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Fixing Read-Only USB Drives

  I recently purchased some inexpensive 4GB USB drives from Amazon and right away, I ran into problems. Mageia Linux essentially mandates that you use their utility, IsoDumper, to write ISO images to USB drives. A nice feature is that if any space is left on the drive, it can format it in one of several different formats compatible with whatever OS the ISO is. For example, I installed the FreeDOS ISO and formatted the remainder of the drive as a FAT partition, perfect for including some DOS apps. However, if the ISO image is installed and is corrupted, the drive becomes "read only" and can't be overwritten on a second attempt with IsoDumper. Unfortunately, because the USB's partition table seems borked, you can't just use: $ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4096 count=1 to zero out the partition table because it returns the error message that /dev/sdX is "read-only". I had an unused drive , so I imaged it with: $ sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=4MB_USB.img Yo...
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Killing the CAPS LOCK Key Revisited from May 21, 2017

 For over a decade, I have been interested in disabling the damn CAPS LOCK key. I frequently press it accidentally and it is a continuing aggravation. Trying several methods, I found one that works and thought I would update the post and try to get the formatting correct. CAPS LOCK KILLED SUCCESS!! I stumbled upon the file /etc/default/keyboard . It reads: # KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE # Consult the keyboard(5) manual page. XKBMODEL=pc105 XKBLAYOUT=us XKBVARIANT= XKBOPTIONS= BACKSPACE=guess Consulting the man page for keyboard reveals the following interesting information: KEYBOARD(5)              Console-setup User's Manual     NAME keyboard - keyboard configuration file DESCRIPTION        The  keyboard file describes the properties of the keyboard. It is read by setupcon(1) in order to configure the keyboard on the  console.   In Debian  systems  the  default  keyboard la...
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Zorin OS -- MS WIndows Killer?

   There have been several Linux distro releases in the past that claim to offer a MS Windows-like experience to woo new users to Linux, such as Corel Linux ,  Xandros Desktop , and Linspire/Lindows . These failed mostly because the commercial companies attempted to modify Linux enough to lock the users into their own walled garden. Interestingly, all these distros were based on Debian. A successful Debian-based distro is Canonical's Ubuntu . It doesn't attempt to strong-arm users into its walled garden, but does offer a few special things and a rich user and support environment. It's popularity is well-earned and spurred by its marketing. Zorin OS 18 is the latest entry into the fray and is a Ubuntu-based distribution , many calls it a "fork" since the UI is customized to mimic MS Windows. They do offer a free download ISO , so I attempted to install that in a VirtualBox VM. It hung up on my first attempt; problems with some LibreOffice packages, so I opted to N...
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Rayhunter

  Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays . Why the Electronic Frontier Foundation   established the project  is explained at the site.  Is this useful for the average person? Not really, but it was fun for me. The device used initially is the Orbic Speed (RC400L), a small Internet hotspot. I found one on eBay for just $15 including shipping. Other devices have been added to the supported device list .  Installation is pretty straightforward. Download the installer that matches your computer, connect the device to your computer with a USB cable and launch the installer per the instructions. A successful installation will show a green bar across the top of the screen and the presence of "stingrays" when you drive around will display yellow dots, orange dashes, or a solid red line . The device will log the data which you may share with the EFF. How do you manage the device? There is a web UI at...
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List ports in use and the applications using them

 This program is part of the net-tools RPM package. # netstat -lntup -l = only services which are listening on some port -n = show port number, don't try to resolve the service name -t = tcp ports -u = udp ports -p = name of the program Since net-tools is deprecated, you can use the ss command instead of netstat if netstat is not present on your machine: # ss -lntup This should work similarly and is already installed on Mageia. RESOURCES https://superuser.com/questions/529830/get-a-list-of-open-ports-in-linux
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X2X For Mageia

  X2X  allows the keyboard, mouse, and clipboard on one X display to be used to control another X display. Mageia does not provide an RPM package for X2X , but openSUSE does for both x86_64 and i586 . The RPM packages install on Mageia with no issues. Ubuntu also provides packages for their distro. To install from the OpenSUSE ftp site: # urpmi f tp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/vol/rzm6/pbone/ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/repositories/openSUSE:/Backports:/SLE-15-SP1/standard/x86_64/x2x-1.30_beta-bp151.3.1.x86_64.rpm You will get the following warning that can be ignored: warning: /var/cache/urpmi/partial/x2x-1.30_beta-bp151.3.1.x86_64.rpm: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 Signature, key ID 65176565: NOKEY The following package has bad signature: /var/cache/urpmi/partial/x2x-1.30_beta-bp151.3.1.x86_64.rpm: Invalid signature (NOT OK (no key): /var/cache/urpmi/partial/x2x-1.30_beta-bp151.3.1.x86_64.rpm: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 Signature, key ID 65176565: NOKEY) Do you want to continue installation ? (y/N) n ...
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Use dd For Everything

 This handy HOWTO for the dd command is usually found at  http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Applications_GUI_Multimedia/How_To_Do_Eveything_With_DD , but is currently unavailable.  It's very hand, so here's a link from the Internet Archive . A great use of dd is to rescue an old floppy disk or a CD. Normally, writing null to the first two sectors of a floppy renders the floppy totally unusable. It cannot even be formatted after that. Thanks to the image of the new, unused floppy, floppy.image, you can write the first two sectors back properly. Rescue an unreadable floppy. ddrescue if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/sam/rescue.image bs=1440k conv=notrunc,noerror with a new floppy in the drive dd if=/home/sam/rescue.image of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 skip=2 seek=2 conv=notrunc,noerror Now the new floppy should be readable This method works similarly well with damaged CD's and DVD's. However, you must mount the resulting .iso image as a loop device and copy all the data that way. RESOUR...
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