Beryl is working, nice interface, another way to impress people who are saying/thinking that linux is only a black terminal(small white letters in a black screen in their words). But a small problem, some of the useful programs are not working properly.

VLC - The videos are not played properly. Change your video output redering from Default to X11 Video output. oh! You have to enable Advanced options.

Window Focusing - One annoying thing about beryl was when i started a new application/window, it didn’t get focus. In the beryl settings, General settings change the focus mode to ‘none’.

Netbeans 5.5 - Disable beryl just for now ;-). Haven’t tried anything yet.

The eye candy Linux desktops, of course way better than windows. I have seen many you tube clips on both compiz and beryl working, do I have to tell you.. those are awsome. So, however inspired by those I decided to give it a try(It was several months ago).

My Linux distribution was ubuntu 6.06. First I installed XGL and change the gdm.conf-custom file to load the XGL with gdm. Then I installed compiz. Nothing to bother at all, only few simple apt-gets and just two or three lines of config files, I have compiz running with XGL. However, since my graphic card is Intel 945GM, I’m using i915(i810) drivers. XGL is bit slow with that. However, this worked nicely without any bugs.

Then, the next thing any person would do is try to optimiz compiz, so you can get a better speed. But how? “Using Google”. Most of the sites said that the best option for my graphics card is AiGLX and Beryl. So, I installed AiGLX first, then beryl. For some reason it didn’t work and more annoyingly my sound card went out. Everytime I start the GDM with AiGLX, it crashes. So, I decided to uninstall that. Oppsss… a small problem. I can’t find the AiGLX package. Oppsss.. a big problem, AiGLX is inside the core of Xorg, it’s not a seperate module as XGL. Now, what do I do? Either I have to reinstall Xorg from the old repositories or disable AiGLX. So, I disabled AiGLX and activated XGL again. Damn.. XGL is not working either now. So, what else? I disabled the both turned back to the old ubuntu human theme.

After all those sort of stuffs, very recently(about three days ago) I formated the old ubuntu 6.06 and installed 6.10. Then I decided to give it a try again. Since, I have some bad experience with AiGLX, I tried to run Beryl with XGL. So, I installed XGL. Installed Beryl. This time, I created a seperate session for XGL, and created a small script ‘/usr/local/bin/startberyl.sh’. The content is :
#!/bin/bash
beryl-manager
sleep 5
beryl


This is not the normal procedure. I just did that on my own to get things easier. So, I logged out, then logged into the XGL session. Then went to the terminal and typed ’startberyl.sh’ and wow finally Beryl is running under XGL. However, It doesn’t sloved my problem completely. It’s still slow. However, I didn’t want to install AiGLX again, I have to statisfy with what I have. I put the script as a startup program. After working few minutes, I restarted the computer. When I rebooted the computer, wow…. It’s working really smoothly. I can’t believe XGL is running this fast. Then, I realized the secret. I forgot to set the XGL as the default session, so what I have done is booted the default gnome session, but how does the beryl is working? It needs either XGL or AiGLX. oh! Ubuntu edgy comes with AiGLX built-in support. wow!! it’s cool. Everything is working perfectly now. Beryl with AiGLX - After all It’s just matter of installing beryl and emerald-themes(for a ubuntu(6.10) edgy user).

Yesterday, I tried to download debian DVD images from their site. One image is about 4 GB which is bigger than 2^32 bytes. So, here is the problem; since all the download accelerators use 32 bit integers for the file size, it doesnt work at all. I tried prozilla and axel. Then I also tried to wget the file into my server, split it and download the files. Wget doesn’t work either.

I sent an email to LKLUG and one of them suggested to use jigdo. But It takes hell of a lot of time to download it file by file. The other solution is to use bittorrent, but I have port limitation problems. So, the only solution left is to download and modify the source code of an accelerator. I downloaded the axel code, but It’s seems bit messy to change it. So, I decided to code my own one to download it. It’s time to start coding again.

Today, I recursively downloaded a web site to my web server using wget, and for some reason it didn’t work well. Some of the immediate files are missing. After running through the original site source, I realized that it’s about the files inside the style sheets. So, I made some quick modifications to the wget source.

It’s just a hack to get my download working, however it will also work on some other sites as well(I hope ;-)). errr…. Sorry about the quality of code.

Unfortunately, I lost the original source code(I have no intention to download it again using my dialup; ah! I forgot to tell you, I’m enjoying the vacation at home; Ratnapura), so I can’t create patch files. wget version is 1.10.1. Download recur.c and html-url.c.

It is true that most people in the world are using Windows. But there is a doubt: “Is it the best OS for PCs?”. Here is a brief description regarding Linux vs. Windows.

GUI (Graphical User Interfaces) -

Both Windows and Linux provide GUIs and both are seem to be fairly ok. But there is an advantage in Linux; many GUIs (Gnome, KDE, etc) are available. Windows only comes with its own one and only GUI. There are some external software to change the look of the theme. But those are third party products and take up too much memory and slow down your computer.

Shell / Dos prompt -

The shell in Linux is very powerful. You can do almost everything in the shell. But the Dos prompt’s scope is limited to a small area (Almost only file handling!).

Cost -

Linux is almost free and Windows is around $200 - $300. But when you consider running Linux on a business environment, you may have to hire some Linux technicians, who might be more costly than the Windows techno craps.

Live CDs -

Windows doesn’t support a live booting while there are many live linux distros.

Software -

This is the main disadvantage of Linux. There are only few 3^rd party software for Linux. You might have some kind of alternatives but those might not good as windows products. For example macromedia products are the ideal tools for the web publishing; there is no good alternative for those in Linux. And most of the games are only for Windows. So, regarding the software Microsoft is in the lead.

Security -

There is no point of even talking about this. Linux is much more secure than Windows. There are thousand of security holes in Windows and very few in Linux. And the Linux bugs are always quickly fixed by the community.

So, as you guys can see Linux is much better than Windows? But why the people are still using Windows? That’s a topic to discuss and gateway to improve linux. Get back to you in another article.

When you guys wants to do packet sniffing what do you do? Just running a packet sniffer? That’ll work if your network is connected using a hub. Not in a switched enviroment. So, the solution is arp poisoning.

Arp Poisoning, one great method of hacking. The basic idea behind arp poisoning is changing the packet destination by fooling the computer. In a local area network the computers are uniqly identifical by the MAC address and IP address. The top level software communicate using the IP addresses. So, when a software wants to connect to another machine, it creates a data packet and put the destination IP address. Then, the kernel takes the packet. The kernel have a table called ARP table which have information about ip address againts the mac addresses. So, the kernel looks at the ARP table and then takes the relevent MAC address. If MAC address is not available in the table, it sends an arp request saying “Hey, xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, send me your MAC address”. So, the other computer sends an arp reply. At that point first computer update it’s arp table. Then the kernel inject that MAC into the packet and give it to the network card. The network card only look at the MAC address. So, the packet’s final destination is the computer pointed by the MAC address; no matter what the ip address is.

Now think like this. Let’s say there are three computers. A,B and C. You are in the computer A and your MAC address is 00:00:00:FF:FF:FF. So, we want to track messages between computer B and C. What we have to do is create two fake arp replies. One is saying “I’m computer B, my MAC address is 00:00:00:FF:FF:FF” and other saying “I’m computer C, my MAC address is 00:00:00:FF:FF:FF”. So, you keep broadcasting both messages, the first message to the computer C and other to the computer B. Then you have to put an ip forwarding program and configure it to redirect the packets to it’s original destination. Now all packets go through your computer. It’s time to sniff.

You can also do some other interesting stuffs. If you want to ban someone from the network, what you have to do is send an arp reply to the gateway saying “Hey, I’m computer X, my MAC address is 00:00:00:00:00:00″. Since there is no MAC address like that, messages from the gateway won’t reach the computer. Ya, finally, you banned them.