Skype on OpenSuSE 11.1

I was installing Skype on OpenSuSE 11.1 with a Creative webcam. It seems that Skype recognized the webcam after install, but I could not get the video to work. Well, if you run the following command from your CLI, then the video should work. At least it worked for me.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

USB on VirtualBox 2.4.4 with OpenSuSE 11.1

I was browsing the Internet with a problem that I had with USB on VirtualBox. The USBs were greyed out and I could not select them. I came across two possible solutions. I did both, and it worked. Now, you may just have to do one of them, but I was trying everything that I could to get it to work. Here are the solutions:

Search for rule 50-udev-default.rules
and change the permissions as follows:

# libusb device nodes
#SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, ENV{DEVTYPE}==”usb_device”,
NAME=”bus/usb/$env{BUSNUM}/$env{DEVNUM}”, MODE=”0664″

I did the following also:

Look in the directory /etc/udev/rules.d/ for the file 10-vboxdrv.rules. Create a backup of this file by:
cp 10-vboxdrv.rules 10-vboxdrv.rules.bak
and then do the following:
mv 10-vboxdrv.rules 60-vboxdrv.rules

then reboot, and hopefully everything works. Good luck!

Man-in-the-Middle attack with Interceptor

The good folks over at Hak5.org did a little diddy on a network monitor that can be placed on the wired side of the network instead of collecting just wireless packets.  Interceptor is a network tap for the wired LAN that can collect packets, so you can come back later and analyze.  It also gives you the ability to run a wireless access point on the backside and create your own VPN tunnel from the outside, where you can be sitting in a van checking out what is happening on the network.

You can read more about Interceptor at DigiNinja.org.  Give it a look, you might find something interesting.  Thanks to Hak5.org for pointing this out to me, and a special thanks to Robin Wood for creating such a great tool!

OpenSuSE 11 and a Pinnacle 800i

A while back I bought a Pinnacle PCTV 800i for my box.  Now, mind you, I had Windows XP installed on this box; but I could NEVER get the damned thing to work.  I am not kidding!  The card was designed for Windows XP, but Pinnacle really dropped the ball on this one.

Well, I recently pulled this machine back out and installed OpenSuSE 11 on it.  Everything works like a charm.  I remembered that I still had that card boxed up; so I pulled it out, blew the dust off of it, and put it in the machine.  I have installed some usb tv cards for my laptop, so I decided to do the same steps from before with this card, even though it’s a PCI card (Steps are below).

I could not believe it, but when I fired up TVTime, the damn card worked.  Absolutely unbelieveable!  So finally, if my fiance’ is watching TV in the living room, I can escape to my office and watch football!

To get this working, just visit http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Pinnacle_PCTV_HD_Card_(800i)

Or follow these instructions:

Run lspci -vvnn (to make sure the card is recognized)

You should see some output that looks like:

00:0a.0 Multimedia video controller [0400]: Conexant CX23880/1/2/3 PCI Video and Audio Decoder [14f1:8800] (rev 05)
	Subsystem: Pinnacle Systems Inc. Unknown device [11bd:0051]
	Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
	Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
	Latency: 32 (5000ns min, 13750ns max), Cache Line Size: 32 bytes
	Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 19
	Region 0: Memory at dc000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
	Capabilities: [44] Vital Product Data
	Capabilities: [4c] Power Management version 2
		Flags: PMEClk- DSI+ D1- D2- AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)

		Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-

Next, go to this website, http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/ and get the firmware.  There are three seperate files, and I suggest you take a look at the README.

Now, go grab the bzip or gzip from http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb

There are instuctions on that site on how to install.  Mainly, copy the tar to /lib/firmware and extract.  Run make and make install.

Now, you should be cooking with gas.  One drawback to using TVTime, is that the sound will not be produced until you install sox from yast and run this command:

sox -c 2 -s -r 32000 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp2 -t ossdsp -r 32000 /dev/dsp

Cheers, and a big screw you to Pinnacle for making me sit on this thing for soooo long.  A huge HELL YEA to SuSE for doing it the right way for soooo long!

OpenSuSE 11.0 Could not start kdeinit4…

I recently installed OpenSuSE 11.0 to see what all the fuss was about.  After completing an update on my machine and rebooting…I tried to login and was greeted with the following message…”Could not start kdeinit4, please check your installation.”

Damn…

Well, I found a way around this.  First, I installed the Nvidia G…(I can’t remember the name because I am typing this up on a different computer) from Yast.  After this, Nvidia tries to install a PAE kernel module, well…I removed the Nvidia PAE module and PAE kernel.  I logged into the failsafe session instead of KDE 4.  Next, I su-ed into root and ran yast2.  I selected Software Management, and searched for KDE4.  I updated all of the packages under KDE4, and then rebooted.

Upon rebooting, everything worked fine.  Cheers, hope this helps.

I am currently running 11.0 on a Dell Latitude D830 with an Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M…for those of you wondering.

Getting a bluescreen with Truecrypt?

Recently, I was getting a BSOD on Windows when trying to mount a Truecrypt partition.  I had no idea what the heck was going on, until I came across a forum post.  Well, I was using Ext2 Installable File System for Windows to mount my Linux partitions on Windows.  The driver that it uses somehow conflicts with Truecrypt.  I never went into too much depth with this besides uninstalling Ext2 Installable File System for Windows, and BAM, everything worked fine.  Just thought I would pass this along to everyone.

Hope this helps!

Getting 02Micro CAC Reader to work with OpenSuSE 10.3

In Yast, install:
libusb
libusb-devel

 From source, compile and install:
ccid-1.3.6

 From Yast, install:
coolkey
coolkey-devel
    (Now, Yast will ask you if you want to install pcsc-ccid, and answer
yes to it)

Go back into Yast and remove pcsc-ccid.  Yast will want to remove
coolkey, but you have to IGNORE THIS REQUIREMENT

Finally, go back into ccid-1.3.6 and re-compile and re-install.

This is how I go it working...good luck to you all, and have a great
day.

Update:  I have found out that this process works with OpenSuSE 11.0 also!

Convert video with VLC and drag and drop batch script…

Courtesy of lifehacker.com, I came across an article about the many uses of VLC.  My favorite was the ability to convert any video with a drag and drop batch script.  Here’s some of the article…

“If you regularly convert files to a specific file format—say, for your iPod—you can set up a batch file with VLC that will make video conversions as easy as dragging and dropping the to-be-converted file onto the script.

Create a new text file and save it as VLC Converter.bat. Make sure your filesystem is showing file extensions so you aren’t saving it as a text file (you don’t want to end up with something like VLC Converter.bat.txt). You need to make sure it’s saving with the BAT extension.

If you were building the script from scratch, at this point you’d open up the file you just created and paste “C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” %1 in the first line. Now you need to get the command line options that describe how VLC should convert the file. For that, you can use the text generated by the Target textbox at the top of the Stream/Save Settings window described in steps two and three of the DVD ripping guide above, which displays the command line options you need for your batch file. Luckily a user at the iPod forums at iLounge already put together a VLC batch conversion script for iPods, so we can just use those settings, which look like this:

“C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” %1 :sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=1024,scale=1,height=240,width=320,acodec=mp4a,ab=128,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=mp4,dst=%1.mp4}}”

Ultimate Boot CD on Thumb Drive…

Here is an easy how-to on installing and running the Ultimate Boot CD on a thumb drive.

Bastille Hardening Program

You have heard of DISA’s Gold Disk as a tool to harden a Windows machine.  Well, Bastille is a program specifically designed to harden a Linux box.  Users can choose to run the program through command line or a GUI.  Bastille is designed for use on Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, HP-UX, or Mac OS X.  The web site offers an easy how-to for installation.  On my OpenSuSE 10.3 machine, I had to add Perl-TK and the Curses packages for the GUI to work.

Through the GUI, Bastille asks the user a set of questions, and the user’s answers determine what settings are applied to the system.  One of the best features of Bastille is the ability to revert to previous settings if unwanted settings are applied.

Bastille