,ehci_hcd,uhci_hcd
thermal                12580  0
fan                     4044  0
thermal_sys            13140  4 video,processor,thermal,fan

This is known now, Beau Smith annonced on MT.org blog that Movable Type 5 – the next generation of this server blog endgine will be availaible at November 8, 2009 in the States and Europe.

“Movable Type 5 will be available December 8th in the US and European markets. It’s been moved one week to provide more time for coordination of the release and associated documentation.”

http://www.movabletype.org/2009/11/mt5_status.html

Ok, so I did it again. I got a Nokia N900 for testing and own amusement.

Let the a free experience drive you phone... Unlocks with 'sudo gainroot'

And there are lots of things I want to try:

• Spotify: got libdespotify+gspotify running, but it halts and I have not gotten it to work. I want to find a way that works for humans beings: i.e. no compiling.
• Remote connections: VNC, OpenSSH, Rdesktop and probably some other stuff like VPN, Ad-hoc WLAN, Bluetooth DUN and IR.
• Telepathy and its beauty: Everything is properly integrated (you have skype, but no skype app which is a plus)

I know that there’s a lot of people out there that want one of this fantastic devices, but you have to know what you buy, right? And what is own amusement without sharing?

So I am willing to test different hardware and software features of the N900 in the coming weeks. Please post a comment to this entry with what you want tested and a group of Redpill Linpro in Oslo and me will give it a shot.

Mind you: Most problems will get solved in a simple manner and solutions will be document in this blog. Although I might end up compiling some stuff and adding weird repositories to my sources.list I will try to get it done in a way that is easy for normal (not super/power) users to achieve the same result.

So there you go, you can know what you want before you buy.

In this way we can together explore if reality aligns with my predictions. Or not…

By mistake, I deleted all the content of the directory /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/.
I was unable to restart the Apache server.
I got the following error :

root@localhost:~# service apache2 restart
Restarting web server: apache2Syntax error on line 143 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:
Invalid command ‘Order’, perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration failed!

A similar problem has already been met and registered as a Debian bug :
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=392349

The command ‘Order’ in Apache configuration file is managed through authz_host module.
Following their solution, I reloaded the modules below:

root@localhost:~# a2enmod authz_host
root@localhost:~# a2enmod mime
root@localhost:~# a2enmod alias
root@localhost:~# a2enmod setenvif

and then I restarted the Apache server successfully :

root@localhost:~# service apache2 restart

For more information about Apache modules, please have a look at their official documentation :
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/

* It was simple wire..

* Aamod came and gave me couple of stickers, and I was amazed..

continued…

Once I get the base system installed, I tried to hang around pure commandline for sometime, I installed the following package to hang around,

$ su -c'apt-get install elinks'

Before going into aptitude for the final phase of my installation, I configured ‘contrib’ ‘nonfree’ and ‘multimedia’ repos by creating two more files in ‘/etc/apt/sources.list.d’ directory as below,

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nonfree.sources.list
deb http://ftp.iitm.ac.in/debian/ lenny contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.iitm.ac.in/debian/ lenny contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates contrib non-free

deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile contrib non-free
deb-src http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile contrib non-free
$

and

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/multimedia.sources.list
deb http://mirror.optus.net/debian-multimedia/ stable main
deb-src http://mirror.optus.net/debian-multimedia/ stable main
$

To use multimedia repo, we also need to install the gpg-key package using the following command,

$ wget http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/d/debian-multimedia-keyring/debian-multimedia-keyring_2008.10.16_all.deb
$ su -c'dpkg -i debian-multimedia-keyring_2008.10.16_all.deb'

Debian multimedia website provides more details, check this link http://www.debian-multimedia.org

At the end, I started aptitude and installed all my must needed packages(Xfce,built-essential, gcc, vim-full, nvidia-glx, flash-10, mplayer, ffmpeg, w64codecs etc).

I don’t want to run any services in my laptop, so I disabled all the default services in lenny(like exim4, avahi, gdm etc.,). The base system run with just ~34MB, Once I ’startx’, it goes to ~140MB, If I start ‘icewesel’, it goes to ~314MB. I never thought I can run a full fledged system with this kind of less memory. No pause on Boot(just taking 10-12 sec to print login prompt)

Now, I’m really happy. I never expected the switch is this much smooth. Thanks to Debian.

* Day 1 was pretty good. We had really nice breakfast, after kind of okay-okay sleep due to late night hacking of memories with Kushl, Pradeepto and Siddhesh. We jumped into vehicle, dropped ourselves to venue and met Jace, Samay and other known faces there. Inside, there were few people.. But, we had very nice discussion with fellow speakers sitting near hackcenter area while watching schedule is updated on-the-fly.

Had nice interaction with Ramkumar and instead of working on Debian workout stuffs, noted to learn emacs (yeah, I’m vim guy ). Started it with small amount of dose. We settled around table #8 and will remain there. Kunal wanted to package some PHP stuff, he started with that. I uploaded yokadi without any fancy stuff (really, nothing). Started with looking into gwibber2. I rushed to hall #3 and introduced about ‘Debian workout’ but I think people were confused about my sudden introduction, Aanjhan was laughing on my crappy jokes on last seat. Anyway, I then went back, met Aanjhan after so many months, met some more people, peeped into wireshark packet capturing by Siddhesh.

Keynote by Dimitris Glezos, was amazing. We then headed to Aangan for dinner. It was entirely Kushal’s idea, so we were suspecting something about beerware, but alas, it was fantastic Punjabi food. We loved it. Return journey to hotel was NFS Rickshaw driving kind of.

Obviously, I’m not seating in Pradeepto-Aanjhan’s room with other fellows, writing this, lots of discussion on lots of random topics. Kushal’s jokes are coming at random() interval.

Day 1, it was..

Best torrent client in linux

Torrents are not stored on servers! Understand that it is peer to peer. So do not expect that all will be blazingly fast downloads.

Get it here:  http://www.getdeb.net/app/Vuze

easy to install

Deluge

Deluge it’s very good and download speeds are faster than Vuze(Azures)

---

KTorrent – Torrent client for KDE

KTorrent is a KDE bittorrent client. It has many features, including the ability to preview multimedia files and minimize to the notification area. Installed by default in Kubuntu.

Homepage: http://ktorrent.org/
Download: apt://ktorrent

---

if your looking for utorrent for linux its ktorrent works perfect in Ubuntu

MonoTorrent (C#)

A cross platform open source .NET Framework based BitTorrent Client written in C#. MonoTorrent is a cross platform and open source implementation of the BitTorrent protocol. It supports many advanced features such as Encryption, DHT, Peer Exchange, Web Seeding and Magnet Links. Frontends: Curses TUI, Gtk GUI, WinForms GUI

Homepage: http://projects.qnetp.net/projects/show/monotorrent
Source: http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/viewvc/trunk/bitsharp/
WinForms GUI homepage: http://code.google.com/p/monotorrent/
Blog: http://monotorrent.blogspot.com/

Monsoon (C#)

Monsoon Project is a GTK+ BitTorrent client based on C# and MonoTorrent.

Homepage: http://www.monsoon-project.org

Opera (built-in)

The Opera browser has built in support for Bit Torrent files. To install Opera, see OperaBrowser

BitTornado (Python)

BitTornado is a very fast Python based BitTorrent client. The standalone non-GUI package is available in the Officially supported Networking section and the GUI package is available in the Networking (Universe) section.

Homepage: http://www.bittornado.com/

TorrentFlux (PHP)

TorrentFlux is a PHP based BitTorrent controller that runs on a web. Manage all of your BitTorrent downloads from anywhere through a convenient and easy-to-use web interface.

Gnome-BT (Python)

A GNOME “mime-sink” for BitTorrent files. It’s not meant to be an entire front-end, just a program that pops up when you “execute” the torrent files. The last and final release of this application is 0.0.32.

Screenshots

Homepage: http://gnome-bt.sourceforge.net Download: apt://gnome-btdownload

OpenArena
Open source first person shooter

OpenArena is an open-source content package for Quake III Arena licensed under
the GPL, effectively creating a free stand-alone game.

The current release is 0.8.1. It is released on October 31, 2008.

How to install in some GNU/linux distributions:

Debian
apt-get install openarena

Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install openarena

Fedora
yum install openarena

Gentoo
emerge openarena

Madriva
urpmi openarena

Suse
yast2 -i openarena

Arch
pacman -S openarena

Ark
apt-get install openarena

Hello people,

yes, you can shiver at the title: we have (are still, actually) done a new package management frontend. Why? Because KDE missed a great one. Maybe some of you using Arch Linux will recognize the name Shaman: it is the default package manager frontend in Chakra, and my very first project with Qt. As such, it has grown quite old, and it’s showing the limits of my early programming skills, which made it almost unmaintainable by now. So me and Lukas (boom1992) decided to take it on a whirl and rewriting it from the ground up, with a more ambitious goal. We had some clear goals in mind:

• It should have been extensible to any package management system and integrated with it
• It should remain simple, and be extendable to the sky throughout plugins
• It should be completely asynchronous to bring the user the best possible experience
• It should be scriptable, to lower the barrier of the contributors and open up more possibilities to backends not in the C realm

There is one platform which actually makes this all possible, and it’s KDE So we created Shaman 2. What is it?

Chapter 1: Shaman for Developers

Before being a package manager, it is a library. Think about it as the Solid or the Phonon of package management. This library provides an easy to use interface to implement frontends, and an abstraction layer for building plugins and backends. A backend is an interface to a package management system, such as apt, yum, packagekit, alpm, whatever. It is implemented as a static plugin that will be chosen upon build. People who need to implement a backend have to reimplement Shaman::BackendInterface and Shaman::Package, and make it work. It’s really easy to do: the current packagekit backend weights ~900 lines of code (and a lot of them are made of strings) and it’s almost feature complete.

Also, in the spirit of giving the backend developers the maximum flexibility, not forcing them into workarounds and getting the best possible performance/user experience ratio, you can implement delayed loading, custom caching of the information, custom progress reporting (soon), custom searching implementations and more. Shaman comes already preloaded with “Insane rockstar settings” (cit.), a backend for PackageKit and one for Aqpm (pacman), but we are looking forward to people who would like to port Shaman 100% natively on platforms not fully supported by PackageKit. For example, Shaman will support soon streaming transaction questions with custom widgets and creating scripted backends. Did you see any references to apt and/or debconf here? I did not.

At the moment all the code in Shaman runs unprivileged: in the near future, though, it will be given the possibility to create a backend with root privileges just by giving a switch to Shaman at compile time. Thanks to some PolicyKit+DBus magic, the backend (and only the backend) will be run privileged and will require authorization to perform any actions. You still have the option of running Shaman as root, but these days it’s really nonsense. You can also simply bypass such a possiblity and implement this straight into the backend (as Aqpm and PackageKit do), but this boils down to be your choice.

What is extremely cool about Shaman, though, is its plugin system. Almost any functionality can be implemented through plugin, from the GUI or the core side. In fact, the 2 main widgets of the Shaman interface are plugins as well. Plugins have a very important role in Shaman, and can also play an active part in transactions. Every plugin, in fact, can register some “Hook”, that can be run after and/or before a transaction. Pre transaction hooks have also the power of reporting fatal errors and aborting the upcoming transaction before it even starts. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of room for making Shaman fully integrated with the underlying distribution and perform some annoying tasks not belonging to the package management system. For example, what about a plugin that after a transaction checks if the kernel was upgraded, and in case rebuilds the VirtualBox kernel module?

Scripting support, as I told you, is a priority. Even if it’s not working right now due to constant changes in the API, it will be made ready as soon as we reach a semi-stable API, and it will use Kross. The basics are already there and ready, so it’s just a matter of time. Help welcome on this side, especially from some Kross masters around

The API is still unstable but it’s stabilizing as I write this. You know where to reach me, if you’re interested, we can have a chat and you can bug me with some questions I look forward to plugin and backend developers

Chapter 2: Shaman for users

Anyway, what about the user interface? The user interface is meant to be non-modal when and where possible, simple & easy to use yet detailed, still remaining beautiful. How does it look like as of today? (Some screenshot here on Arch, some on Fedora, using Aqpm and PackageKit)

P.S.: The interface is changing by the minute and the default dialog sizes are much smaller than shown. Hey, this is a preview footage after all

You might or might not have noticed some small differences in the PackageKit and Aqpm UI. This is because Shaman adapts its UI depending on the capabilities of the backend. So you will never be shown something your backend does not know about. Well, unless the backend developer is cheating, of course

Shaman implements also some neat stuff: for example, your queue is retained on exit. This means that if you mark some packages to be processed, then your girlfriend calls you and you realize being already 30 minutes late for your date, just don’t worry: close Shaman and turn off your PC: the next time you will start Shaman, it will automagically restore the last queue, which will be ready to be processed. There is also a transaction logger ready for you, so that you won’t lose any bit of history.

There is also security: Shaman is meant to be run as a standard user, using technologies such as PolicyKit and KAuth for granting authorizations for privileged actions.

And it installs, removes and upgrades your packages too!

Near future development

Shaman as the frontend is only the first product in our quest to provide a fully integrated and KDE branded experience for package management. Those of you who used/tried Chakra might have run into, and hopefully loved, Chase, the automatic update system. Chase will be improved and ported over to libshaman (not a lot of work actually), to provide automatic updates in a fully integrated way. And there is also some stuff boiling in our minds to bring to Plasma some of the package management: we are planning on a Plasmoid which will serve as a global visualizator for transactions done through libshaman, and will also provide some very basic package management functions. All the three tools (Automatic updates, plasma widget/engine, Shaman) will be tightly integrated and cooperating, instead of conflicting (just as it happens with Shaman 1 and Chase in Chakra right now), to provide users an easy and integrated way of managing their software.

That’s all, folks

And I sincerely hope I raised some interest I am actually looking forward to distribution developers to get excited and use Shaman in their own distros. Up to now I have a VM for Fedora and Debian where Shaman runs great using the PackageKit backend.

The most important thing, is that Shaman is still not ready to be used. But for the brave souls and curious developers, playground/sysadmin/shaman is the place to be

I discovered this on my older laptop, the Dell Latitude C600. It has an S-Video output on it, so I decided to hunt down how to enable it. I’m running Debian Squeeze on it at the moment, so I ran this command to get the necessary utility:

sudo apt-get install atitvout

Then, with the S-Video cable plugged into the laptop at one end and a large (I’m guessing around 150cm (~60 inches) diagonal measurement) RCA-brand HDTV on the other, I ran the command like so:

sudo atitvout -f t

to force off the LCD screen and enable the S-Video output. To reverse this, just type:

sudo atitvout -f l

to disable the S-Video output and reenable the LCD screen.

Unfortunatly, I cannot yet get a higher resolution on the television screen than I can on my LCD, resulting in a blurry image. It would of course help to do some research on what resolutions the television will accept, but as I’m borrowing the S-Video cable, and must return it today, I simply won’t have the time to further experiment with it.

Also, I cannot enable BOTH the LCD and the S-Video output at the same time, from what I can determine from my experience and what Scroogle found. This would be a very handy feature to have, if I had to make a presentation that required hooking up to a projecter that had only an S-Video input and no VGA input. Good thing that’s very unlikely to happen! :|

Hi,

After long time I’m posting this. In this time, I got a fantastic experience of switching myself from ubuntu to debian. Reasons? may be silly but here they are,

1. From 8.10, I had a tough time with all the kernel’s ubuntu shipped and updated into my laptop, I was hit by a kernel acpi bug (http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11727) which still exists(in i686, not in x86_64). It pauses boot process when my laptop runs in battery and I need to press until init starts.

2. Nowadays, I hate the idea of ‘linux for everyone’. because ‘*nix’ systems are not for everyone. its for the one who like to learn computing.

3. My laptop lost DVD drive.

So I was in a mood to switch myself to something else. While surfing, I came to the debian website, their Installation guide explains howto install debian from a USB drive. Mine is Athlon64, so this time I went for x86_64. First I prepared my pendrive. For that we need to partition it using ‘fdisk’

$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

You can do this by running system->administration->partition-editor in Ubuntu. Once you created a new partition in your pendrive(/dev/sdb1), you need to format the partition as FAT32 using the following command

$ sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1

Once you formatted, the next step is to install ’syslinux’ into it, If your Ubuntu don’t have ’syslinux’ command, install ’syslinux’ package

$ sudo apt-get install syslinux
$ sudo syslinux /dev/sdb1

Now its time to download the installation files, I copied all the files from the following location and copied into /dev/sdb1. Finally the drive will look like this,

$ find /media/disk
.
./gtk
./gtk/vmlinuz
./gtk/initrd.gz
./syslinux.cfg
./vmlinuz
./initrd.gz
./ldlinux.sys
./MANIFEST
./boot.img.gz
$

And it is capable of booting using ’syslinux’ bootloader. To use Graphical Installer, we need to modify ’syslinux.cfg’ to look like this

default gtk/vmlinuz
append initrd=gtk/initrd.gz video=vesa:ywrap,mtrr vga=788

Once your pendrive is ready, unmount it and reboot the system, change the Boot order(In Compaq, press F9) and select the USB drive. The debian-installer will start asking questions, there on, its an easy ride. I didn’t install Gnome/Kde when the installer asked to choose one. I was interested in Xfce, so I postponed it.

In next post, I’ll tell you how I installed the 3rd layer(desktop).

will continue..

I just uploaded aptdaemon 0.11-1 and software-center 1.1debian1 to Debian unstable. They are currently waiting in NEW, and will hopefully pass it in a short time. I plan to replace gnome-app-install with software-center for Squeeze, but you can currently have both installed.

Ubuntu Software Center (or just ‘Software Center’) is a new graphical user interface for installing and removing applications; replacing gnome-app-install. Under the hood, it uses aptdaemon which exposes an interface to APT via D-Bus; i.e. something in the direction of PackageKit. At a later stage, the Software Center shall replace Synaptic, Update Manager and various other programs related to package management.

The aptdaemon package is completely compatible to the Ubuntu one, and could thus be synced directly to Ubuntu without any change (if Ubuntu supports “3.0 (quilt)” source packages now, I have not looked into this). The software-center package is based on the latest Ubuntu lucid package; and contains some generalization (e.g. replacing ‘Ubuntu Software Center’ with ‘Software Center’) at some more places. It still needs some work in the documentation and some parts of the program will have to be adjusted for Debian aswell. We also do not have a debianized icon yet; this will be worked on later.

In order to use the proxy remotely, from your remote machine create an SSH tunnel to the proxy server/port:

ssh -p 22 username@ssh-server-ip -L 8080:proxy-server-ip:proxy-port -N

Where… “-p 22″ is the default port of your SSH server (change it if it is different), “username” is your username on the SSH server, “ssh-server-ip” is the IP address of your remote SSH server, “proxy-server-ip” is the local IP address of your proxy server (i.e. its internal address, 192.168.1.whatever – If the SSH server and proxy server are on the same machine, use 127.0.0.1), and “proxy-port” is the… proxy port (8080 if you’ve been following along).

Now, you can go into a web browser on your remote machine, to proxy settings, and for the IP of the proxy server, type “localhost” OR “127.0.0.1″ and for the port, 8080. Your web traffic will now be tunneled across SSH to your server, then passed to your proxy server for protected surfing!

There are not many anti-virus tools included with Debian GNU/Linux, probably because GNU/Linux users are not plagued by viruses.

The Unix security model makes a distinction between privileged (root) processes and user-owned processes, therefore a “hostile” executable that a non-root user receives or creates and then executes cannot “infect” or otherwise manipulate the whole system.

However, GNU/Linux worms and viruses do exist, although there has not (yet, hopefully) been any that has spread in the wild over any Debian distribution. In any case, administrators might want to build up anti-virus gateways that protect against viruses arising on other, more vulnerable systems in their network.

Debian GNU/Linux currently provides the following tools for building antivirus environments:

• Clam Antivirus, provided since Debian sarge (3.1 release). Packages are provided both for the virus scanner (clamav) for the scanner daemon (clamav-daemon) and for the data files needed for the scanner. Since keeping an antivirus up-to-date is critical for it to work properly there are two different ways to get this data: clamav-freshclam provides a way to update the database through the Internet automatically and clamav-data which provides the data files directly.

• mailscanner an e-mail gateway virus scanner and spam detector. Using sendmail or exim as its basis, it can use more than 17 different virus scanning engines (including clamav).

• libfile-scan-perl which provides File::Scan, a Perl extension for scanning files for viruses. This modules can be used to make platform independent virus scanners.

• Amavis Next Generation, provided in the package amavis-ng and available in sarge, which is a mail virus scanner which integrates with different MTA (Exim, Sendmail, Postfix, or Qmail) and supports over 15 virus scanning engines (including clamav, File::Scan and openantivirus).

• sanitizer, a tool that uses the procmail package, which can scan email attachments for viruses, block attachments based on their filenames, and more.

• amavis-postfix, a script that provides an interface from a mail transport agent to one or more commercial virus scanners (this package is built with support for the postfix MTA only).

• exiscan, an e-mail virus scanner written in Perl that works with Exim.

• blackhole-qmail a spam filter for Qmail with built-in support for Clamav.

Some gateway daemons support already tools extensions to build antivirus environments including exim4-daemon-heavy (the heavy version of the Exim MTA), frox (a transparent caching ftp proxy server), messagewall (an SMTP proxy daemon) and pop3vscan (a transparent POP3 proxy).

Debian currently provide clamav as the only antivirus scanning software in the main official distribution and it also provides multiple interfaces to build gateways with antivirus capabilities for different protocols.

Some other free software antivirus projects which might be included in future Debian GNU/Linux releases:

• Open Antivirus (see Bug #150698 (ITP oav-scannerdaemon) and Bug #150695 (ITP oav-update) ).

FIXME: Is there a package that provides a script to download the latest virus signatures from http://www.openantivirus.org/latest.php?

FIXME: Check if scannerdaemon is the same as the open antivirus scanner daemon (read ITPs).

However, Debian will never provide propietary (non-free and undistributable) antivirus software such as: Panda Antivirus, NAI Netshield, Sophos Sweep, TrendMicro Interscan, or RAV. For more pointers see the Linux antivirus software mini-FAQ. This does not mean that this software cannot be installed properly in a Debian system

Each time I launch a graphical application like gedit as a non-root user, I get this error :

(gedit:1376): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: “ubuntulooks”

To solve this problem, please install the following Debian package :

root@localhost:~# apt-get install gtk2-engines-ubuntulooks

Try to relaunch your graphical application :

foo@localhost:~$ gedit &

You will  not get the initial error message anymore.

There are lot’s of network scanner for debian and ubuntu package.

You can use it and play around with it.

• nmap

• xprobe

• p0f

• knocker

• isic

• hping2

• icmpush

• nbtscan (for SMB /NetBIOS audits)

• fragrouter

• strobe (in the netdiag package)

• irpas

While xprobe provide only remote operating system detection (using TCP/IP fingerprinting, nmap and knocker do both operating system detection and port scanning of the remote hosts. On the other hand,hping2 and icmpush can be used for remote ICMP attack techniques.

Designed specifically for SMB networks, nbtscan can be used to scan IP networks and retrieve name information from SMB-enabled servers, including: usernames, network names, MAC addresses…

On the other hand, fragrouter can be used to test network intrusion detection systems and see if the NIDS can be eluded by fragmentation attacks.

How to install :

aptitude install XXXXX