How to Mount a Windows Partition in Ubuntu Using fstab

If you have dual-boot on your computer or in a range of other events, a partition might be mounted in nautilus automatically, but not using fstab.

This was my scenario as well, I needed to create a symlink from my Ubuntu system to a folder on the same hard drive, but under Windows 7 (different partition). Nautilus has mounted the Windows 7 NTFS file system on each boot, but the symlink became broken every single time. Talking to some friends on IRC I was told to set up a mount point in fstab as this will be more reliable.

I will use my own example where I wanted to add a mount point for the device /dev/sda2 to /mnt/windows. (Simply put /dev/sda2 is my Windows 7 partition and I want this to be readable and writeable under the location /mnt/windows)

1. First off check the list of devices (partitions) with
sudo blkid

This will output something like:

/dev/sda2: UUID="E88450A5845077D0" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda6: UUID="3ce77abd-dcf9-43f3-a94a-1369855d16b2" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="Mass Storage" UUID="4E84E9E384E9CE11" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/mapper/cryptswap1: UUID="444536d6-705b-4626-b0a5-382107c3ec96" TYPE="swap"

What this tells, are the unique identifiers of devices on the computer. 

For example I know now that /dev/sda2 is my Windows partition based on the fact that it has ntfs file system. This information will be useful in the next steps.

2. Create the location where you want to mount your partition. This directory must be created first, so go ahead and create a directory in /media or /mnt. In my case this was:

sudo mkdir /mnt/windows

3. Edit fstab with

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

After inspecting the file, on the top you will see lines of already mounted devices, these will be different depending on your system and configuration. Just to shown an example here are my first 2 lines.

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>

proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0

This is mostly self-explanatory.

<file system>, the first tag of the line is the device, hence the /dev/sda2 in my case if I wanted my external Win7 partition.

<mount point> is the point where you want this partition to be mounted at. This can be in /media or /mnt or wherever you like it. As explained above, in my case this is /mnt/windows

<type> defines the type of the partition, that is ext3, ext4, ntfs and so on. This information was also obtained in step 1, ntfs.

<options> provides extra settings for permission and such. I used "default", but more advanced options can be read in the manual:

man fstab

4. Add  a new line for the partition or device you want to mount. In my case again, I wanted to mount the partition at /dev/sda2 to the location /mnt/windows

Add the following  line to fstab:

#Windows mount point
/dev/sda2 /mnt/windows    ntfs    defaults    0    0  

Save the changes.

5. After this you can mount all partitions with

sudo mount -a
 

Or you can reboot your system and it will be booted automatically.

Using the above steps I could successfully create a mount point in /mnt/windows to my /dev/sda2 device and this mounting also allows (permanent) symlinks and is persistent even after a reboot.

How Install Flash Games on PirateBox

Although it was not designed for this, PirateBox can support browser games as well. It's main purpose is to allow anonymous file sharing and chat between the connected users, but hey, it doesn't hurt to have a little fun while sharing files right?

My TP-LINK MR3020 is loaded with a custom UI and I was experimenting to see if I can get some flash games running sort of "out of the box".

It turned out, it is simpler than I have imagined, flash games can be used on the PirateBox by simply copying them over and embedding them with <embed media>.

Here is a screenshot of the flash games running on my box:

Guide to Install a Game:

1. Your PirateBox has to be version 0.5.1 or above, that is use lighttpd.
   
2. Find the flash game you want on your box. Search on the internet what you like, e.g. mario, sonic and so on. After you found the game, download it on your computer. This should be an ".swf" file.
   
3. Take your USB drive from the PirateBox and plug it in your computer. The file USB/PirateBox/pbIMG_ws.img has to be edited. This is an img file container mounted when the PirateBox starts and contains the UI files among others.
   This pbIMG_ws.img is 20 Mb by default so if you have a custom UI and 1-2 game you might need to create a bigger file container.
   
   To mount this file do:
   
   sudo mkdir -p /tmp/tmp_mount/ && sudo mount -o loop,rw,sync /media/[$usb]/PirateBox/pbIMG_ws.img /tmp/tmp_mount
   sudo chmod -R 777 /tmp/tmp_mount
   
   (Where [$usb] is the name of your USB drive)
   
4. The file will be mounted at /tmp/tmp_mount/
   Navigate here and open the html file from the www folder you want to add the flash game to.
   Or create a new html page with the game in it. Don't forget to link this to the landing page, so itt will be easily available for users.
   
5. Use the following code to embed the flash game into your site:
   
   
   <embed src="path/to/flash-game.swf"  type="application/x-shockwave-flash" name="obj1" width="600" height="450">
   
   src - path to the file within the www directory. Hence if you have a "games" folder in www then the route should be games/yourgame.swf
   width - width of the flash game (advised to keep original)
   height - height of the flash gem (advised to keep original)
   
6. After finished, unmount the img container before ejecting the USB drive with:
   
   sudo umount /media/[$usb]/PirateBox/pbIMG_ws.img
   
   
7. Eject your USB drive, plug in into your PirateBox and boot it.

NOTE:

The easiest way to quickly mount and unmount this

/media/[$usb]/PirateBox/pbIMG_ws.img

is to create a script that does this for you. 

Here is the script I wrote to make things easier for myself.

CAUTION: Flash games load by default in the browser. Therefore, many games on the same page (especially landing page) will most likely create an unnecessarily high load for the PirateBox. I would advise that you create separate html pages for games.

pbIMG_ws.img mounter script

People are often having issues with changing and mostly finding the UI/html files on the piratebox. These are located in an img file container located at
USB/PirateBox/pbIMG_ws.img

To access the files inside this .img container, you have to mount this file. See guide here.

The best way to do this mounting is to use a script so you don't need to type the command all the time. The script I am using to quickly mount and unmount the pbIMG_ws.img file from your USB drive that contains the www foler (UI files) is shown below. Feel free to take a copy.

1. Copy the code below into a text file (starting from the line "#!/bin/bash")
2. Give it execute permissions either by "properties/allow execution as program" or
sudo chmod +X file.name
2. Replace "TOSHIBA" in the configuration part with the name of your USB stick
3. Run it in the terminal
_________________________________________________________________________________

#!/bin/bash

#Script to mount & unmount pbIMG_ws.img

############## CONFIGURE #######################
#Change this to the name of your USB drive
usb=TOSHIBA

################################################

echo "What do you want to do?"
PS3='Select an option:'
select main in "Mount PirateBox Image" "Unmount PirateBox image"
do
case $main in

"Mount PirateBox Image")
sudo mkdir -p /tmp/tmp_mount/ && sudo mount -o loop,rw,sync /media/$usb/PirateBox/pbIMG_ws.img /tmp/tmp_mount
sudo chmod -R 777 /tmp/tmp_mount
echo ""
echo "Image was successfully mounted at /tmp/tmp_mount"
echo "
1) Mount PirateBox Image
2) Unmount PirateBox image"
;;

"Unmount PirateBox image")
sudo chmod -R 777 /tmp/tmp_mount
sudo umount /media/$usb/PirateBox/pbIMG_ws.img
echo ""
echo "PirateBox image was successfully unmounted!"
echo "
1) Mount PirateBox Image
2) Unmount PirateBox image"
;;
*) echo PEBKAC;;
esac
done

PirateBox Camp 2013, Berlin

Hello everyone!

The PirateBox development team has officially announced today a PirateBox Camp.

Location: Berlin, Germany 

Date: 20th & 21th of July, 2013

Entry: Free for everyone

The event is free to attend and it is going to be fun for al those  who are interested in the project or would like to contribute to it.

Talks will take place explaining the the ideas behind the project project, future development, techniques behind it, a DIY section for building PirateBoxes and much more.

Go check out the details at http://camp.piratebox.de !

Installing Litecoin Client and Mining Software in Ubuntu

Following the success of Bitcoin many different peer-to-peer currencies have appeared on the internet. One of these was Litecoin. And even though it was designed by following the basic principles behind Bitcoin, it has some major differences.

This guide will show a likeliness to Bitcoin Basics and Ubuntu 12.04 simply because the similarities in the client and mining software and the currency in general.

Contents of this Article:

• About Litecoin
• Installing the Litecoin Client
• Mining Software
• Mining Hardware Comparison
• Installing the Mining Software
• Where to Mine
• Sources

About Litecoin

"Litecoin provides faster confirmations (targeted at every 2.5 minutes on average) and uses memory-hard, scrypt-based mining to target the CPUs and GPUs most people already have." [1]

Generating new currency is done by investing computing power, hashing. The computer solves a puzzle and when it finds a block a reward is issued. he block reward is currently still 50 Litecoins (LTC), halving every ~4 years. The exchange rate at the time of writing this article, 1 LTC was worth ~ $1.5.

Litecoin network uses the scrypt algorithm that was specially designed to take longer time to compute, hence hashing rates are lower than in the Bitcoin network. However, since a new block is generated - on average - every 2.5 minutes (compared to 10 minutes in the Bitcoin), there will be 4 times as much coins in existence, summing in 84 million.

Another aim for Litecoin was to avoid concurrence to Bitcoin. While FPGAs and ASICs are providing the majority of the Bitcoin network's hashing power, these are not usable for Litecoin mining (or at least not yet). Litecoin mining is economically viable on available, consumer hardware. As the global hashing rate is slower, there will be no handful of individuals "dominating" the network with extremely powerful devices (to be seen in the future). However, there is still concurrence, as if one has a GPU, a decision has to be made whether to mine BTC or LTC.

Installing the Litecoin Client

Installing the client is simple and it can be done either  from the terminal or through GUI/Nautilus.

It has to be noted that Litecoin has also 2 client versions, litecoind and litecoin-qt. Litecoind is the "litecoin daemon, a terminal version, whereas litecoin-qt is the qt4, GUI version of the client software. Unless you know what you are doing, it is recommended to use the GUI version of the client, litecoin-qt.

Latest Client

Before Installation

Package dependencies have to be satisfied. Run the following command to install necessary packages,

sudo apt-get install libqtgui4

If you have the Bitcoin client installed, you probably already have all packages.

GUI

• Download the latest client software
• Unpack the downloaded file to anywhere on your computer
• Navigate to the unpacked directory/bin/##
• Launch the executable file "litecoin-qt"

Where ## is either 32 or 64 depending on what system you have (32 or 64 bit).

This will launch the Litecoin client.

Terminal

Run the following commands in a terminal window to install the client,

• wget https://github.com/downloads/litecoin-project/litecoin/litecoin-0.6.3c-linux.tar.gz
• tar xzvf litecoin-0.6.3c-linux.tar.gz  
• cd litecoin-0.6.3c-linux/## 
• ./litecoin-qt

Where ## is either 32 or 64 depending on what system you have (32 or 64 bit).

This will launch the Litecoin client.

After running the executable file, a directory ".litecoin" will be created in your home directory.
/Home/$USER/.litecoin contains your blockchain and wallet.dat file. (You can press Ctrl+H to view hidden files)

The Litecoin client is nicely integrated into the Ubuntu menu bar, originally an issue with older Bitcoin clients.

Mining Software

The generation of new blocks is done by "mining" that is the investing of computational power. As the Litecoin was designed to be unfavourable for specific mining hardware (FPGA & ASIC), mining is currently only done using CPUs, but mainly GPUs.

There are back end software, actually doing the mining and there is a GUI front end, that allows quick and easy configuration.

The 3 software for Litecoin mining currently available are,

1. cgminer --scrypt
2. reaper miner
3. pooler cpumineer

GUIminer -scrypt  serves as a front end and has reaper miner, cgminer and even stratum built in! Hence is a truly useful tool for beginners.

Cgminer is the same miner that is used for mining Bitcoins, but with the argument "--scrypt" it can be used for mining Litecoins. Uses GPU and requires AMD APP SDK on ATI/AMD cards to be installed. Cgminer comes with stratum proxy included, hence it can be used to mine through both getwork and stratum.

Reaper miner is an OpenCL miner for both nVidia and ATI/AMD GPUs, however it is more efficient on ATI cards. If pool requires stratum, stratum proxy has to be running.

Pooler cpuminer (or "minerd" ) is a miner for CPUs that was integrated into the Litecoin-qt client as well. If pool requires stratum, stratum proxy has to be running.


Stratum Mining Protocol (or Stratum Proxy) is a protocol written by slush originally for Bitcoin mining to improve pool-miner communications. This protocol was adopted by a range of other pools and by many of the Litecoin pools as well.

Mining Hardware Comparison

Of course there are differences in hardware hashing powers. Due to the architecture of ATI/AMD and nVidia graphics cards, ATI/AMD cards perform better here as well.

And while one would get 200MH/s+ from a decent GPU in the Bitcoin network, using the scrypt algorithm and mining Litecoin, this value is in the range of a few hundred kH/s.

CPUs only do a few 10kH/s and hence are (once again) ineffective and probably economically not viable for mining purposes.

List of Mining Hardware Comparied [2]

Installing the Mining Software

 

GUIminer -scrypt

 

The installation procedure is the same as in the case of GUIminer for Bitcoin. Please refer to Bitcoin Basics and Ubuntu 12.04

Get the latest release of GUIminer -scrypt from git repository https://github.com/theRealTacoTime/poclbm

Stratum Proxy

Stratum protocol is using python. If you do not have python-dev installed, run the following command,

sudo apt-get install python-dev

Download the tarball from https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy/tarball/master

Extract it

Open up a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T) and navigate to the newly created directory and run the command to install,

sudo python setup.py install

When installation is finished, you may start the proxy with

./mining_proxy.py

However, as stratum tries to connect to slush's Bitcoin mining pool by default, extra arguments need to be used.

./mining_proxy.py -o coinotron.com -p 3334

Would connect to coinotron.com pool on port number 3334. For a list of arguments that can be used, type

./mining_proxy.py --help

Note: If you are getting an error during install, it is likely that you don't have the necessary python-dev installed.

Also, all this can be done form a terminal window as well,

wget https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy/tarball/master
tar xf slush0-stratum-mining-proxy-7b5c080.tar.gz
cd slush0-stratum-mining-proxy-7b5c080/sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo python setup.py install
./mining_proxy.py -o coinotron.com -p 3334

Pooler cpuminer

Download latest source tarball from https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer/downloads
(I had problems when trying to clone git repository, so use the above link)

Extract it to anywhere on your computer

Open a new terminal window and navigate to the newly created directory and compile from source

./configure
make

After making it the executable file minerd will be created in the directory. You can start using miner (pooler cpuminer) to mine right away. Using the credentials from your pool. Remember, if your pool only uses stratum for mining, you have to have stratum running.

In this case you have to connect to,

host: localhost (or 127.0.0.1)

port: 8332

Watch out whether or not you have to use stratum and your pool's login credentials. Once again, installation can e done purely from the terminal as well,

wget https://github.com/downloads/pooler/cpuminer/pooler-cpuminer-2.2.3.tar.gz

tar xzvf pooler-cpuminer-2.2.3.tar.gz

cd pooler-cpuminer-2.2.3

./configure && make

./minerd -o URL:PORT -u USER - p PASSWORD

Important that minerd can be used through the libcoin-qt as well. To do this copy the minerd executable file into the folder where libcoin-qt is. After this you can start CPU mining directly from your client software! Credentials still have to be provided of course.

Pooler cpuminer is similar to cgminer and uses the same syntax. When launching from the terminal you can use the following arguments,

• -o URL of your pool
• -u workername
• -p woerkerpass

 So when stratum proxy is running and connected to a pool, it can be run as
./minerd -o localhost:8332 -u USER -p PASSWORD

As with any miners, to get some help,

./minerd --help

Cgminer

Unfortunately, as my laptop is rather old, it doesn't have a good enough video card to support any type of mining. However, the installation process is the following.

• Download latest cgminer from ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/
• Make sure you have AMD APP SDK installed (See links in blog sidebar) as well as appropriate AMD drivers.
• Refer to guide at  Bitcoin Basics and Ubuntu 12.04 as this is the same miner with the extra argument "--scrypt" when running it.

Cgminer has to be started with the argument "--scrypt" in order to start mining Litecoins with the scrypt algorithm. If you have cgminer on your system and can mine Bitcoins, there is nothing more to do. A sample setup would look like,

cgminer --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://coinotron.com:3334 -u workername -p workerpass

Where

• -o URL of your pool
• -u workername
• -p woerkerpass

Reaper Miner

Download latest version from http://wiki.solidcoin.info/wiki/Reaper#Download

Extract the archive

Open a terminal window and navigate to the directory and issue the following commands,

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make

You need the 2 dots [..] at the end!

After this the reaper binary, executable file will be generated. You can run it as

./reaper

If you want to, you can move this executable to any other folder, but also move the files,

• reaper.cl
• reaper.conf
• litecoin.conf

As these are used by the miner and have to be in the same directory.

Reaper miner uses config files for mining, in this case 2 config files are of interest, namely reaper.conf and litecoin.conf.

First open reaper.conf with any text editor and remove the lines

mine solidcoin

mine bitcoin

from the end of the file. It should look like this,

Then open litecoin.conf (DO NOT mix this up with home/$USER/.litecoin/litecoin.conf as the two are NOT the same !) and fill out the 

• host localhost 
• port 8332 
• user username
• pass password

with the proper credentials for your pool. Note that there will be a difference when mining through stratum proxy. The config file should look similar,

After these configurations have been made, make sure that the reaper executable file is in the same directory as the config files. Run reaper with

./reaper

If you have managed to start reaper miner, you can start experimenting with the configuration files to get better hashing speeds.

Note that reaper miner also uses OpenCL, hence make sure you have the necessary AMD APP SDK installed.

Where to Mine

Just like with Bitcoin, there are two options for mining: solo and pooled mining.

Solo mining is when you are running the client in server mode and connect to it with your mining software. If you find a block, the whole 50LTC reward goes to you (~70$ currently). If, however, you do not find a block, there is no reward. This is a high risk high gain mining technique and it is not advised unless you have considerable hashing power.

Pooled mining is when a group of miners unite and mine as a team. Shares are given to each miner based on the amount of work (hashes solved) and when a block is found by any of the miners, the block reward is split among the miners, based on the amount of shares received. This allows a steadier, but smaller amount of payments and hence reduces the risk of never finding a block and never receiving anything.

Configure Solo Mining

Solo mining requires to start the client software in server mode, have proper configuration and connect the mining software to the running client.

1. Firstly a litecoin.conf file has to be created in /Home/$USER/.litecoin
This file has to contain the following lines:

rpcuser=username

rpcpassword=password

rpcallowip=127.0.0.1

rpcport=9332

daemon=1

server=1

gen=0

Make sure you change username and password to something unique.

2. Kill the running litecoind or litecoin-qt if any of them are running. You can do this by right-clicking it in the top bar and choose "exit" or sudo killall litecoin-qt.

3. The client has to be launched in server mode in order for you to connect to it and mine in solo mode. To do this navigate to the unpacked folder and run litecoin-qt with the -server option.

4. Connecting to the server with any mining software is using the credentials given in the litecoin.conf file as created above.

host: 127.0.0.1 (or localhost)
port: 9332
username: your unique username
password: your unique passowrd

Note: You will not see any shares being accepted when mining in solo. If a share is accepted, that means you have found a block. Also if you get a connection error, double-check the credentials to see if you have mistyped something.

Configure Pooled Mining

A list of mining pools is available HERE. After signing up for a pool, you will need some credentials,

• worker name
• worker password
• pool mining address
• port number

Workers are simply put the devices that will mine Litecoins for you. For example if you have 2 GPUs and a decent CPU, you would need to create 3 separate workers.

To connect to the pool, simply substitute the above credentials when connecting with any of the mining software.

Here is a list of mining pools, compared.

Remember

• Some pools require stratum and do not work over standard http/getwork.
• If you are running stratum, use the host "localhost" or "127.0.0.1" and the port "8332"
• In order to mine with GPUs you have to have either AMD APP SDK for AMD/ATI cards or the CUDA toolkit for nVidia cards. Dont forget about appropriate drivers either. (There are some useful ATI driver links in the blog sidebar)

If you need any help, or something wasn't clear, please leave a comment and I will get back to you and reply as soon as I can.

Happy mining!

(Also, if you have some Litecoins already and want to have some fun, you can check out litecoinkamikaze.com. Here you can use your Litecoins to make bets, play and maybe even win the jackpot.)

Sources

[1] - Litecoin.org
[2] - GitHub Wiki

Create Symbolic Links in Ubuntu

The 2 types of links are hard links and soft links .

A hard link is essentially a file with multiple names, there are multiple copies of the file. So that if one of the hard links is deleted, the file persists to exist.

A soft link (also called symlink or symbolic link) is a file system entry that points to the file name and location. Deleting the symbolic link does not remove the original file. If, however, the file to which the soft link points is removed, the soft link stops working, it is broken.

Symbolic links can be created both from the terminal and from nautilus (file manager, GUI). 

 

Terminal

 

The syntax for creating a symbolic link is,

ln -s target source

where,

• target - The existing file/directory you would like to link TO.
• source - The file/folder to be created, copying the contents of the target. The LINK itself.

For more help see ln --help

Example:

ln -s /home/nargren/Pictures /home/nargren/Pictures_Backup

This would create a symbolic link directory called "Pictures_Backup" to my "Pictures" directory. All the content in either of the 2 directories would appear in the other one as well.

GUI

 

You can easily create a symbolic link to a folder or file by middle clicking on the folder with the mouse and dragging it to its new location, while holding the middle mouse button.

Remove Symbolic Links

 

To remove a symbolic link, be it a file or directory, simply remove the created link. This can be done either through nautilus (GUI) or using the rm and rm -f commands in the terminal.

Use of Symbolic Links

 

Symbolic links are especially useful on computers with dual-boot, running for example Windows and Linux. As symbolic links can be created across partitions and file systems, windows folders can be linked to appropriate Ubuntu folders.

I will bring my own example of using Mozilla Thunderbird as e-mail client. I would like to have my emails and profiles available, including all my downloaded emails on both operating systems. This could be done either by downloading all new e-mails when I start the software on any of the two operating systems, or via symbolic links. As I had problems downloading new emails with multiple clients, I have chosen to make a symbolic link.

I have linked my Windows

[USER]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird

 folder to the Ubuntu directory

 home/.thunderbird

This allowed me to download my emails only once and have them available on both Windows and Linux while keeping my entire profile.

Ubuntu tablet

Earlier today Ubuntu tablet was announced. 

The brief promo video shows how fast the OS works on a tablet computer. Seamless change between applications and stunning multi task experience. Head over to Ubuntu.com to learn more!

The user interface looks mostly identical to that of the Ubuntu phone, hence the "unity", uniformity across devices. The same simple and fast interface on a larger screen allowing you to use both hands or watch videos, view and edit images or video chat with friends. Very nice first impression with the extremely fast and responsive system. I have used android tablets before, but this seems like a new user experience. I like the layout, the controls and the full utilization of the screen.

Just like in the case of the Ubuntu phone, I really hope that the tablet can run a terminal as well.

To learn more about functions and features read my post about the Ubuntu Phone and watch the video above. Don't forget to check out Ubuntu.com either!