First of all a huge thanks to Maxime who has made some really nice improvements to my design that I am discussing here. It is about the "Design 2.0" and see the list of improvements below.
The improvements and changes do not require any change to your PirateBox, except for the www folder where the html files are stored, the pbIMG_ws.img file on your drive.
Improvements
User gets automatically redirected to mobile version of the website if accessing from mobile device (presuming no preference is set on the device for viewing the browser versions).
Display the number of connected users, just to keep track on how many users are connected to the PirateBox.
(Fundamental part of a PirateBox is that it is fully anonymous and this does not change here. No information is collected from the users, the device only tells the total number of connections, nothing else.)
There is a very nicely written tutorial for replacing the original PirateBox design with my Design, including instructions how to modify the page for your liking.
Also the chat was changed slightly. It is no longer operating as an iframe, but as a core part of the index (home) page. As a result of this it will load faster and it will eliminate compatibility issues with some devices. Also since it is now the part of the main page, there is no need for a chat.html page either.
There is a tutorial written by Maxime on GitHub that you can follow, but it is as simple as downloading the "Design 2.0" folder and copying over its contents to the Pendrive's pbIMG_ws.img/piratebox/www folder, overwriting any similar files already there.
Attention: Make sure you do a BACKUP of your own www folder and it's contents before overwriting files or doing any changes.
Screenshots
So that you do not have to go back to previous post to know what design I am talking about.
As you can see nothing has changed in the overall design, the pictures just show how the design looks to have a quick idea of what you get here. The change in chat is not remarkable to the naked eye, but it is a nice new feature that it doesn't need to be loaded and embedded from a separate page, but being part of the main page.
I also cannot show the mobile redirect, but that is one of the nice features I really like. So from now on even people from mobile devices can get a basic view of the site, however if they prefer they can sure view the browser version.
Future Plans
After talking to Maxime we have started to work together to give a better finish to the UI, add more functionality and improve general appearance and usability.
Our plans for the future are to add the following:
Admin page with the features
Allow editing (rename, delete etc.) of uploaded files
Contain a short guide of terminal commands with the most important commands
Option for owners to add video, music or possible games to the PirateBox that can be streamed to the users. It is likely that only "stronger" PirateBoxes will have this function as this will need larger amount of computing power from the router. (However as browser try opening files instead of downloading them anyway, this sort of works already.)
Multiple languages support for the site so users could choose to view & use the PirateBox in their own, preferred language.
Design adjustments to achieve a higher standard and make a more attractive UI in general for the public.
Videos, music and even flash games can be added easily by anyone right now as well. As HTML5 supports a videos and music, this can also be added relatively easily, see the example below for adding a video:
<article id="video">
<h1>Copy Is Not Theft!</h1>
<h2>A short video illustrating the difference between stealing and copying.</h2>
<video id="intro_vid" width="600" height="450" controls >
<source src="multimedia/Copying.Is.Not.Theft.webm" />
<source src="multimedia/Copying.Is.Not.Theft.mp4" />
</video>
</article>
The above code would add a new article (section) to the man page where video(s) would be at multimedia/video.webNow you can see 2 video formats listed there, this is needed because in HTML 5 different browsers support different video types.
Similarly, you could add audio files to your site as well, example:
<audio controls="controls">
<source src="multimedia/audio.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
<source src="multimedia/audio.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
Your browser does not support the audio element, soz.
</audio>
Where again the 2 file types are because of browser supports.
Although note that the standard pbIMG_ws.img container is only 20MB in size and all the files for the website must be in here. Now you can of course make a larger img file that could contain all the files and added videos, but this will take up space on the pendrive. Also the more multimedia you add, the more your box will have to work.
On my custom box I am using a 50MB container with just one short video and audio file for experimental purposes, it looks like this:
As you can see, I also made myself a "Video" and "Games" tab as well, the picture above shows the video page, but there is a flash game uploaded as well. It is running just fine, but not multiplayer.
This article contains some help for those starting to get into using bitcoin and contains help I have found when reading through different forums and experiences made. It also assumes some basic knowledge about Bitcoin in general, bitcoin client the meaning of mining, mining software, blocks, hashing rate and so on. All this information can be found in the Bitcoin Wiki and only requires some reading and no actual deep programming knowledge.
Contents of this Article
About Bitcoin
Installing the Bitcoin Client
Mining & Mining Software
Where to Mine
Downloads & Links
Earn Your First Coins (for free)
Sources
About Bitcoin
"Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is open-source; its design is public, nobody owns or controls Bitcoin and everyone can take part."[1]
Originally Bitcoin was developed by an anonymous person calling himself "Satoshi Nakamoto", his real identity is still unknown. [2]
The network uses the SHA256 algorithm that is very fast to compute and hence allowed technology companies to develop specialized hardware for bitcoin mining, the coin generation process. The mining process includes a "puzzle" a machine can solve and based on the outcome of this puzzle a block might be generated. Upon finding a new block, 25 BTC is added to the miner. Blocks are generated on a predictable rate (1 block every 10 minutes) and the reward for finding a block halves on a pre-determined basis. These factors limit the total number of available bitcoins in the system, which will be 21 million coins once the system reaches this point in the future.
The easy calculation of SHA256 hashes made it available to develop specialized hardware such as FPGAs (Field programmable Gate Array) and ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) that specialize in bitcoin mining. Such hardware have dramatically shifted the bitcoin mining process and increased the global hash rate of the network. Whether this is good or bad, everyone has to decide for him/herself. one thing is for sure, bitcoin is growing faster than before. Currently 1 coin (BTC) is worth over 500$ and it does not seem to slow down.
And here is a short video explaining a few things and introducing Bitcoin.
Installing the Bitcoin Client
First of all what you should know that there are 2 versions of the official bitcoin client, bitcoin and bitcoin-qt. Bitcoin is the command line client that is for more advanced users while bitcoin-qt is the graphical user interface (GUI) version that is easier to use (aim to use the bitcoin-qt, GUI version).
Known issue with the client under Ubuntu: The icon does not show in the Unity menu bar (top of the screen where email etc is.). It shows up when first installing, but after that it is gone. As said above, I tried building from source to see if the problem is solved that way, but it isn't. Not a big impact, just a minor issue, but I personally would like to be displayed there, hopefully this will be fixed soon. Update: This issue has been fixed in theLatest Client (as far as I saw).
1. Amending Software Sources (PPA) - Recommended
Update: This seems to be the predominantly supported and easiest way of installing bitcoin-qt on an Ubuntu system.
Edit your software sources by,
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
and add the 2 lines at the end of the file,
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bitcoin/bitcoin/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bitcoin/bitcoin/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main
Where of course you replace "YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE" with the name of your Ubuntu version, e.g. 12.04 is "precise". If this is not perfectly clear for you or you are using another version than 12.04 of Ubuntu then check out this link for help: https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin.
After this simply run in the terminal,
It is now installed on your system in /home/[USER]/.bitcoin
You can create a desktop launcher or launch it from unity panel or your favourite place.
If you need more help: Bitcoin.org
2. Installing the Bitcoin Client - Alternative 1
Installation by downlaoding the latest bitcoin *.tar.gz file. As per the README file tells:
Download the latest *.tar.gz file from bitcoin.org
Unzip the contents into a folder
Run sudo apt-get install libqtgui4 to install Qt4 runtime libraries (if you had a previous version installed this should already exist on your system)
Run either of the 4 executable installers (according to your system)
This should install the bitcoin client onto your system.
3. Building from Source - Alternative 2
To get the bitcoin client clone the official github repository first and then decide whether you need the GUI version (bitcoin-qt) or just the terminal one. Clone the github repository,
where "ROUTE" is the route to the folder you want to copy to. Leave empty to clone it to your home directory. Also you will need some packages installed, get these by running
This is fully in the terminal. After the github repository as been downloaded and the necessary packages applied, simply execute (as per doc/readme-qt.rst)
qmake
make
Now note that as said this is the terminal version of the bitcoin client, it comes with no graphical interface, all arguments must be given in the terminal. It is highly advised that you do not use this option.
If qmake gives an error, try
qmake "USE_UPNP=-"
make
3.b. GUI Version
You have to get a program called "Qt-creator" from the software centre so go ahead and download it.
Also you will need the packages as mentioned above so install those if you have not done so already.
If you have it navigate to the cloned github repository, right-click bitcoin-qt.pro and select "Open with Qt Creator"
This will open up Qt, here click on run on the bottom left of the screen
and this will create an executable file in the bitcoin folder that will run bitcoin-qt. Run as you would any other file.
Mining & Mining Software
You can either mine alone - in "solo" - where the possibility of you finding a block (25 BTC ~ 7000 Euros, but doesn't matter as it is changing all the time) is above 40 years, or you can mine for a group - called "pools" - where you get a share of the 25 BTC based on the help you provided. With solo mining you may not receive anything at all, but you might find a block and get the total 25 BTC, whereas in a pool you will have more steady, but smaller payments. As the difficulty and global hash rate are high, it is highly advised to join and mine a pool.
Installing poclbm-GUI
Either way you want to go, you need a software to mine and start hashing. I suggest using poclbm-gui miner which is easy to set up and gives the same functions as the terminal version. The things you will need on your system installed are,
python 2.6 or above (3 is not supported) wxpython, get them from synaptic package manager.
nVidia Cards: numpy and PyOpenCL, that can again be again installed from synaptic package manager.
Launch synaptic package manager with:
sudo synaptic
and make a search for the packages and install.
ATI video cards:
If you have an ATI card and plan to use it for mining (which will be much faster than CPU or nVidia cards) the you also need an ATI Stream SDK downloaded and installed.
You can get the latest version of poclbm GUI miner from github,
git clone https://github.com/Kiv/poclbm
and then to run,
cd /home/[USER]/poclbm
python guiminer.py
This will run the guiminer (the front end software) and also poclbm miner, however if you want to use other mining software (e.g. cgminer), it has to be downloaded and installed manually (see links at end of the post and at List of Bitcoin Mining Software). I leave this to you, you have to decide what software you want to use or rather what does your hardware support (!). With all the different ASICS out you will need to check for support. Cgminer is generally a good option to go for and installing it is very simple and it is described in the readme file.
Look for what you need; clone git repo, cd to git repo, ./configure, make, make install or refer to documentation.
After say you have downlaoded cgminer, you can use the GUIminer to control it. This virtually poses no overhead on your hash rate. Make sure you set the correct path to your mining software! Refer to software screenshots below. I recommend you create a "miners" directory within the guiminer and put all miners you use in here. Just to keep things in one place.
Mining in Solo
Firstly go to ~/.bitcoin directory (to see hidden folders press "Ctrl+H" in the file manager, in your home directory) and create a new file called bitcoin.conf if you do not have it already. Put 3 lines in the file,
Keep these secure.
Setting up solo mining requires the bitcoin client to be started up in server mode. To do this, close the client if you have it already running and and start bitcoin-qt with the following command from the terminal,
Where192.168.0.* is you local IP address range, note that this might be different based on your home network settings. This is to tell the client to allow miner connections from the local network.
Start mining software as normal and set up a new solo miner, refer to picture below.
Ext. Path: Absolute path to your miners installed. Make sure it is pointing to the right executable file.
Server: Choose solo Host:localhost Port: Just use 8332, make sure it is the same as you have launched the client with & set in your bitcoin.conf
Username: As per set in ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf Password: As per set in ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf Extra flags: Flags for the miner, like "-v -w 128', this depends on the miner and graphics card you are using. You can look up a list of best settings for different cards Bitcoin Wiki
After setting up to mine in solo, you should see a similar window:
Ubuntu
Windows
If you have launched the client right, got the matching username & password you should be mining in solo.
Mining for a Pool
Pooled mining is the "easier" from the 2. From the dropdown menu simply choose which pool you want to mine for - or choose "other" if it is not listed - type in your account credentials and other information necessary, specified on the pool's homepage and start mining. Please refer to the images and information discussed above in "Mining in Solo".
Of course, username and password in this case will be the ones specific to your pool's one and not the one set it ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf !
If you are looking for a pool to mine for, scroll to the bottom of this post!
Note:
Setting all these up is not difficult at all, once you have figured out how to do it. I hope I could save you some time of looking around the internet and browsing through different forums for finding the right information.
If you however require any further help or anything was not clear or just got stuck, leave a comment and I will get back to you and do my best to help.
Downloads & Links
poclbm with GUI - Github (Kiv); GPU miner using OpenCL, Nvida & ATI; Recommendedas it contains GUI and mining software alike!
Ufasoft CPU/GPU miner - darkgamex.ch; has to be built from source (Windows & Linux)
Diablo GPU miner - Github (Diablo);Uses Java ant the OpenCL framework for hashing; ATI & Nvidia cards
cgminer - ck.kolivas.org; multi-threaded multi-pool GPU, FPGA and CPU miner
Dailybitcoins.org - Some micro bitcoins every hour, random prizes and advertising opportunity. Nice option for those new to Bitcoin to make their first coins fast and for people who want to advertise alike. Bitvisitor.org - Earn bitcoins for watching videos CoinURL.com - Earn bitcoins for publishing ads on your website, by shortening URLs and you can even advertise with bitcoins.
Where to Mine
Update: Please note that "hobby mining" may no longer be profitable with the ever-increasing difficulty and even the cheapest electricity prices. Furthermore cloudmining is often leading to losses and not to profit! At this point I can personally only recommend LTCGear that offers profitable mining power that scales with the difficulty and the below linked GAWminers.
After registration you will be given a short tutorial about the website. Click through the tutorial. (Important!)
At the end of the tutorial you will be given aGenesis Hashlet (10GH/s)
Select a Bitcoin mining pool for it and drag&drop onto your new hashlet.
You are done and mining Bitcoin with 10GH/s!
CEX.io
Join me mining and trading at CEX.io, here you get the following benefits:
Mine in the ghash.io pool with 0% fee
Rent Hashing Power (GH/s) (With BTC or NMC)
You can buy & sell GH/s from the cloud that will work for you OR you can simply make a profit on buying and selling these shares. No fee.
Invite others and get 3% bonus of their GH/s in extra to your account (this does not affect the invited person in a negative manner)
Merged mining ofBitcoin, Namecoin, Devcoin and IXcoin. These do not require extra work, but increase your profit.
Warning! Maintenance fees are so high that it practically only makes sense to TRADE at CEX.io. Buying hashing power and letting it work will make you lose money on the long term!
Triplemining
You can also join me mining at Triplemining where:
The pool gets all the shares
You have a chance to win the weekly jackpot of around ~0.4 BTC
You can make your own "minipool" and earn more by inviting others
Lowest payout limit that I have seen among pools (0.01 BTC)
In the latest release of Ubuntu, 12.10 there was a privacy leak discovered in the new Dash. When you search for an item, you will see Amazon advertisements of similar products as well from the internet (aka you make an internet search from your desktop and then by clicking on the links they will open in the browser). Now the search request is sent through https, which is secure, but the images from Amazon.com are sent back through insecure http. Thereby your IP, location and hence identity can be revealed.
EFF.org has a more detailed article on this and the latest show of Hak5 is also talking about the issue, hence I am just raising awareness here as well. If you have upgraded to 12.10 then you might want to solve this issue, what you can do quickly by reading on here or visiting either of the above two sites.
Disable Data Leaks
Terminal
sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping From System Settings Go to Privacy/Search Results and set "When Searching in the Dash" to "Off"
Email encryption and digital signature are ways to protect your emails from spying eyes and to make sure the recipient knows that you are the original sender of the email. Enigmail is an Add-on for the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client that allows you to send securely emails.
The term e-mail is a little misleading. When you send a mail trough the post you write something on a paper and put it into a sealed envelope, so the people handling your mail can't actually see what is inside. Now most people think that the e-mail is similar to this, however in reality its more like a postcard...When going trough the servers, basically anyone who knows how to, can read them. This is where Enigmail and OpenGPG appear and add a layer of security.
Digital signature
Digital signature is the equivalent of a signature in the computer world. It helps to uniquely identify -in this case- the sender of the email. So if A and B are talking (assuming both of them have the software of course) and A sends an e-mail to B and signs it with his own signature, then B knows for sure that the e-mail came from A and it wasn't altered, the information can be trusted.
Digital signature doesn't prevent others from reading your message on its way, but it cannot be altered and the recipient can be sure that the e-mail comes from the right source. You can also sign e-mails and send to a person who doesn't have the software and they will still be able to read it.
Encryption
Encryption is encryption. You encrypt the whole message making others unable to read it except for the person you have sent it to. This is considered as secure messaging and the contents of the email remain hidden from spying eyes.
The basics for the encryption used here is the use of encryption keys. So if A and B are e-mailing both of them have a key pair on their system, a private key and a public key.
Private key - Must be kept secret and protected from everyone. It is used to decrypt messages sent TO you.
Public key - You can share this key with friends and basically anyone. It is used BY OTHERS to send encrypted messages TO YOU.
So for starters A and B have to exchange their public keys, this will identify them and allow to send and receive encrypted e-mails. Here is how it goes briefly:
A takes the public key of B and uses it to encrypt the message and sends it to B. B then receives this message and decrypts it with his own private key. If this private key is secret, only B is able to read the message. Similarly when B replies he encrypts the message with A's public key and A can decrypt it with his own private key.
Step 1. Installing Enigmail for Thunderbird
There are two components to install: Enigmail, the Add-on for Thunderbird and GnuPG encryption software.
Enigmail can be simply downloaded from the Add-on tab of Thunderbird, it is very straightforward, but it uses GnuPG to work so without that it's useless.
Open Mozilla Thunderbird
Go to Tools/Options/Manage Add-Ons
Search for "Enigmail" and download it
(If you can't seem to find it there, download from Mozdev and install, or you can upgrade to the latest Thunderbird version which should be able to find it)
That is Enigmail done.
Step 2. Installing GnuPG
First of all GnuPG depends on the following packages: libgpg-error, libgcrypt, libksba and libassuan.
Now these not installed by default with Ubuntu so if you have not installed them before you will have to do it now. The easiest way to do this is with the synaptic package manager (sudo apt-get install synaptic if you do not have it already). Simply search for each of the above packages and mark them for installation and install them all.
Go to gnupg.org and download GnuPG 2.0 which will come in a .tar.bz2 file. Extract this file and open up a terminal window, cd to the extracted folder and build GnuPG from source as you would do normally:
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install
If you are still missing a package and error message will warn you at the end of ./congfigure similar to this:
Instructions are straightforward, simply install missing packages and everything will go smoothly. After running make and make install (takes some time) you will get a confirmation of GnuPG installed:
Step 3. Check configuration
First of all Thunderbird and Enigmail need to be set up to use GnuPG, usually it is done by default, but do a manual check. Open Thunderbird and check the new OpenPGP menu point and select Properties and you will be presented the following window
All you have to make sure that the router to gpg is correct (usually it is), however if it is not, specify the correct router in the box below.
DONE.
You can either import you key files from another machine or if this is the first time using Enigmail and OpenGPG then you will need to create a new key pair. This is beyond the installation tutorial, but a step-by-step (quickstart) guide is available on enigmail.net
Thanks to conversall2 for spotting a glitch with the chat feature in my new website design.
Due to slightly different design than before, the chat window was embedded into the main page and did not refresh by itself.
This has been fixed by using a simple iframe and chat works normally now.
Please download the fixed design from GitHub
Thanks for spotting & feedback and sorry for this issue.
Recently I had the error message appearing when trying to launch my PB on my Ubuntu machine:
Starting lighttpd: (network.c.358) can't bind to port: 80 Address already in use
Turns out there are quite a few old forum threads on this topic where the issue comes down to one of 2 things:
Another webserver application is running (like apache)To solve this issue check what is running on port 80 by:
sudo fuser -v 80/tcp
And then kill or remove this application.
IPv6 is causing some issues in the lighttpd.conf file Open lighttpd.conf file in any text editor and comment the line include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl" with a #, so: #include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl" Although in case of the PirateBox script package, this comes ready and set.
My personal issue was that somehow I had apache2 webserver installed on my system. I do not remember installing it, but now it has been removed and lighttpd is starting/running just fine. So if anyone is having a similar issue, you may want to check out these 2 possible issues.
Now since I am doing some designs for the PirateBox in the future it will be easier if I would make custom image files that could replace the original one. This would make life easier as there would be no need to mount, backup and change the original image file.
I am experimenting with some html5 videos in my custom PB design just to see how the server and router handles the "pressure". Also after reading some threads on reddit I am keen to try some browser games on my PB, but these will need a larger container than the default img (20MB). So here is a short note on how to handle these img files.
(Also sorry for the colours, it is just to illustrate parts of the code.)
Creating & formatting img files in Ubuntu
1. Open terminal and type
dd if=/dev/zeroof=file.img bs=1M count=50
This will create a file called "file.img" in your home directory with a size of 50 MB.
What is what? if=/dev/zero => input file, but since we want an empty container (no input file), we use the "universal" term for "nothing" /dev/zero
of=file.img => output file, file name & location
count=50 => Size of the file in MB
2. After this image needs to be formatted in some file format (ext4, fat32, ntfs and so on; ext3 for the PirateBox). Now you can either use gparted if you want some nice GUI or you can use mkfs command:
mkfs ext3 -F file.img
(For a quick and easy way to do this, you can use my script imgKreator from GitHub.)
Mounting the img file
I have tried mounting the PirateBox img file with different software, but that didn't work. So after some help through chat and forums here is the command to mount the img file:
sudo mkdir -p /tmp/mount_tmp/ && sudo mount -o loop,rw,sync piratebox/pbIMG_ws.img/tmp/mount_tmp
What is what? /tmp/mount_tmp/ => Create the folder where the img will be mounted piratebox/pbIMG_ws.img => Route to PB image file /tmp/mount_tmp => Mount location
I personally had issues trying to edit anything in the folder so I am running a mounting script with the second line being:
sudo chmod -R ug+rw /tmp/mount_tmp
Which just gives read+write permission to the folder.(Although this worked for me before, when creating a new file container use sudo chmod 777 otherwise the PB will not recognize the files and although connection to the network can be made, no website will load). After this editing is simple.
To unmount:
sudo unmount piratebox/pbIMG_ws.img
PirateBox: If interested here is a script that will allow you to quickly mount and unmount pbIM_ws.img file that contains the www folder and the UI/html files.
As you can see, I also made myself a "Video" and "Games" tab as well, the picture above shows the video page, but there is a flash game uploaded as well. It is running just fine, but not multiplayer.
