Here’s some candy I am enjoying in Jaunty:
Per-user language settings under System > Administration > Language support:
Cryptkeeper, (package: cryptkeeper) a tray applet to graphically manage EncFS encrypted directories:
ext4 filesystem support in the Gnome partition editor (package: gparted):
I’d love to hear about any of your favorite Jaunty candy too 🙂
I invite anyone interested in helping out organize the Honduras Ubuntu team to come and meet fellow users on the #ubuntu-hn IRC channel, next Thursday night February 19th.
When: 9PM, Tegucigalpa (UTC-6) time (click on the link to get the time in your time zone)
Anyone wanting to join can use their IRC client or the Mibbit service.
See the announcement thread at:[U-HN] Primera reunion de organizacion Ubuntu-hn
No, I haven’t moved to Honduras, just helping out there 😉
David Giard, a founding member of the Ubuntu Quebec LoCo Team, relayed these news to me this morning (via The Fridge):
NOT A FORK – as soon as I posted this I got a comment about this being a fork, well, it’s not! It’s a collection of modules and a theme, which are managed via a project in Launchpad. This is not a separate fork of Drupal! 🙂
That long needed suite of tools has finally been completed.
This suite is designed for any Ubuntu Local Communities wanting to host a website. It is designed to allow any LoCo team to quickly create a website using Drupal for their team.
What this suite offers:
- An approved theme for any LoCo
- A highly customizable theme
- Launchpad OpenID integration
- -> Users don’t need to create an account on your site
- Launchpad Teams integration
- -> Can control access levels in site based on LP team memberships
- Fast and friendly support
Official project: launchpad.net/loco-drupal/
Release Downloads:
Drupal 5.x: launchpad.net/loco-drupal/5.x/0.5.0
Drupal 6.x: launchpad.net/loco-drupal/6.x/1.1.0
Drupal 7.x: in development
A Special Thanks:
This project would not be possible without all the collaboration involved.
The Ubuntu South Dakota Local Community – Michael Lustfield
It’s great to know we have some dedicated people in the Ubuntu community.
Quoting from the Gnome Do Core Team PPA page:
64-bit users! There is a bug in Launchpad’s ppa that causes 64-bit mono package builds to fail, but David was in the marines for 12 years and only learned one thing- Leave no man behind. We’ve got a package for you at http://launchpad.net/do/+download
Thanks Kurt for pointing that out 🙂
I’ve been playing with encryption for some time now and I am always curious about removable storage encryption.
There are tons of guides to do this but it always seems to require either too many steps or some non-free software. I’ve been using this method succesfully adapted from this post for some time now so I wanted to share it here, if anyone has better ideas I’d love to hear it. Removable storage encrypted using this method can also be read directly from Intrepid Live CD sessions as Intrepid now includes cryptsetup by default.
You will need to install the cryptsetup package in Hardy, and also gparted as a helper graphical application to setup partitions and format your media. Gparted is already available on LiveCD sessions. Yes I know this can be done in command line, but I try to limit that as I show this to other CLI-agnostic friends.
Notice I’ve added a step (formatting with a regular partition first), and I used partitions instead of device names.
Find out which device your stick is by issuing from command line:
sudo lshw -C disk -short
This may also help detect other types of storage:
Find out which device your stick is by issuing from command line:
sudo lshw -C storage -short
Example output:
H/W path Device Class Description
=======================================================
/0/100/1f.1/0 /dev/sda disk 251GB Maxtor 6L250R0
/0/100/1f.1/1 /dev/sdb disk 251GB Maxtor 6L250R0
/0/100/1f.1/2 /dev/cdrom disk DVD-RW DVR-110D
/0/100/1f.1/3 /dev/cdrom1 disk RW/DVD GCC-4521B
/0/100/1f.1/3/0 /dev/cdrom1 disk
/0/1/0.0.0 /dev/sdc disk 256MB Cruzer Micro
/0/1/0.0.0/0 /dev/sdc disk 256MB
In this case the device is /dev/sdc.
Next make sure the device is unmounted:
sudo umount /dev/sdc1
Format your removable storage device using gparted, create one single ext3 partition on it. This will end up being partition /dev/sdc1 (assuming your device is /dev/sdc like in my example).
If you do not want to encrypt the whole removable storage, repartition it using gparted.
Overwrite the created partition with an encrypted partition on the target media:
sudo luksformat /dev/sdc1
This will ask you for a passphrase. The default file system is “vfat”, but you can specify a different one with the “-t” option. An example of the same, using an ext3 partition:
sudo luksformat -t ext3 /dev/sdc1
Make sure you type YES in all capitals when prompted, read the prompts carefully.
After this procedure, remove the stick and plug it in again. This should trigger a dialog which asks you for the passphrase and mounts the encrypted partition (along with any unencrypted one, of course).
I was able to read a stick encrypted this way in other computers, just by installing cryptsetup on them. You will need to install cryptsetup and reboot every computer where you want to access this.
Intrepid already comes with cryptsetup installed BTW.
I hear this kind of encrypted removable media can also be read from Windows using FreeOTFE but I haven’t tried it. If anyone can share how to do that, I’d also like to hear about it.
Just a little warning at the end: Please be aware that if you lose the passphrase, I CAN’T HELP RECOVERING THE DATA! This may sound obvious but in a previous posting about this I got private requests about such problems. No comments!