The Matrix has you

            Do you remember a movie called The Matrix (a science fiction-action film) which has been written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski in 1999? If not, then you haven’t watch this movie yet.  The reason is no one will ever forget this movie, even they don’t understand.  I’m not going to tell about that movie, I’m going to tell about the reality of the movie. The basic theme of this movie is a virtual world called matrix. Is this world can be implement in the real world? Now that sounds interesting.

       In most of the movies, we can see computing stuff like hacking, login remotely, accessing the internet, chatting via the internet and, blah blah blah....The fact is most of them are not using real systems, and they just control the system by using unknown commands and methods. Somehow in The Matrix movie, there is a scene that an infamous female hacker called Trinity is trying to login a system remotely.  Check this out.

 In this picture she uses a Linux system and NMAP (a network mapping program). Not only NMAP but also she uses SSHnuke (the real tool is SSH - Secure Shell) to login to the remote system as root (Admin). That's really cool. Still you may think is it possible to build a virtual world (which has everything like the real world) in side a computer or a server.  There are little evidences we can think of it. I’ll show them from my next post.

Forgetting Root

What happen if you forgot your GNU/Linux root password? 

Worry? ah.... 

Ok. I'm going to describe a method which can be helpful to you. I have tested this method in my Linux OS (debian 6.0 ). 

Here what you need to do, first of all, make sure what is the boot loader you are using. You can check it easily by reading the name when your PC boots. If your boot loader is LILO then this method is not for you. If your boot loader is GRUB .............

 Follow these easy steps. Unfortunately, I don't have any screen shot. Because of that I have used one screen shot from the internet.

  Examine the screen shot at the end of this post. 
 1. Reboot the PC and press arrow keys when the boot loader appear.

 2. Select the OS and press 'e'

 3. Select the kernel mode. 

              You can find this in the top of the list. I can give a phrase. "linux /boot/vmlinuz ". Try to find that line.

FYI :  vmlinuz is the name of the Linux kernel executable.

 4. To edit that line, press 'e' again. For Grub V1.9+, you don't need to do that.

 5. Now go to the end of the line by hitting 'End' key. Type the following path to initialization after a space.

      init=/bin/bash
 6. Now exit from the edit mode and press 'b' to boot. For Grub V1.9+ use Ctrl+x
 7. After the system boots type following in the command prompt.

                #mount -o remount, rw /

                    #passwd

           

      Enter your new password.

              #sync

                  #mount -o remount, ro /

                  #reboot

 8. Thatz it. Hopefully, this method will work for your system. However, I can't grantee.

              

Install tar.bz2 in linux

If you want to install an application which is not listed in your linux distro sources you need to find an installable file which suitable to your distro.

example:

                for debian/ubuntu, you need to download .deb files

                for fedora/suse/redhat you need to download .rpm files

If you can find .bin file, that would be the easiest way to install the application.

In this post I'm going to show how to install the application from the hardest way. (only use this method if you fail to find above files, and this method can be use for any linux distro)

Ok, now I'm going to install seamonkey. (a web browser based on firefox)

1. Download tar.bz2 file.

2. Make a directory and move the downloaded tar.bz2 file to that directory.

To make a directory ( "seamonkey" is the name I have used)

mkdir seamonkey

To move tar.bz2 file ( "seamonkey-2.0.11.tar.bz2" is the name of tar.bz2 )

mv seamonkey-2.0.11.tar.bz2 ./seamonkey/

cd seamonkey/
 

3. Extract .tar.bz2 file ( you can use full name without using * )

tar jxvf sea*.tar.bz2

4. Change the directory to seamonkey which has been extracted.

cd seamonkey/

5. Finally run the application by using

./seamonkey

6. Configure the application launcher ( the way is depends on the desktop environment )

for GDM

FYI: This method is for seamonkey, for the other applications, open the .tar.bz2 file then you can find the README.txt. You will find a similar method as above.

Reinstalling grub boot loader

This post is only for the Linux users. If you want to use Linux with Windows you need to install a boot loader. Most of the latest distros provides a boot loader (ex: grub) and it installs automatically with the OS. If you install Windows after installing Linux the boot loader will disappear, in other words, you are unable to load Linux OS. To solve this problem you need to reinstall grub boot loader. First of all, you need to find a live Linux CD and boot it without installing. ( http://www.livecdlist.com )

1. Open a terminal and log in as root.

:~> su -

or use "sudo"  

               
2. run grub

 :~# grub

or :~> sudo grub

3. finding master boot record

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

 

4. If you know where the master boot record

grub> root (hd0,6)

5. Setup the boot loader

grub> setup (hd0) 

grub> quit

 Now you can have both operating systems.