The New Era

Has someone asked itself about what’s going on?

Some days ago I did and I realized that there are too many things happening in the world, I used to think the future will come, but the very truth is that the future is here, and is reaching us so fast that we can’t even notice.

Some time ago I read about the Web 2.0 and how It’s was going to be, but the Web 2.0 was already here, and the Web 3.0 it’s getting closer, I loved the Wikipedia’s analogy about the Web:

• Web 1.0 (read-only)
• Web 2.0 (read-write)
• Web 3.0 (read-write-execute)

When I was a child, I used to think about the future, the flying cars, the houses in the moon, a lot of things that seemed like I got them from a drunk person.

Now we don’t have houses on the moon, but we got smartphones, with wi-fi, mms, e-mail, etc. Why hire an assistant if you can get a smartphone?, Why contract a phone line if we can set up a VoIP phone?, Why use the postal service if I can send an e-mail?, I don’t have to go to library anymore because I have Internet, I don’t even have to read a book, the computer does, and sometimes I don’t use the mouse or the keyboard, with a bluetooth hands free I give orders to the computer.

As a computer engineer, I wonder, Why do it if I can code it?

The IA was a dream, now It’s a reality. The human brain has created many awesome things, I hope we can use our brilliant mind to do something good with the earth. Everything’s going to change soon, the new era won’t come, it’s already here and we have to move on.

Some years ago the big deal was to create the tools, now the big deal is what to do with the tools?

What’s gonna happen now?

What will follow our present?

We are living our parent’s future, now we have to make our’s.

Java Course

You can find the Java course by Cisco here.

http://rapidshare.com/files/146058010/Curricula.tar.gz.html

Let your computer reads for you

I found a little program text-to-speech, TextAloud is a program wich has some voices, the crack for the program and the crack to the Jorge’s voice.

http://rapidshare.com/files/88536416/TA2173.rar.html

I’ll edit this later.

Mount NTFS partitions with write permission

To enable the NTFS to write you have to install the ntfs-3g package, well in a terminal as root type:

# apt-get install ntfs-3g

And you’ll have the package installed, now you have to enable int the fstab file, these are my lines:

/dev/sda5 /home/fobia/doks ntfs-3g umask=0,force 0 0
/dev/sda2 /home/fobia/xp ntfs-3g silent,umask=0,locale=es_ES.utf8 0 0

I had some problems, so I added the force option, but the sda2 partition worked pretty good, so sda5 does, but I haven’t changed that, anyway this configuration works.

If you don’t have any problem without activating the force option, then don’t do it, because can be dangerous.

Root access exploiting a kernel bug

The uid and gid have a little bug that allow users being root, obviously it’s not that simple, the source code in the exploit(written in C and Assembler) let you have access as root, without asking for a password, this bug can be great if you wanna hack a system, but for the ones that want protect their system it’s a really huge problem.

It can be fixed, the bug just can be exploited in 2.6.24.1 kernel and olders, actually, if you got a newer kernel you don’t have to be afraid.

Well you just have to compile and run the program, but it will be great if you understand the source code, the bug was improved from an older version, anyway, it works really good, here you have a couple of screenshots.

if you want the code, write a comment and i’ll mail you.

Root shell from grub

Well now, I’ll show you a trick to get root access without any password, from the grub it’s pretty simple, we’ll get access like recovery mode, and that will give us the root shell, just by modifying one line.

When the grub boots, type ‘e’ to edit the line that boots linux, then you’ll see some lines, edit the line that contains the kernel, then somewhere you’ll se ‘ro quiet’ or something like that, then erase from the end until the ro and edit to

ro init=/bin/bash

bash is the shell we want, it can be csh or sh.

Then press return and you’ll return to the lines of the grub in your linux choice, DON’T TYPE RETURN TO BOOT, BECAUSE THE TRICK WON’T WORK, YOU HAVE TO TYPE ‘b’ TO BOOT WITH THE LINE WE CHANGED, then you’ll have the root access.

Here’s the video hos this works.

Enjoy it

Repositories in Debian Etch

Well my friend Roger wants to know how to drop the damn dvd away, because is better download the packages, instead of download dvds that maybe you won’t use again.

This is with debian etch, if you use another version of debian just change etch to lenny, sid, or whatever you use.

These are the principal repositories, there’s a lot, but if you don’t know how this works, don’t get your sources.list stuck because you can get some errors of versions, don’t mix stable with unstable or testing, it’s dangerous, it’s under your own risk.

Well, just edit your sources.list file, to do that in a terminal as root type:

# vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Add a # at the beginning to every line that says something about cdrom

then at the end of the file, if don’t have them, add these lines:

#Etch

deb http://security.debian.org etch/updates main contrib non-free

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

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free

deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free

Then your sources.list will be something like this:

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r2 _etch_ - Official i386 CD Binary-1 20080102-13:35]/ etch contrib main

#deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r2 _etch_ - Official i386 CD Binary-1 20080102-13:35]/ etch contrib main

#Etch

deb http://security.debian.org etch/updates main contrib non-free

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

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free

deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free

Then just update your apt, as root type:

# apt-get update

And the next time you need some package it will be downloaded.

Hope it helps.

Mount NTFS partition without being root

Have you realized when you install debian, you can mount your NTFS or FAT partition only if you are root??

Well the solution is the fstab file, I had the same problem, you can find the answer reading the manpage of fstab, but we’re not used to read the documentation.

You must understand what the line means, read your manpage just writing:

$ man fstab

And you’ll understand what my line means, well I added this line to my fstab,

# vim /etc/fstab

I didn’t have the partition in the file, so I wrote it, if you have your partition just edit your line.

/dev/sda5 /home/fobia/doks ntfs nls=utf8,umask=022 0 0

And when you reboot, you’ll see your NTFS partitions mounted, now I’ll install the ntfs and edit my fstab again, I’ll let you know how that goes.

Debian Lenny

I just installed Debian Lenny amd64, with 2.6.22-2 kernel, and now I can’t wait for the final release, I installed it in the laptop, and almost everything went fine, unless the Intel 3945ABG Wireless card and the Intel HDA sound, so I’m gonna show you how I made that work.

First the sound.

1. We gotta know what card we got, so we’ll run:

$ lspci | grep Audio

I got: 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)

If you get something like that, then this is going to work for you.

2. Now as root we’ll add this line to sound file, mi laptop is acer, and it works this way, I’m not really sure what you have to write if you don’t have an Acer PC.

# echo options snd-hda-intel model=acer > /etc/modprobe.d/sound

3. And install the ALSA utilities:

# aptitude install alsa-source alsa-tools alsa-tools-gui alsamixergui alsa-oss

4. To finish you have to recompile the ALSA source, just typing:

# m-a a-i alsa

When you reboot, you’ll have the sound working, It pretty simple ^_^

Now the Wireless, in this part we will recompile the iwl3945 source, we can’t install ipw3945 because the ipw3945 for this kernel doesn’t have x64 support, well I haven’t found it yet, anyway, iwl3945 is newer and it’s gonna work better

I tried many ways to keep my wireless working but just this worked, with etch I had ipw3945 working pretty good, but I didn’t have my video driver, I tried recompiling my kernel but It didn’t work, I did something wrong, i guess, that’s why I get Debian Lenny, well the original post is this, I’m just writing that again, but I did it just the way it says and It worked.

Preparation

To double check that you have the right hardware, you may need to update your PCI IDs. (And while you’re at it, you may as well update the USB IDs.)

 update-pciids
 update-usbids

This guide assumes that you are running a kernel version of 2.6.22 or later. If you are running Debian etch, then the 2.6.22 kernel is available from the etch-backports repository. A sample line for your /etc/apt/sources.list is as follows and at the time of writing, the package name is linux-image-2.6.22-2-686 (or -amd64).

 deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main contrib non-free

If you have edited your /etc/apt/sources.list you will need to run aptitude update. If you have installed a new kernel, you may as well reboot into that kernel before proceeding as the use of uname below assumes that you are running the kernel for which you want to compile the module.

Installation

This guide assumes that you have set the variable $KVER to contain the current version of your kernel (e.g. 2.6.22). This can be done as follows:

 KVER=$(uname -r | sed 's,-.*,,g')

Now, obtain the kernel source and headers (both appear to be necessary at this stage) along with the firmware and make sure you have the necessary compilation tools installed:

 aptitude install linux-headers-$(uname -r) linux-source-$KVER \
       firmware-iwlwifi build-essential wireless-tools

Note that the firmware-iwlwifi package is only available in lenny/sid and that you need to either add them to your /etc/apt/sources.list too, or manually download that .deb and install it using dpkg -i.

The kernel source needs to be unpacked and a symlink put in place so that the module compiles correctly:

 cd /usr/src
 tar jxf linux-source-$KVER.tar.bz2
 ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-$KVER /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/source

Now, obtain the latest module source code. At the time of writing, it was version 1.1.18 which is known to work with 2.6.22. You can check on the iwlwifi pages for the current module status.

 wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-1.1.18.tgz
 tar zxf iwlwifi-1.1.18.tgz

You may now compile the driver. Note that you may be required to run make twice; follow the instructions that it prints out for you.

 cd iwlwifi-1.1.18
 make
 make install

To make the module visible to your running kernel, you may like to run depmod -a.

Usage

To load the module into the kernel:

 modprobe iwl4965

Well, that's it for now, hope it helps you.

The New Stage

Well the time of dancing, hanging up is over, now I start the new school time.

I’ll be back with more posts, I’m downloading the Debian Lenny Testing I’ll post how it’s going with it.

See u in the next post