MATE : Linux Desktop environment

May 20, 2012

MATE-desktop

Windows and Desktops

Most Linux users will be familiar with Gnome, KDE, LXDE and XFCE desktop environments (DE), there are many other DE’s or window managers (WM) in the world to look at, some of which use tiling rather than layering interfaces and have become very popular.

We’ve also recently seen Cinnamon and MATE appear on the scene, almost as a retaliation to Ubuntu’s UNITY preference, and Gnome3 respectively.

I’ve used all the ones mentioned above and  XFCE was my prefered choice for a very long time, due to it’s middle-grounding of features and performance. Now I have found a new champion in MATE.
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Optware for your router

May 14, 2012 1 Comment

In my previous post I shared with you some quick details about flashing the Linksys E3200. None of this wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the great work done by Eko and many others on the forums and in particular the thread found here

When flashed some features were not initially working, (A) 5Ghz wifi, (B) NTFS support which is useful for many when connecting a USB drive to the router.
I’ve since moved my USB hard drive to a different location on my network, and instead purchased a micro-USB device to sit hidden in the back of the router, search for something like “Hewlett Packard 8GB V165 USB” that fits the bill nicely.

The USB thumb drive is important to installing Optware, which in turn will allow you to increase the functionality of your router, including (but now probably useless to you) NTFS support, transmission torrent daemon, snort and other IDS tools, bash, even X11(remote display) and lots more.

So how to install. Well again we are fortunate enough that some people have been there and got the T-shirt then kindly wrote a guide for us which can be found here. I’m just going to briefly mention the steps here but I strongly advise you to read that guide.

  • Partition your USB device to have 1x SWAP : 32MB in size, 1x ext2 or ext3 512MB in size, the rest of the space can be used for your “data” storage.
  • You can turn off JFFS support via your web interface as this doesn’t appear to be needed. Because there is no NTFS partition on your USB drive, it should mount automatically, this can be checked via your router’s web-interface –> Services –> USB. See note 1.
  • Your 512MB partition should be mounted at /opt on your router. This gives you the space you need to install the optware applications
  • Telnet or SSH in and issue the commands “wget -O /tmp/prep_optware http://wd.mirmana.com/prep_optware” and then “sh /tmp/prep_optware” This will download an install script, and then run it.
  • After installation is complete you should be able to happily reboot the router

*Note1 : For some reason both the data and opt partitions get mounted in /opt on the router. The easiest way to resolve for is to visit your routers web-interface –> Administration –> Commands and then save the following to your startup option:

umount /opt
umount /opt
mount -t ext2 /dev/discs/disc0/part1 /opt
mount -o noatime -t ext2 /dev/discs/disc0/part3 /mnt
swapon /dev/discs/disc0/part2

You now have Optware installed, the world is your oyster, allowing you to issue “service” commands, run “ipkg-opt update”, “ipkg-opt upgrade”, and “ipkg-opt list” to update your package list, upgrade any packages if needed, and then show you a list of all packages you can download and install.

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E3200 Router flashed with DD-WRT firmware

May 11, 2012

E3200 routerI have been planning for a couple of months to set-up an internet gateway running Linux. I wanted the opportunity to have a “production” place to setup and play with firewalls (iptables), logging and Intrusion Detection Systems but this would all cost me money and my money tree died long ago.

I am using a Linksys E3200 router, its sleek, got power and support 5Ghz wifi, it also provided the opportunity to flash the device with DD-WRT firmware.

A big problem for DD-WRT.com website is that the information is wildly out of date or messy. It took 3 days of reading the wiki, the database of supported devices and the forums before I had the confident that I could flash the router without bricking it. Let this be a warning to all that are interested in updating their router to custom / open-source firmware, if you do it wrong you will likely brick your device rendering it useless.

The advantages

Normally a router will limit the user to the web interface when you connect to it via your web-browser. All the flexibility and power is hidden but we can set it free allowing us to make use of the 500Mhz processor, memory and providing you with a Linux interface.

Immediately this is acting like a mini-PC with enough power to run a mini distribution Linux, a firewall, IDS, Secure Shell (SSH), FTP, even a basic web host if you desire.

I followed the steps found at this wiki page, making a change only with the firmware version that I flashed the device with.

  1. READ the Peacock Announcement Carefully! http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=51486
  2. Disconnect all cables and wireless clients.
  3. Do a 30/30/30 reset on router
  4. Connect 1 Lan cable to pc doing the flash.
  5. Log into Web Interface and flash the firmware 17201 E3200 Trailed Initial Flash Builddd-wrt.v24-18946_NEWD-2_K2.6_mini-e3200.bin
  6. Wait 10 minutes until WLAN (wireless) light turns on.
  7. Power cycle by unplugging E3200 for 30 secs.
  8. Plug E3200 back in and wait about 5 minutes until it finishes booting.
  9. Do a 30/30/30 reset on router.
  10. Wait 3 minutes and log into web interface.

Notes

Be aware that the initial flash must be done using the mini-E3200 binary, if you try to jump straight to the other file it’ll brick your device.
The Mega file will open up features on your E3200 such as the USB driver. At the moment the 5Ghz wifi isn’t supported as the drivers for this have only just been released to the open-source community and is now being developed for future releases.

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HTC One X

April 9, 2012

I recently got my hands on a HTC One X (Black, not White!). It’s much wider than any previous phones I’ve used, although a bit smaller than the Samsung Note a family member got on the same day.

The processing power of a quad core processor sounds impressive, but I did quickly notice an issue with Fruit Ninja game that is so popular among mobile and Xbox gamers. The smoothness of the game compared to my old HTC Desire is notably less, I suspect this is down to the game needing to be recompiled to make use of the processor power at hand.

Other market apps are actually not really any different in performance, it’s features such as the facial recognition when unlocking the phone, the camera being the fastest on any phone in the world today, and the quality of the screen are all top notch. Read more of this post

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ePetition to UK Government to move to Linux

April 3, 2012

In the UK a genius once decided to create an ePetition website where each petition that receives over 100,000 signatures will be noted and reviewed by the government.

There is a new petition to the UK government to encourage them to review their IT architecture that is currently heavily influenced by Microsoft, and consider moving across to Open Source and free software such as Linux.

Sign up here: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32255

The petition points out the irony of how the UK government produces all it’s cost saving schemes at the expense to the tax payer, rather than reviewing their own internal expenses such as IT costs, something the NHS(National Health Service) has be criticised of for decades for example.

Lets hope….

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Regular Expressions : (Regex|Regexp) part 2

February 7, 2012

This post is a continuation from Regular Expressions: (Regex|Regexp) Part 1.

Regular Expressions

Regex Ninja

As I continue to learn and grow with Regular Expressions (regex) I am really enjoying my new found knowledge. Regex isn’t exactly something that might spring to mind as being exciting, or something that stands out as being worth learning, but I’ve come to realise that studying this subject has helped me improve my methodology and thinking of how computers work.

In my daily job I can easily identify the difference between a technally savvy individual, and one who just thinks computers speak English. The later make some shocking assumpions, the former are normally people who possess logical and systomatic thinking, just what you need for wielding regex skills.

In the last guide we covered quite a bit fo the basics to understanding regular expressions. We’ll continue this expanding more on the basics.
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