The remote application accesses your Boxee media center PC via Wifi and requires no server side application (other than Boxee obviously).  The iPhone/iPod  has two user interfaces for control.  The first is a gesture method that displays a Boxee logo in the middle of your device screen.  Place your finger on the icon and slide up down or side to side to simulate using the arrow keys on your keyboard.  Tap on the logo after you’ve highlighted your selection to accept, much like a mouse click.  The second user interface is called “Buttons” and its just what you think.  Select the buttons mode and a set of direction arrows, OK button and a back button appear on your device.  A volume slider bar across the bottom of the iPhone/iPod screen will adjust the audio of the computer being controlled.

The iPod/iPhone will also display thumbnails of the current video playing on Boxee and a Now Playing button will display Artist and Title of any music playing.

Boxee Remote Control will work with Boxee Media Center running on PC, MAC and Linux.  Go get it today!

Apple Itunes Store – Boxee Remote

Boxee Media Center

Update: The original text for this tutorial was apparently submitted to me as an exact copy of an article by ah2 at ah2’s universe. Please check out the original article there.

The following are instructions for installing the HP Mini’s Mie interface on Ubuntu. The process is fairly easy but be aware that not everything works as expected yet. You can get most of the functionality of the new interface working but in my experience things like the special book marking shortcut added to Firefox don’t work. All in all the HP Mini’s interface is pretty good for small screens.

Warning some features may not work and I ran into an issue where the harbour-launcher used over 50% of the processor.

This instructions were original posted in the Ubuntu forums by wildcard and rafaelcapanema

Download the GTK+ theme, the Firefox theme, and the Thunderbird theme if you want.

The GTK+ theme can be activated through System > Preferences > Appearance (mind you, you don’t need to change the wallpaper, so leave it at the really out-of-place brown), while Firefox should load the theme choosing screen on next load. If it doesn’t, go to Tools > Addons.

Now that that’s over, you’ll need to do some work for getting the launcher.

Firstly, download this, and save it to your home folder. Or anywhere really, but if you’re not that good with Linux you obviously don’t want to.

Now, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal, and put this in:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture --force-depends harbour-launcher_0.78.3_lpia.deb

If the file you just downloaded isn’t in your home folder, then change the last part.

To launch it, press Alt-F2 and type in harbour-launcher. If the launcher didn’t show up, press the Show Desktop button or Ctrl+Alt+D.

But wait! Not everything’s working yet.

For music/pictures, you will need to install elisa. Elisa can be found in your repositories, but don’t install it from there.

You will need to install a number of packages, one after the other.

So here’s a bunch of links. Install them in the order provided.

libpigment0.3-8_0.3.11-1~ppa2-intrepid1-1_i386.deb
python-pgm_0.3.8-1~ppa1-intrepid1-1_i386.deb
python-elisa_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb
elisa_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb
elisa-plugins-good_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb
elisa-plugins-bad_0.5.15.5-0dennis9_all.deb
elisa-plugins-ugly_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb

Whew. Now that that’s over, restart, and press Alt-F2 and type in harbour-launcher. Enjoying it?

Alright, so now, do you want to actually make it auto-start?

Then go to System > Preferences > Sessions, and add a new startup entry, with anything you want as the name, and harbour-launcher as the command.

Boxee runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows. The Linux and OSX beta clients are open to download but the Windows beta is still an invite only deal.

I have been using boxee for a couple of weeks now and I can say I am in love. No more visting each individual web site to look for content. I just launch boxee and surf the content on most of the major media sites just like I am changing channels on my T.V.

Boxee comes with the ability to play content directly from Hulu, Comedy Central, CBS, Last.fm, Netflix, MySpaceTV and a number of other sources. Seeing it is open source and based on the XBOX Media Center project there are a number of additional plugins for other sites available with new ones showing up in their forums every day. I found this Adult Swim plugin on their forum. No more missed episodes of Robot Chicken. I couldn’t be happier.

I can’t explain it as well as the video below so check it out.

The Debian package was a quick one click install with no hassle. Set-up of the software was the same.  Simply enter the name of your HAVA box, enter your password, and click on the connect button and away it goes. Be careful as the IT wants to make the first character a capital by default. Video on the LAN is superb. It’s leaps and bounds better than the equivalent slingbox mobile and desktop players.  The best part of this is that it’s portable. You can take your IT (Internet Tablet) wherever you want to go, you can even watch an episode of House in the bathroom if you want.

The video and audio on the LAN is very good and remote viewing over the Internet isn’t to shabby either. This will obviously depend on the quality of your Internet connection. I have a pretty poor connection at home (Stay away from housing developments that use Hcontrol) and I can still view a show with decent quality. The video does have a tendency to get out of sync with the audio from time to time but, this is a slight offset and should be improved before the final release to the general public. The HAVA unit is also capable of streaming HD content from an external HD Tuner. I played with this a little yesterday and it does work but, there’s nothing to exciting about it. The quality was the same as standard definition content but, I guess if you want to see your local broadcasters HD2 weather channel, then it’s a plus.

The user interface is simple to navigate and provides quite a bit of control. The software includes four generic remote control surfaces that include a standard number pad with channel up/down, a favorites pad with 12 programmable favorite buttons, an STS remote with standard sat receiver controls, and a generic PVR control for playing recorded shows. The last function is not implemented yet. The only way to view recorded shows at this time is to record and then transfer them to your Nokia N800/810.

Overall, I have to take my hat off to the folks at Monsoon, good work.  This is an application that a lot of people have been wanting for a long time and the people at Sling refused to provide. Thank You.

I received the Hava Platinum HD in the mail a couple weeks ago and quickly ripped it out of the package (Christmas Morning Style).  The contents included the Hava Platinum HD, Ethernet cable, 2 Component HD cables, 2 AV cables, powers supply and CD.  The Component and AV cables are standard RCA connectors on one end and 1/8th inch 4 contact phono connectors to interface with the Hava box.  The Hava Box is capable of streaming HD channels across your network and has HD pass through so you can place your Hava Box in-between your cable box and TV, hence the two HD cables.  Audio is only standard stereo unfortunately and is handled by the AV cables minus the video plug.  Hell, if you wanted 5.1 surround, go sit in front of your 72 inch plasma with your 3000 dollar surround system with your 18 speakers.  That’s what you bought it for.

Heres the rundown:

Hava Platinum HD- HD and Standard Definition, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control,wired Ethernet only, recording or time shift capabilty to a PC and NO built in tuner.

Hava Wireless HD – HD and standard Definition, Standard Definition tuner built in, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control, wireless bridge built in, recording or time shift capability to a PC.

Hava Titanium HD – HD and  standard definition, IR blasters for cable or sat box control, wireless USB dongle with future support for N networks, recording or time shift capability to a PC.  This unit also has an internal hard drive or 2 USB ports to plug in an external drive for recording.  This function is in beta now. No built in tuner.

As of today, Hava only supports Windows based software for the player.  The software has a nice interface and is easy to set-up and use but the real advantage these units have over the Slingbox is that they are developing the client for the N800 and Linux support.  Thanks for showing the penguin a little respect.  More on this later when I get my copy of the Internet Tablet software.

The user interface appears to work just fine but, there are some issues with video and audio coding.  Check out the thread on Internettablettalk.

Read The Thread

Here’s the simple nuts and bolts to make this work with your system.  The Software is simply an application for your N800 or 810 and a server application to be installed on your mythfrontend. 

Mythetomer N800/810 app: 

To install the Internet tablet program, navigate to this page from your Tablet and click the download link below.  Follow the prompts.  Easy.

Download Mythetomer app

Server App:

On your frontend machine open a terminal window and type in

sudo wget http://netti.nic.fi/~icewood/mythetomer/file.php?file=mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

After the file downloads to your machine type in a terminal window

sudo dpkg -i mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

Done!

You will now need to shutdown your frontend if you haven’t already and start the mythetomer server.  To do this simply open a terminal window and type “mythetomer” and press enter.  Add a & sign at the end to run it in the background otherwise don’t close the terminal window or the server will stop.

I set mine up last night using the WLAN in my home and it works great.  The software gives you a remote control surface on you IT with number pad, direction arrows, menu and esc buttons, volume and channel up/down, and player controls such as play, pause, skip forward and back.  I have not tried the bluetooth connection as of yet cause I really have no need too but I might play with it a little later to see what happens.  The performance of the software is top notch, easy interface , no lag on button push and pretty steady connection.  I did have an issue once where the server croaked and the N800 lost its connection.  This required me to shutdown the frontend and restart the mythetomer server which to say the least very frustrating.  I am currently working on a Cron job to monitor the status of the mythetomer server. 

Overall its a good piece of tech gadgetry available for download.  I like it and it works much better than my Lirc based machine remote.  Give it a whirl.

Mythetomer Website

Get It Now

Since posting my article listing the open source alternatives to Symantec Ghost Enterprise, I have received a lot of questions related to installing and configuring Clonezilla, so I thought it would be a good idea to post a “quick start guide” for installing Clonezilla.

The following applies to setting up a network boot environtment using the PXE capabilities of your network card. If you simply want to image a single machine, then I suggest you use the Clonezilla Live CD. You simply boot your system from the CD, mount a network drive, and save your image to the network. It is the same as using a ghost boot disk in DOS but, without all the network card configuration.

If you are anything like me then you don’t like having to remember what you did with a boot disk and have to image a system a lot more often then a couple of times a year. In that case, follow along to setup a Clonezilla server your clients can use to boot from without the need for a boot disk.

Required:

First, you will need a fresh install of Ubuntu to follow this guide. I am using the latest server release candidate, Ubuntu 8.10 (Hardy), for this guide. If you are using the desktop version of Ubuntu or an early server version, you should be fine. Just make sure to change the required lines when adding the drbl (Diskless remote boot Linux) repositories to your source.list.

Second, you will need too configure two network cards. These can either be physical cards or one can be a virtual one. I am using a virtual interface for the second card.

Below is my /etc/network/interfaces file. You’ll need to edit your file to match. Make sure you change the IP addresses to something that will work on your network.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.2.201
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.2.1

auto eth0:0
iface eth0:0 inet static
address 192.168.3.1
netmask 255.255.255.0

Finally, you are going to need a list of the MAC address for each machine you wish to image. By default, Clonezilla installs a DHCP server. We want to lock down which machines can request an IP address from this server so we don’t cause any problems with other machines requesting a DHCP address from the Clonezilla server and receiving the wrong information. This is very important if you are setting up Clonezilla on a production network with an existing DHCP server.

Once you have your two network cards setup you are ready to start installing Clonezilla.

Installing Clonezilla.

The first step is to install the key for the Clonezilla repository. Enter the following in the terminal to download the key:

wget http://drbl.nchc.org.tw/GPG-KEY-DRBL

Second, add the key:

sudo apt-key add GPG-KEY-DRBL

Third, we need to add the Clonezilla repository to the apt source.list file. Enter the following to open /etc/apt/source.list in the nano text editor:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following two lines to the bottom of the file. Make sure to replace “hardy” with the name of the Ubuntu distribution you are using. I.E. gutsy, feisty, edgy….:

deb http://free.nchc.org.tw/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://free.nchc.org.tw/drbl-core drbl stable

Once you have added the Clonezilla repository to your source list, you can run the following two commands to update your list and install drbl:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install drbl

Once drbl is installed we can go ahead and install all the dependencies for Clonezilla. NIS will fail to launch at this point. Just ignore it. We will configure it later.

sudo apt-get install util-linux tar gzip bzip2 procps dialog rsync parted pciutils tcpdump bc grub gawk hdparm sdparm netcat file ethtool etherwake ssh syslinux mtools mkisofs reiserfsprogs e2fsprogs psmisc locales wget disktype zip unzip initscripts dhcp3-server tftpd-hpa nfs-kernel-server nis ntp curl lftp iptables sysutils libdigest-sha1-perl

sudo apt-get install partclone mkpxeinitrd-net clonezilla mkswap-uuid drbl-partimage drbl-ntfsprogs drbl-chntpw drbl-lzop udpcast drbl-etherboot freedos

sudo apt-get install lvm2 ntfs-3g lshw

Once drbl is installed we need to create a file with the MAC address of each system we wish to image. The addresses should be in the following format with one address per line.

sudo nano /etc/drbl/macadr-eth0:0.txt

00:00:00:00:00:00

Next we need to configure the boot image that each PXE client will use:

sudo /opt/drbl/sbin/drblsrv-offline -s `uname -r`

Finally, we need to launch drblpush to configure the environment.

sudo /opt/drbl/sbin/drblpush -i

The drblpush script will ask you a series of questions and then setup your environment for you.

Please enter DNS domain (such as drbl.sf.net):

Enter your domain.

Please enter NIS/YP domain name:

Enter you NIS domain name. If you don’t have a NIS domain you can call it whatever you want.

Please enter the client hostname prefix:
This prefix is used to automatically create hostname for clients. If you want to overwrite some or all automatically created hostnames, press Ctrl-C to quit this program now, edit /opt/drbl/conf/client-ip-hostname, then run this program again.

Enter a hostname prefix.

The public IP address of this server is NOT found.
Which ethernet port in this server is for public Internet accsess, not for DRBL connection ?

eth0

Now we can collect the MAC address of clients!
If you want to let the DHCP service in DRBL server offer same IP address to client every time when client boot, and you never did this procedure, you should do it now!
If you already have those MAC addresses of clients, you can put them into different group files (These files number is the same number of networks cards for DRBL service). In this case, you can skip this step.
This step helps you to record the MAC addresses of clients, then divide them into different groups. It will save your time and reduce the typos.
The MAC addresses will be recorded turn by turn according to the boot of clients,
and they will be put into different files according to the network card in server, file name will be like macadr-eth1.txt, macadr-eth2.txt… You can find them in directory /etc/drbl.
Please boot the clients by order, make sure they boot from etherboot or PXE!
Do you want to collect them ?

n. We already listed them in the /etc/drbl/macadr-eth0:0.txt file.

Do you want to let the DHCP service in DRBL server offer same IP address to the client every time when client boots (If you want this function, you have to collect the MAC addresses of clients, and save them in file(s) (as in the previous procedure)). This is for the clients connected to DRBL server’s ethernet network interface eth0:0 ?

y

OK! Please tell me the file name which contains the MAC address of clients line by line for eth0:0.

macadr-eth0:0.txt

What is the initial number do you want to use in the last set of digits in the IP (i.e. the initial value of d in the IP address a.b.c.d) for DRBL clients connected to this ethernet port eth0:0.

10. This will be the starting IP address of your DHCP range.

The file name you set is “macadr-eth0:0.txt”.
The clients number in this file is 1.
We will set the IP address for the clients connected to DRBL server’s ethernet network interface eth0:0 By the MAC address file you set, the IP addresses for the clients connected to DRBL server’s ethernet network interface eth0:0 as: 192.168.3.10 – 192.168.3.10
Accept?

y

The Layout for your DRBL environment:
******************************************************
NIC NIC IP Clients
+—————————–+
| DRBL SERVER |
| |
| +– [eth0] 192.168.2.201 +- to WAN
| |
| +– [eth0:0] 192.168.3.1 +- to clients group 0:0 [ 1 clients, their IP
| | from 192.168.3.10 - 192.168.3.10]
+—————————–+
******************************************************
Total clients: 1
******************************************************
Press Enter to continue…

In the system, there are 3 modes for diskless linux services:
[0] Full DRBL mode, every client has its own NFS based /etc and /var.
[1] DRBL SSI (Single system image) mode, every client uses tmpfs based /etc and /var. In this mode, the loading and necessary disk space of server will be lighter. NOTE! (a) The client machine memory is recommended at least 256 MB. (b) The setting and config files of client will not be saved to the DRBL server! They are just used once and will vanish after the machine shutdowns! Besides, if you modify any file in the template client (located in /tftpboot/nodes), you have to run /opt/drbl/sbin/gen_ssi_files to create the template tarball in /tftpboot/node_root/drbl_ssi/. (c) If you want to provide some file to overwrite the setting in the template tarball when client boots, check /tftpboot/node_root/drbl_ssi/clients/00_README for more details.
[2] I do NOT want to provide diskless Linux service to client.
Which mode do you prefer ?

2. We didn’t configure any other option above.

In the system, there are 3 modes available for clonezilla:
[0] Full Clonezilla mode, every client has its own NFS based /etc and /var.
[1] Clonezilla box mode, every client uses tmpfs based /etc and /var. In this mode, the loading and necessary disk space of server will be lighter than that in Full Clonezilla mode. Note! In Clonezilla box mode, the setting and config files of client will not be saved to the DRBL server! They just use once and will vanish after the machine shutdowns!
[2] I do NOT want clonezilla.
Which mode do you prefer ?

1

When using clonezilla, which directory in this server you want to store the saved image (Please use absolute path, and do NOT assign it under /mnt/, /media/ or /tmp/) ?
[/home/partimag]

/home/partimag. You should change this to the location wish to store your images.

Do you want to set the pxelinux password for clients so that when client boots, a password must be entered to startup (For better security)

n

Do you want to set the boot prompt for clients ?

n

Do you want to use graphic background for PXE menu when client boots ?
Note! If you use graphical PXELinux menu, however client fails to boot, you can switch to text mode by running “/opt/drbl/sbin/switch-pxe-bg-mode -m text”.

y

Do you want to let DRBL server as a NAT server ? If not, your DRBL client will NOT be able to access Internet.

n

We are now ready to deploy the files to system!
Do you want to continue ?
Warning! If you go on, your firewall rules will be overwritten during the setup!
The original rules will be backuped as iptables.drblsave in system config directory (/etc/sysconfig or /etc/default).

y

After a minute or so you PXE boot environment should be set up automatically.

The last thing you need to do is start the Clonezilla server.

sudo /opt/drbl/sbin/dcs

On the first screen select All.

On the second screen select clonezilla-start

On the third screen select “select-in-client” so you can choose to backup or restore an image on a client by client basis.

On the last two screens you should select the default values provided.

That’s it. Clonezilla is ready to go.

Now we can move over to the client and see if you can boot it using your newly created DRBL environment.

Go into your BIOS settings and set the first boot device to your network card and reboot.
That’s it. Let the client boot and enjoy.

PDFCrack is a GNU/Linux application (or any other POSIX-compatible system) tool for recovering passwords and content from PDF-files. It is small, command line driven, and without external dependencies. PDFCrack is released under GPL.

Install pdfcrack on Ubuntu by typing:
sudo aptitude install pdfcrack

Run a quick benchmark by entering the following at the command line:
pdfcrack -b

Results:

Benchmark: Average Speed (calls / second):
MD5: 2616026.7
MD5_50 (fast): 146928.3
MD5_50 (slow): 107780.3

RC4 (40, static): 863985.7
RC4 (40, no check): 864661.2
RC4 (128, no check): 802203.0

Benchmark: Average Speed (passwords / second):
PDF (40, user): 653588.2
PDF (40, owner): 322317.1
PDF (40, owner, fast): 714278.6

PDF (128, user): 30861.1
PDF (128, owner): 14687.8
PDF (128, owner, fast): 30861.1

Use pdfcrack to crack an encrypted pdf-file by typing:

pdfcrack test.pdf