My first wall texture

I decided to make a wall texture and see how it turns out, but the only think I really like about it are the colors. Compared to a wall texture I used from another Urban Terror map just for testing, this one has much bigger bricks (but that isn’t too bad as it is theoretically possible to scale it within the level editor).

But the thing that really bugs me is the blurry middle part… in case you don’t know too much about such textures (as I did yesterday until reading some tutorials), you take a square of a (free-for-use) photo and then set an offset for the image in GIMP (or what you like to use) to x/2 and y/2 (if your imagination isn’t that good, here are some example pictures). The goal is to make a transition between all the edges (which are now in the middle) and in my bad example, it looks like the that part is painted or something :-\

I’m glad I did a wall anyway, because now I know exactly how it works. But for good looking textures, I’ll probably use some from the default UrT maps and change the color in order to get what I want.

Urban Terror mapping on Archlinux

Yesterday and today I’ve been trying to get a version of gtkradiant working with Archlinux in order to make own Urban Terror maps. The result is that I expanded the UrT wiki page and created two AUR packages. Everything seems to work now, I just need to get skilled in that editor

ghostship: first release (0.4)

Ghostship runs surprisingly stable (which may also have something to do with the recent upstream update of Ultrasurf from 9.5 to 9.6), so I decided to release an official source package.  It still does run Ultrasurf like an Unix daemon, I have written pretty much about that by now, so if you don’t know the project yet, check out its homepage.

Why do I start with version 0.4? Well, I just counted my first two attempts plus the major rewrite I did lately as single versions.

About packaging: I have already made two PKGBUILDs for the AUR, so Archlinux is all fine. Yoschi on the other hand will build Debian/Ubuntu packages as soon as I get the code ported properly (I am not quite sure, but I think that there are still some parts in the code that work only on Arch). If you would like to see ghostship on another distribution, please try to build a distribution specific package from the release and give some feedback.

PS: I guess I will add a little tutorial how to use Ultrasurf with Firefox on the ghostship homepage soon. The wordpress.com control panel tells me, that there are actually people looking for such information.

ghostship-svn in the Archlinux User Repository

Ghostship itself runs okay now in my experience, but I’ll keep on testing a bit longer, before I make a stable release. Archlinux is bleeding edge, so if you use that distribution, you may just build the most recent SVN revision from the AUR with the PKGBUILD I submitted.

Any feedback is welcome.

ghostship 0.4: some major rewrites

A few days ago I noticed that my ghostship software had much more bugs than I thought – in fact some bugs that prevented even bigger bugs (that happens sometimes…). Today I had enough time, so I read through all the code again, gave it better comments, simplified it where possible and rewrote some parts. The ship does still need a lot of testing and fixing, since some parts (shutdown, viewer and the init scripts) do not work anymore.

As said before, I will release an officiall tarball (gotta love that word) as soon as I think it is stable. But feel free to literary check out the svn and tell me what you think about it if you want to.

ultrasurf-tools becomes ghostship

As mentioned before, I like to run the Windows proxy software Ultrasurf on Linux.

Some time ago, I made a simple script, that keeps the connection alive by sending data through it from time to time. Two weeks ago I decided to advance it and give it a new name, „ultrasurf-tools“. This piece of bash code was able to completely hide the GUI and run it like a Unix daemon then.

A few days ago however, I decided to push the development even further and turn it into a full Unix daemon. That means automatic installation of the two needed DLL files, automatic download and update of Ultrasurf and even automatic setup of an own user with his own wineprefix and TightVNC settings. So basically one just needs to install that daemon and as soon as it gets started, everything works out of the box.

It basically does its job by now, except that there is still a little bug. When your internet disconnects, Ultasurf tries to connect again for an infinite amount of time, but it somehow does not trigger wget’s timeout (which I use to check whether we are online or not). Thus not only Ultrasurf hangs, but the daemon does not realize it and so nothing happens at all. As soon as I fix this, I will put an official release of the script on its brand new homepage.

Also you may have figured out from the title of this article, that I gave the software a new name. Why? Because ultrasurf-tools might be fine for a little bash script, but as a full functionally daemon, I’d rather use a name that is not related to another software’s name. So I came up with ghostship (metaphor for the invisibility of your IP as well as the invisibility of the GUI).

More information on the official homepage.

More Archlinux artwork!

Eleven days ago, I have posted my first piece of Archlinux related artwork, a wallpaper featuring the punk tux from this blogs header. Today I took a look at Ghost1227’s Arch logo variations thread (again) and decided that I should make one with the very same tux.

archlinux logo variation

svg file, archbbs

Later this day I was still experimenting with Inkscape and guess what just came out? Right, a wallpaper with an exploding taco. Ghost1227 says it looks great, and trusting his word I release it now. I hope you enjoy it

Exploding tacos and conky configs?

svg file, archbbs

PS: This wallpaper also includes the JDownloader icon background fix I mentioned in the first wallpaper’s post.

License for the archlinux logo and text:

The Arch Linux name and logo are recognized trademarks. Some rights reserved. (taken from archlinux.org)

License for everything else in both pictures:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.

Running Amarok 1.4 From Within a Debian Chroot at Arch

Amarok 1.4 is obsolete, but it still is my preferred linux audio player (foobar2k is my choice for windows). I know that there is a newer version out there called amarok2, but as with all of KDE4 it is in my opinion lacking features the previous versions had. Especially the interface is just a big different approach, just look at some screenshots and you will know what I mean.

You might think now: Why don’t I simply install the Amarok 1.4 from the AUR or from kdemod-legacy? The answer is that the AUR version does not build at all with software of newer versions such as gcc and the kdemod build just keeps on crashing. Seriously, I have used the later one for a very long time now, but it keeps on crashing randomly.

Old… one might say stable software… where would you look for that? Debian! My first try was to just use Debians binarys and install them with a PKGBUILD. But it did not work, I don’t remember why exactly, but it had to do with the fact that kde(mod) is installed to /opt/kde on arch and that the libraries weren’t the same.

Yesterday I decided to take a look at chroot again, I already use it for my bundled arch32 installation anyway. I’ve set it up and now amarok is playing without crashing all the time. Awesome!

This is roughly how I did it:

• install debootstrap from AUR

• set up a debian installation in somewhere like /opt/debian and install amarok plus everything else you need via apt-get (eg. python for some plugins)

• copy over some important files, see the arch32 article for details

• create something like /etc/rc.d/debian which contains (adjust to your needs, make sure you mount the folder which has all the music; the mysql sock is used when you try to connect to localhost and dev is for accessing alsa’s dmix):

#!/bin/bash

. /etc/rc.conf
. /etc/rc.d/functions

case $1 in
start)
stat_busy „Starting Debian chroot“
mount –bind /var/lib/dbus /opt/debian/var/lib/dbus
mount –bind /proc /opt/debian/proc
mount –bind /tmp /opt/debian/tmp

mount –bind /home /opt/debian/home

mount –bind /dev /opt/debian/dev
ln -f /tmp/mysql.sock /opt/debian/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
add_daemon debian
stat_done
;;
stop)

stat_busy „Stopping Debian chroot“
umount /opt/debian/var/lib/dbus
umount /opt/debian/proc
umount /opt/debian/tmp
umount /opt/debian/home

umount /opt/debian/dev
rm_daemon debian
stat_done
;;
restart)
$0 stop
sleep 1
$0 start
;;
*)
echo „usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}“
esac
exit 0

• Find a way to start Amarok. Mine is to create two scripts, one (/usr/bin/amarok_debian) which contains the following and is allowed to be started by my user without my password (insert your own nickname here):

#!/bin/bash
echo „Starting ROCK stable amarok (from within debian chroot)…“
chroot /opt/debian su thoughtcrime -c „amarok $*“

• And the other one called /usr/bin/amarok, which just calls the previous one with sudo:

#!/bin/bash
sudo /usr/bin/amarok_debian

In the end, I want to warn you that if you use this method, you will not be able to download covers from amazon (note: there are plugins which can do a better job anyway) anymore as well as retrieve artist/song/album information from wikipedia inside of amarok. Why? Because the Web 2.0, fast as it is, just changes and Debian’s amarok does not have the needed patches to keep track of it. KDEmod does, but it is not stable.

My First (Arch)Linux Wallpaper

Previously I had drawn a black and white version of my punk tux (which is somewhat based on a debian wallpaper), but I couldn’t use it yet. So I decided to put it on a wallpaper and it turned out to be okay in my opinion. But decide yourself:

And yes, just as the arch philosophy says, I kept it simple.

For JDownloader users like me and its non-transparent tray icon, I added a special workaround: The whole bottom-area matches its background-color and because of that, it appears to be transparent. Of course this will only work if the panel holding the tray icons is on the bottom of the screen, or if you simply edit the SVG and put the lighter background on the top/wherever you want. It is just a blurred shape and easy to move with Inkscape

If it fits your over-all desktop theme, you might also try to change the color of the blue square. In my experience, almost every color looks good there.

Download:

Scalable Vector Graphic (recommended)

pre-rendered Portable Network Graphic (2560×2480)

License for the archlinux logo and text:

The Arch Linux name and logo are recognized trademarks. Some rights reserved. (taken from archlinux.org)

License for everything else in this wallpaper:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.

In case you want to make archlinux related artwork yourself, just install the archlinux-artwork package from the extra repository.

archbbs thread

Java Script: Brute Force Calculator

GPGPU. That is a new technology which allows to do mathematical instead of only graphical tasks with the GPU. The point is that video cards have a lot more GFLOPs than CPUs. While GPGPU is only effective for doing very parallel tasks, they are perfect for password cracking.

Today I just wanted to know how long someone would need to crack a password of a specific length with GPGPU. There are some Brute Force Calculators on the web, but the ones I’ve seen on my quick research only offer CPU, not GPU related results.

So I decided to write my own calculator in Java Script (so make sure to activate that), which does exactly what I want.

jwcxz’s mirror (thx!)

omploader mirror (updated)

source code

How to use:

Everything should be self-explaining up to Combinations per second. For this one you need to decide what hardware you want to check your password against and how fast trying one combination can be (which also depends on the algorithm).

I’ve googled for something AES related, but I couldn’t really find anything (if you did, please leave a comment). Instead there’s a web page that lists how many keys per second video cards/CPUs can take when brute forcing the RC5-72 Algorithm, so go on and open that page in a tab.

As I am writing this, someone with a Radeon HD 4850-625 keeps the high score with 450951.8 kkey/sec (kkey/sec = thousand keys per second). So if I want to check a password against that card, I type below Combinations per second the number 450951800. For ten times that card, it will be 4509518000 and so on.

Enjoy!

archbbs thread