Friday, May 11, 2007

Enable backspace in firefox

With the release of Firefox 2.0.x , the backapce button has ceased to act as back button , instead the developers made it to be used as pageup.But no tensions, recently I cam across the following funda on a firefox forum,hope this helps you to reclaim back backspace button as a back button.

Open your firefox browser and type the following code into the address bar:

about:config


After that in the filter type:

browser.backspace_action


and change it's value to "0" from "1".

For the more curious ones please check out the following link

For Seamonkey as well the same method would be applicable.

Monday, April 30, 2007

Zenwalk

Debian is good, no not good its fantastic, but that's where the problem lies in . It's just too good and made my life too easy, one of the reasons why I despise Microsoft OSs so much.So for a change I decided to go out of the way and try out a brand new non-debian based Linux distro .Given my bad taste for any fedora based distro , I was left with the choice of going for either Arch or Gentoo, as both are considered fast.So i started doing a little bit of research on net to find which of the two was better to try out.Although I have used Gentoo previously , i never got the chance to use Arch.While googling for more info and through some sites like Distrowatch , I cam across a new distro called Zenwalk , a Slackware based distro but a lot lot lot faster than the original Slack.Found quite a few interesting articles on net regarding it.Here I would like to mention a few of them.

This is what Distrowatch had to say about Zenwalk:

Zenwalk Linux (formerly Minislack) is a Slackware-based GNU/Linux operating system with a goal of being slim and fast by using only one application per task and with focus on graphical desktop and multimedia usage. Zenwalk features the latest Linux technology along with a complete programming environment and libraries to provide an ideal platform for application programmers. Zenwalk's modular approach also provides a simple way to convert Zenwalk Linux into a finely-tuned modern server (e.g. LAMP, messaging, file sharing).

And this is what Zenwalk had to say about itself:

Zenwalk is a GNU/Linux operating system, designed to provide the following characteristics :

  • Modern (latest stable software)
  • Fast (optimized for performance capabilities)
  • Rational (one mainstream application for each task)
  • Complete (full development/desktop/multimedia environment)
  • Evolutionary (simple network package management tool - netpkg)

Shall add more in coming time till then get zened :)

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

ADS and Linux applications

The following article is meant to help out people who want to run Linux applications behind a ADS system.

WTF is ADS ?

I don't have the patience to blabber about a propitiatory applications like ADS which belongs some macrohard company.But still for you rinfo you can have a look at the following link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Directory .It basically is an alternative to kerberos which also a network authentication tool.

What is the problem with using Linux & ADS ?

ADS being a propitiatory application does not allow a lot of applications in linux to get authenticated, like synaptic,opera,gaim,xmms,gaim,etc.

How to overcome the problem ?

An alternative is to install\run NTLM . Unpack and browse into the directory.There edit the server.cfg file as per your requirements.I'm putting up a sample , you can modify yours as per your requirements.

#========================================================================
[GENERAL]

LISTEN_PORT:5865 ##Leave this as it is else add whatever port u want.

# If you want APS to authenticate you at WWW servers using NTLM then just leave this
# value blank like PARENT_PROXY: and APS will connect to web servers directly.
# You can specify more than one proxy by leaving a space between each one, and
# APS will detect when one fails and automatically fail-over to the next. EG:
#PARENT_PROXY:first_proxy second_proxy third_proxy
# And NOTE that NTLM cannot pass through another proxy server.
PARENT_PROXY:proxyserver.com ##This is where you specify the proxy server

PARENT_PROXY_PORT:3128 ##Specify the proxy port

# APS will poll the upstream proxy and attempt to fail-over to a new one if it doesn't
# get a response within an appropriate time frame. The amount of time that it will
# wait for a response before attempting fail-over is specified, in seconds, below:
PARENT_PROXY_TIMEOUT:15

# Set to 1 if you want to grant this authorization service to clients from other computers.
# NOTE: all the users from other hosts that will be using you copy of APS for authentication
# will be using your credentials in NTLM auth at the remote host.
ALLOW_EXTERNAL_CLIENTS:0

# If you want to allow some other but not all computers to use your proxy for authorization,
# just set ALLOW_EXTERNAL_CLIENTS:0 and put friendly IP addresses here.
# Use space as a delimiter.
# NOTE that special addesses don't work here (192.168.3.0 for example).
FRIENDLY_IPS:

# Requested URLs are written to "url.log" file. May be useful.
URL_LOG:0

# When a network service listens for connections, there is a maximum number of connection
# attempts to that service that the underlying OS will allow to backlog waiting for a response
# before the OS will start dropping new connection attempts with 'Connection refused'. The
# standard method of determining the maximum number of backlogged connections is to use the
# SOMAXCONN constant, which is supposed to represent the maximum number that an OS will support
# (for example, 5 on Windows 2000 Pro, and 200 on Windows 2000 server). However, because this
# is a statically compiled value in a Python distribution, usually this instead represents the
# the most conservative value (5 on all Windows platforms, and 128 on the GNU/Linux variant I
# tried). So if you are running (for example) a massively threaded/parallel download manager,
# the default value of, say, 5, or whatever SOMAXCONN happens to be set to, may be too low and
# cause some connections to fail. The value below can be set to any integer (it seems that
# Python just silently caps values above the hard limit for the underlying platform), or it can
# be set to the special value of SOMAXCONN (i.e. MAX_CONNECTION_BACKLOG:SOMAXCONN), to use
# whatever this value happens to be set to in your Python build. Setting this higher than
# necessary may cause APS to consume more memory than you needed to.
MAX_CONNECTION_BACKLOG:5

#========================================================================
[CLIENT_HEADER]

# This section describes what and how the server should change in the clients headers.
# Made in order to prevent parent proxy from seeing that you are using wget instead of IE5.5

Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, text/html, application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q= 0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*; q=0.5
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT5)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Keep-Alive: 300
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive ##Few lines are missing from the default one in order to make apt or synaptic work you need to add the xml phrase also


# You can uncomment these chages in client's header to mimic IE5+ better, but in this case
# you may expirience problems with *.html if your client does not really handle compression.
#Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

#========================================================================
[NTLM_AUTH]

# Optional value, if leaved blank then APS will use gethostname() to determine
# host's name.
# NOTE1: If you Linux host name differs from Windows host name then it may be that
# MS server wont recognize you host at all and wont grant you access
# to resources requested. Then you have to use this option and APS will use
# this name in NTLM negotiations.
# NOTE2: There are several reports that you can successfully use "foreign" host name
# here. Say, if user may access a resource from 'host1' and may not from 'host2'
# then there is a chance that APS running on 'host2' with NT_HOSTNAME:host1 will
# be able to be granted access to the restricted resource. However use this on
# you own risk as such a trick may be considered as a hack or something.
NT_HOSTNAME:abracadabra ##Put your linux comps hostname here

# Windows Domain.
# NOTE: it is not full qualified internet domain, but windows network domain.
NT_DOMAIN:domain.com ##Put the domain name here eg. people in IIT-M campus can use iitm.ac.in as domain name else you can leave it blank

# What user's name to use during authorization. It may differ form real current username.
# If you enable NTLM_TO_BASIC, below, you can either leave this blank or simply
# hash it out.
USER:username ## Your ADS username

# Password. Just leave it blank here and server will request it at the start time,
# or, if you enable NTLM_TO_BASIC, below, you can either leave this blank or simply
# hash it out, and you *won't* be prompted for a password at start time.
PASSWORD:passwd ## Your ADS password

# These two options replace old FULL_NTLM option.
# NTLM authentication consists virtually of two parts: LM and NT. Windows95/98 use
# only LM part, WindowsNT/2000 can use NT and LM or just NT part.
# Almost always using just LM part will be enough. I had several reports
# about LM and NT requirement and no about just NT.
# So try to setup 1, 1 only if you have enough reasons to do so and when you understand
# what you are doing.
# 0, 0 is an illegal combination
# NOTE: if you change these options then you have to setup flag option accordingly.
LM_PART:1
NT_PART:0

# Highly experimental option. See research.txt for details.
# LM - 06820000
# NT - 05820000
# LM + NT - 07820000
NTLM_FLAGS: 06820000

# This option makes APS try to translate NTLM authentication to very usual "Basic"
# scheme. Almost all http clients know it. With this option set to 1 user will be requested
# by his browser to enter his credentials and these username and password will be used by
# APS for NTLM authentication at MS Proxy server or Web server.
# In such a case different users can use one runnig APS with their own credentials.
# NOTE1: currently translation works so it allows only one try for entering
# username/password. If you make a mistake you will have to restart you browser.
# NOTE2: With debug:1 basic username/password will be written in log file in clear
# text format. I could try hide it, but the basic scheme is so weak that anybody
# who had access to APS would be able to get it.
NTLM_TO_BASIC:0

#========================================================================
[DEBUG]

# Set this to 1 if you want to see debug info in many log files. One per connection.
DEBUG:0

# Set this to 1 to get even more debug info.
BIN_DEBUG:0

# Set this to 1 to see some strange activity on screen. Actually you won't want it.
SCR_DEBUG:0

# Not actually a debug option but gives you some details on authentication process
# into *.auth logs. Also see research.txt.
AUTH_DEBUG:0

Once You are done with the configuration all you need to do is type

python path/to/main.py


After that you can use localhost as the proxy server and 5865 as your port for the various linux applications.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Customized Kernel in Debian

This blog is intended to work as a guide for people who want to set up their own customized and flavored kernel without losing the debian touch a.k.a the dpkg method.

What do I need for it ?

Well first things first ! Of course you need a kernel source for it , go to www.kernel.org and get the latest one.You would also need to install fakeroot & kernel-package on your system.

Steps to follow

  • Install the kernel-package and fakeroot.
  • Get the Linux kernel tarball from some where.
  • Uncompress the tarball to a place of your choice.
  • cd into the kernel source directory.
  • Configure your kernel.Now do not expect me to dish out the details of kernel configuration in this blog as it in itself is a big topic and needs separate attention.I prefer to use
make menuconfig


  • Once you are done with configuring the kernel execute the following command in order to create your own .deb package
fakeroot make-kpkg kernel_image

  • You will have a kernel deb in the parent directory of your kernel source now (e.g. /usr/src). Install it using dpkg
dpkg -i file.deb


If you use grub here is what you need to do to get your menu.lst automatically updated.

Create a file /etc/kernel-img.conf and add the following lines:


postinst_hook = /sbin/update-grub postrm_hook = /sbin/update-grub do_bootloader = no


This will ensure update-grub is ran upon installation of any kernel packages, self-created or Debian-created.