Archive for October, 2011
Saturday, October 8th, 2011 
Triumph of the Nerds is 3 parts documentary movie on how the Personal Computer was developed. The movie features interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Allan Paul and many other IT veterans who played key roles for the development of the Personal Computer ,
The movie is an interesting watching for people interested into Information Technology and gives some minor insights on the starred interviewed people and their life philosophy. It was interesting times back then and it seems many of the guys who could participate in the PCs were very lucky, where others who made key developments which are de-facto standards today went into history without much being remembered.
Now the trends which these man set in world’s development is not nice. Even though PC brough a lot of fun in our every lives it suddenly started taking over our privacy and made the humanity divided.
The movie is a story of a man motivated by greed arrogancy and exploitation. Even though the movie has historical value it doesn’t even mention about Free Software Richard Stallman and the free software movement.
The movie talks about the development of CP/M the predecessor of Quick and Dirty DOS (QDOS), MS-DOS Windows 1,2,3, Windows 95 etc.
It also tries to picture the events around the raise and fall of IBM and OS/2.
The most notable parts for me in the movie are the showing off of some old computer hardware and Mainframe servers as well as the quick explanation on how Mainframes irons predecessed the PC. Another interesting moment in the movie is displaying Steve Jobs demonstrating the Xerox’s Alto graphical interface. Talking about Jobs it was quite shocking for the world his sudden death just 3 days ago so (R.I.P).
The movie author Robert X. Cringery stress out in the movie the great struggle between the so called “the blue Elephant” IBM and the just emerging early Microsoft Corporation
Triumph of the Nerds slightly mentions Digital Equipment Corporation / DEC or COMPAQ as later known. DEC is company less known in todays world which had historically great impact on computer market, so its a pity the movie part mentioning DEC is so short.
What the movie misses is to aforemention About’s Digital Equipment VMS operating system known under the code name OpenVMS. OpenVMS even of today is believed by many to be the most secure Operating System ever developed.
The movie part that talks about DEC is the second part of movie it shows a nice COMPAQ portable computer.
One should admit COMPAQ portable Computer is a really trendy for its time, Also the way it sticks the keyboard to the screen does remind seriously the opening and closing of a modern laptop 😉
The movie includes some interesting, so called crash courses where the movie author gives some insight on elementary computing, so for those new to informatix the movie will surely be educative as well, though for a UNIX gurus this elementary computing scenes will look kinda ridiculous 😉
One serious flaw with this movie is the complete lack of interviews with Richard Stallman and the importance of Free Software for the development of modern PC and the influence of the free software culture on todays latest Macintosh and PC developments.
A related movie which probably most IT geeks already know / seen is Pirates of the Sillicon Valley
, hence large chunk of Triumph of the Nerds gives another point of view on the ideas and stories presented in Triumph of the Nerds
Triumph of the Nerds brings back some good memories of the glorious PC computer past for all of us who had been a DR-DOS/MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 / 95 users.
Tags: Alto, arrogancy, author robert, being, bill gates, blue elephant, Computer, computing, de facto standards, death, DEC, development of the personal computer, doesn, equipment, explanation, Free, free software movement, graphical interface, greed, interesting times, key developments, life philosophy, mainframe servers, movement, ms dos windows, MS-DOS, old computer, os 2, philosophy, Privacy, qdos, quot, richard stallman, software, steve ballmer, steve jobs, story, stress, triumph, triumph of the nerds, value, watching
Posted in Business Management, Entertainment, Everyday Life | 4 Comments »
Friday, October 7th, 2011 
RarCrack is able to crack rar and 7z archive files protected by password on Linux.
The program is currently at release version 0.2, so its far from perfection, but at least it can break rars.
RarCrack is currently installable on most Linux distributions only from source, to install on a random Linux distro, download and make && make install . RarCrack’s official site is here, I’ve mirrored the current version of RarCrack for download here . To install rarcrack from source using the mirrored version:
linux:~# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2
...
linux:~# tar -jxvvf rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2
linux:~# cd rarcrack-0.2
linux:~/rarcrack-0.2# make
...
linux:~/rarcrack-0.2# make install
...
On FreeBSD, rarcrack is available and installable via the ports tree, to install on FreeBSD:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/security/rarcrack
freebsd# make && make install
...
To use RarCrack to crack rar, zip or 7z archive file:
freebsd% rarcrack rar_file_protected_with_password.rar --type rar
The argument –type rar is optional, in most archives RarCrack should detect the archive automatically. The –type option could also take the arguments of rar and 7z .
I’ve created a sample rar file protected with password linux_then_and_now.png.rar . The archive linux_then_and_now.png contains a graphic file illustrating the linux growth in use in computers, mobiles and servers. linux_then_and_now.png.rar is protected with the sample password parola
RarCrack also supports threads (a simultaneous instance spawned copies of the program). Using threads speeds up the process of cracking and thus using the –threads is generally a good idea. Hence a good way to use rarcrack with the –threads option is:
freebsd% rarcrack linux_then_and_now.png.rar --threads 8 --type rar
RarCrack! 0.2 by David Zoltan Kedves (kedazo@gmail.com)
INFO: the specified archive type: rar
INFO: cracking linux_then_and_now.png.rar, status file: linux_then_and_now.png.rar.xml
Probing: '0i' [24 pwds/sec]
Probing: '1v' [25 pwds/sec]
RarCrack‘s source archive also comes with three sample archive files (rar, 7z and zip) protected with passwords for the sake of testing the tool.
One downside of RarCrack is its extremely slow in breaking the passwords on my Lenovo notebook – dual core 1.8ghz with 2g ram it was able to brute force only 20-25 passwords per second.
This means cracking a normal password of 6 symbols will take at least 5 hours.
RarCrack is also said to support cracking zip passwords, but my tests to crack password protected zip file did not bring good results and even one of the tests ended with a segmentation fault.
To test how rarcrack performs with password protected zip files and hence compare if it is superior or inferior to fcrackzip, I used the fcrackzip’s sample pass protected zip noradi.zip
hipo@noah:~$ rarcrack --threads 8 noradi.zip --type zip
2 by David Zoltan Kedves (kedazo@gmail.com)
INFO: the specified archive type: zip
INFO: cracking noradi.zip, status file: noradi.zip.xml
Probing: 'hP' [386 pwds/sec]
Probing: 'At' [385 pwds/sec]
Probing: 'ST' [380 pwds/sec]
As you can see in above’s command output, the zip password cracking rate of approximately 380 passwords per second is a bit quicker, but still slower than fcrackzip.
RarCrack seg faults if cracking a pass protected zip is passed on without specifying the –type zip command arguments:
linux:~$ rarcrack --threads 8 noradi.zip
RarCrack! 0.2 by David Zoltan Kedves (kedazo@gmail.com)
Segmentation fault
While talking about cracking protected rar and zip archives with password, its worthy to mention creating a password protected archive with Gnome Desktop on Linux and FreeBSD is very easy.
To create the password protected archive in Gnome graphic environment:
a. Point the cursor to the file you want to archive with password
b. Press on Other Options and fill in the password in the pwd dialog
I think as of time of writting, no GUI frontend interface for neither RarCrack or FcrackZip is available. Lets hope some good guy from the community will take the time to write extension for Gnome to allow us to crack rar and zip from a nice GUI interface.
Tags: amp, archive type, argument, argument type, bz2 linux, com, current version, download, fcrackzip, file, freak, Gmail, Gnome, gnu linux, instance, Linux, linux cd, linux growth, linux tar, most linux distributions, option, password, png, ports, random linux, rar, rarcrackfreebsd, rarINFO, second, segmentation, status, tar bz2, time, tool, tree, type, type option, usr, version linux, wget, xml, zoltan
Posted in Computer Security, System Administration, Various | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 
Its not very common, but sometimes it happens you have to crack some downloaded file from thepiratebay.com or some other big torrent tracker. An example scenario would be downloading a huge words dictionary (a rainbow tables) dictionary etc., which was protected by the author with a password and zipped.
Fortunately Mark Lehmann developed a software called fcrackzip which is capable of brute forcing zip protected file passwords straight on UNIX like operating systems (GNU/Linux, FreeBSD).
fcrackzip is available from package repositories on Debian and Ubuntu Linuces to install via apt:
linux:~# apt-get install frackzip
...
fcrackzip is also available on FreeBSD via the ports tree and can be installed with:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/security/fcrackzip
freebsd# make install cleam
On Debian it's worthy to have a quick look on the README file:
linux:~# cat /usr/share/doc/fcrackzip/READMESee fcrackzip.txt (which is derived from the manpage), or fcrackzip.html
There is a web page with more information at
http://lehmann.home.ml.org/fcrackzip.html or
http://www.goof.com/pcg/marc/fcrackzip.html
A sample password-protected .zip file is included as "noradi.zip". It's
password has 6 lower case characters, and fcrackzip will find it (and a
number of false positives) with
fcrackzip -b -c a -p aaaaaa ./noradi.zip
which will take between one and thirty minutes on typical machines.
To find out which of these passwords is the right one either try them out
or use the –use-unzip option.
Marc
Cracking the noradi.zip password protected sample file on my dual core 1.8 ghz box with 2gb, it took 30 seconds.
linux:~# time fcrackzip -u -b -c a -p aaaaaa noradi.zip
PASSWORD FOUND!!!!: pw == noradi
real 0m29.627s
user 0m29.530s
sys 0m0.064s
Of course the sample set password for noradi.zip is pretty trivial and with more complex passwords, sometimes cracking the password can take up to 30 minutes or an hour and it all depends on the specific case, but at least now we the free software users have a new tool in the growing arsenal of free software programs 😉
Here are the options passed on to the above fcrackzip command:
-u – Try to decompress with the detected possible archive passwords using unzip (This is necessery to precisely find the archive password, otherwise it will just print out a number of possible matching archive passwords and you have to try each of the passwords one by one. Note that this option depends on a working unzip version installed.)
-c a – include all charsets to be tried with the generated passwords
-b – Select brute force mode – Tries all possible combinations of letters specified
-p aaaaaa – init-password string (Look up for a password between the password length 6 characters long)
FCrackZip is partly written in assembler and thus is generally works fast, to reduce the CPU load fcrackzip will put on the processor its also capable of using external words dictionary file by passing it the option:
-D – The file should be in a format one word per line and be preliminary alphabetically sorted with let's say sort
Also fcrackzip supports parallel file brute force, for example if you have 10 zip files protected with passwords it can paralelly try to brute force the pwds.
As of time of writting frackzip reached version 1.0 and seems to be pretty stable. Happy cracking.
Just to make sure fcrackzip's source is not lost somewhere in the line in the long future to come, I've created a fcrackzip download mirror here
Tags: brute, case characters, com, downloaded file, dual core, example scenario, false positives, fcrackzip, file, file linux, frackzip, gnu linux, goof, htmlThere, information, lehmann, linux freebsd, linux?, lower case, manpage, number, option, outor, package, page, password, pcg, quot, README, readme file, READMESee, repositories, right, softw, software, spassword, TABLE, time, torrent tracker, tree, Ubuntu, withfcrackzip, words dictionary, zip file, zippassword
Posted in Computer Security, Hacks, System Administration | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 
saidar is a text based ncurses program to display live statistics about general system health.
It displays in one refreshable screen (similar to top) statistics about server state of:
CPU, Load, Memory, Swap, Network, I/O disk operations
Besides that saidar supports a ncurses console colors, which makes it more funny to look at.
Saidar extracts the statistics for system state based on libgstrap cross platform statistics library about pc system health.
On Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS Linuxes saider is available for install straight from distribution repositories.
On Debian and Ubuntu saidar is installed with cmd:
debian:~# apt-get install saidar
...
On CentOS and Fedora saidar is bundled as a part of statgrab-tools rpm package.
Installing it on 64 bit CentOS with yum is with command:
[root@centos ~]# yum install statgrab-tools.x86_64
Saidar is also available on FreeBSD as a part of the /usr/ports/devel/libgstrab, hence to use on my FreeBSD I had to install the libgstrab port:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/devel/libstatgrab
freebsd# make install clean
Here is saidar running on my Desktop Debian on Thinkpad in color output:
debian:~# saidar -c
I've seen many people, who use various shell scripts to output system monitoring information, this scripts however are often written to just run without efficiency in mind and they put some let's say 1% extra load on the system CPU. This is not the case with saidar which is written in C and hence the program is optimized well for what it does.
Update: Next to saidar I recommend you check out Slurm (Real Time Network Interface Monitor) it can visualizes network interface traffic using ascii graph such as on top of the article. On Debian and Ubuntu Slurm is available and easily installable via simple:
apt-get install –yes slurm
Tags: CentOS, cleanHere, cpu load, cross platform, Desktop, desktop system, Disk, disk operations, distribution, extracts, fedora, freebsd, health, information, libgstrab, libgstrap, Linux, Load, load memory, memory, Monitor General Server Desktop, package, platform, ports, repositories, root, rpm, saidar, saider, screen, server desktop, server state, Shell, shell scripts, Slurm Real Time Network Interface Monitor, statistics library, system cpu, system health, text, thinkpad, Ubuntu, use, yum
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, Monitoring, Networking, System Administration | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 3rd, 2011 
Gcompris is a great piece of software to educate children in the age interval of 2 to 10 years old.
Gcompris is a tool of educative and funny interactive computer applications many of which has a form of games.
Gcompris is teaching the children on the following fields of knowledge:
- understand the computer – keyboard, mouse etc.
- Algebra – Summing up numbers, enumarations, table memory, mirror image etc.
- Science – The Canal lock, the water cycle, how a submarine works, elementary electric simulation
- Geography – Find out about country locations, Place the country on the map
- Games – Learn how to play chess, improve memory and memorization, sudoku etc.
- Reading – Learning to read fluent, reading practice
- Learn to proerply tell time, solve puzzle games and learn famous paintings, basic cartoon making, vector drawing
All the funny activities Gcompris educative kid tool offers 100+. Gcompris is in active development so with time more and more activities gets added.
Gcompris is a Free Software and among with its native GNU / Linux support it has ports for Windows and Mac OS X
The Free Software nature of Gcompris gives possibility to be easily adapted and further developed! Its really funny not only for kids, but even for adults. If you had a stressy day and you want to relax in a childish way and feel like a kid again, give it a try and you will be amazed how much light and happiness this computer program can bless you with 😉
Many of Gcompris activities has a little cute penguins and in general its capable of introducing the kids to the nice concept of the free software.
As a free software Gcompris is really great as among the rest of the so popular free software freedoms: to distribute and modify the software it comes absolutely free of charge (in money terms). This is great news for parents who are growing their kids in the “developing world”, the so called 2nd and 3rd world as well is a good alternative to the many available paid costly application and games aiming at kids brain development.
The name Gcompris is also known in free software realm under the name I GOT IT .Gcompris has currently Sound and text support for 33 Country Languages, here is a completele list of languages currently supported:
Arabic, Asturian, Bulgarian, Breton, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Indian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Indian, Norwegian, Dutch, Norwegian, Punjabi, Portuguese, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Urdu, Chinese
Some of the languages supported still does not have a 100% translation but partially translated as its a question of time that enough translators are found to make the translations for all available major languages. The only 100% completed trasnlation as of time of writting is in French, Slovenian and Spanish
Gcompris is already included in almost all available moderm GNU / Linux distributions. A packaged version of it is part of Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu.
For all those parents who wish to educate their children on Fedora Linux install it with the GUI installer or yum with cmd:
[root@fedora ~]# yum install gcompris
...
On Debian and Ubuntu Gcompris is installable via apt from repos:
debian:~# apt-get install gcompris
...
To add a text and sound translation to Gcompris its also necessery to install the relevant gcompris-sound distribution package, for example to add the sound translations for my native Bulgarian language I had to install the package gcompris-sound-bg, e.g.:
debian:~# apt-get install gcompris-sound-bg
...
Gcompris is developed to use the Gnome’s GTK and is a perfect match for Linux users who already run a Gnome Desktop on their PCs.
Most of Gcompris versions should run without much hassle on Mac OS X and Windows so all mommies and daddies on Windows or Mac can install it and use it to educate their kids 😉
Here are few more screenshots of Gcompris
Gcompris also fits well with Tux for Kids Linux / Windows ready games also suitable for kids development. Gcompris and Tux for Kids makes Linux and free software more “children mature” and is a perfect to be used on kids educational computers in kindergartens or any educational institutions aiming at children development.
To sum it up, if you want to make your children smarter or you’re bored to death and you need to have some rest by going back to your childhood years give gcompris a try 😉
Tags: active development, age, canal lock, cartoon, computer keyboard, cycle, developing world, famous paintings, Free, gcompris, Gnome, gnu linux, how to play chess, intellect, interactive computer applications, keyboard mouse, kid, Learn, linux support, linux windows, mac os x, memorization, mirror image, money terms, nbsp, package, piece, puzzle games, quality educational software, quot, reading, reading practice, software, software nature, Sound, submarine, support, text, time, tool, Ubuntu, water cycle
Posted in Entertainment, Games Linux, Linux, Various, Windows | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 3rd, 2011 
Lately, I have to deal with some wordpress based installs in big part of my working time. One of the wordpress sites needed to have added a multi language support.
My first research in Google pointed me to WPML Multilingual CMS The WordPress Multilingual Plugin
WPML Multilingual CMS looks nice and easy to use but unfortunately its paid, the company couldn’t afford to pay for the plugin so I looked forward online for a free alternative and stumbled upon QTranslate
QTranslate is free and very easy to install. Its installed the wordpress classic way and the installation went smoothly, e.g.:
1. Download and unzip QTranslate
# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/qtranslate.2.5.24.zip
...
/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# unzip qtranslate.2.5.24.zip
...
Just for fun and in case the plugin disappears in future, a mirror of Qtranslate 2.5.24 is found here
2. Enable QTranslate from wordpress admin
Plugins -> Inactive -> qTranslate (Activate)
After activating the plugin, there is a Settings button from which qTranslate‘s various plugin parameteres can be tuned.
In my case my site had to support both English and Arabic, so from the settings I added support for Arabic translation to the wordpress install.
Adding Arabic is done in the following way:
a. From the Language Management (qTranslate Configuration) from the Languages menu and the Languages (Add Languages) I had to choose a language code (in my case a language code of ar – for Arabic). Next I had to choose the Arabic flag from the follow up flag list.
In next text box Name , again I had to fill Arabic, for Locale en_US.UTF-8
The following Date Format and Time Format text boxes are optional so I left them blank.
To complete the process of adding the Arabic as a new language wordpress should support I pressed the Add Language button and the Arabic got added as a second language.
Afterwards the Arabic was added as second language, on the bottom of the left wordpress menu pane a button allowing a switch between English, Arabic appeared (see below screenshot):
Finally to make Arabic appear as a second language of choice on the website I added it as a Widget in the Widgets menu from the AWidgets menu:
Appearance -> Widgets
In widgets I added qTranslate Language Chooser to the Sidebar without putting any kind of Title for qtranslate widget .
I found it most helpful to choose the Text and Image as an option on how to display the Language switching in the wp.
Tags: Activate, alternative, arabi, Arabic, arabic translation, Button, cms, code, company, Date, downloads, flag, flag list, format, fun, google, Inactive, installation, language button, language code, language management, language support, languages, menu, mirror, multilingual, new language, plugin, Plugins, screenshot, second language, settings button, support, text, text boxes, time, time format, time one, unzip, UTF, utf 8, wget, Wordpress, working time
Posted in Various, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 2 Comments »
