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…to the super-enhanced Hacker’s Manual for 2016.
Dive in and learn how to hack everything.
Hacking shouldn’t have
the bad name it has. We
do not all wear the black
hat of the evil hacker;
many of us can embrace
the term wearing the
white hat of the data
defender, or even run with
the original definition of the term, coined in the
’60s by MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club and
Artificial Intelligence Lab: someone using their
wiles – generally in a playful way – to achieve a
goal. That’s certainly what we’ve gone for here,
in this latest edition of The Hacker’s Manual.
It’s a collection of the most essential
features and tutorials from the excellent pages

of Linux Format magazine, taking you through
everything: choosing the right distro for the
right purpose; picking up brand new software
and coding skills to solve problems faster and
more efficiently; making your network and
computers more secure than ever before; and
even having a little fun while you’re at it.
If you enjoy what you read here, may
I highly recommend picking up a subscription
to Linux Format magazine? I may. And I shall:
you’ll get all the latest news, reviews, features
and exciting hacker ideas delivered to your
doorstep 13 times a year, imparted by the
most brilliant team in tech journalism. Head
over to page 176 to find out more.
Enjoy your hacking!

Alex Cox, Editor

Guru Guides are designed to
help experienced technology
users dive deeper into a
subject. Whether you’re
learning a new programming
language or planning to start
a new business, each book
aspires to be…

computer and consult time and
time again when you need to
know how to do something or
solve a problem

know the basics so instead of
patronising you we’ll suggest new
things to try and help you take
your knowledge to the next level

OA teacher – helping you develop

OAvailable anywhere – you can

your skills and take with you
through your life, applying them at
home or even in the workplace

take your Guru Guide everywhere
thanks to the free digital edition
you can download and read on
your tablet, smartphone or laptop
– see page 178 for more details

O A reference you can keep

on your desk or next to your

OA challenge – we know that you

How are we doing? Email techbookseditor@futurenet.com and let us know if we’ve lived up to our promises!

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 5

Welcome & Manifesto

Welcome!

Contents
Dive into the world
of hacking with this
in-depth manual that
covers the big topics,
from the Linux kernel
and wider open-source
OS to hacking servers,
the web and beyond.

6 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Distros

Software

The distro is the core of
Linux, so make sure you
get the right one.

Did we say the distro was
the core? Forget that:
software is what you need.

Best distro of 2015

Systemd

Alternative OSes

Top 100 Linux tools

Linux vs Windows

Linux desktops

Server distros

Build a Steam machine

15 years of Linux

Remote desktops

Contents

Security

Do more

Coding

Hammer up the boards and
keep the riff-raff out with
these essential secrets.

Super-maximise your skills
and create things you can be
super-proud of.

You’re not a hacker unless
you know your variables
from your pointers.

Who protects your data?

121

152

Tux’s Coding Academy

Linux malware

130 200 Linux tips

162

Scripting languages

Privacy distros

138

168 Riak NoSQL

Set up a Tor hotspot

140 Clone your website

Build a Linux PC

Turbocharge your network

102 Drive encryption part 1

144 Deploy multiple machines

104 Drive encryption part 2

146 Hack your wireless router

172

PHP feed aggregator

106 Penetration testing
109 Build a motion detector
114

Securing Apache

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 7

Because if there was only one
form of Linux, we’d be bored
10

Best distro of 2015
We put 2015’s top distros to the test
to find the absolute best version for
every usage case.

Alternative OSes
If you’re after something new, why not
try one of these non-Linux open-source
operating systems?

Linux vs Windows
How does Microsoft’s latest OS release
affect the Linux ecosystem? And, more
importantly, what have they ripped off
from us this time? We find out.

Server distros
When it’s time to get serious, you need
a serious package of software...

15 years of Linux
Tracing the OS’s evolution since the big
breakthrough in the early 2000s.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 9

Distros | Intro

Distros

Distros | Best distro

BEST
DISTRO
OF 2015

Which distro is the one for you? Which is,
without doubt, the absolute best? We pick
a peck of perfect distros as we head into 2016.
he Linux-verse is teeming with
distros of all shapes and sizes,
and each of them is a labour of
love, but not all deserve a slice
of your hard disk. On the face of it, all
distros borrow from the same common
pool of applications and libraries and you
might think they would offer pretty much
the same user experience.
However, a Linux distribution
(or distro) is more than the
sum of its parts. The
mainstream distros put in
many hours working on open
source components to
tweak and polish them to suit their
particular flavour of Linux.
Things were much simpler in the good ol’
days when distro choices were governed by
the choice of software or function:
OpenSUSE was popular for its rendition of
the KDE desktop; Gnome was Fedora’s

forte; and Ubuntu was the new kid on the
block with a novel software centre. Oh, how
things have changed. The top distros have a
wider mandate and can’t afford to just cater
to a particular audience anymore.
Another differentiating factor between a
regular distro and the popular distros is the
amount of time that’s spent on building

cash-rich multinational corporations fuelling
their R&D, such as Ubuntu. But thanks to
the nature of open source software that one
factor alone doesn’t always help corporatebacked projects get a technological edge
over pure donation-based, communitysupported efforts, such as Linux Mint.
Thanks to being in a perennial state of flux,
a distro that fails to impress
its users with a new feature in
one release might win them
back as the feature stabilises
in future releases.
In the next 10 pages, we’ll
compare and rate the top
desktop distros and help you pick one that
showcases the best of Linux and the wider
open source community. We’ve also
included the top distros for older
computers, distros designed for beginners,
rolling release distros for advanced users
and server distros for the admins.

“The popular distros go that
extra mile to create a solid
desktop OS experience.”
custom tools. The popular distros go that
extra mile to create a solid desktop operating
system experience and write everything from
installers to several critical apps and utilities
to manage the desktop. The top distros are
also constantly evolving, some more than
others. Some distros have the resources of

THE CONTENDERS
Mageia 5 Q Ubuntu 15.04 Q Linux Mint 17.2 Q Fedora Workstation 22 Q OpenSUSE 13.2
10 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

An involved process or an evolved one?
Although some mainstream vendors – such as Dell and
Lenovo – have joined the ranks of region-specific
vendors, – such as System76 and ZaReason – in
offering pre-installed Linux computers, for the majority
of users a distro’s installation process is still their first
encounter with Linux.
A few releases ago, the Fedora project overhauled its
Anaconda installer, which now employs a ‘hub and spoke’
model instead of a linear wizard. It isn’t the most intuitive
installer in the business and it’s taken a few releases to
stabilise but can even be used with disks with complex
layouts now. Advanced users can use the Anaconda to
create a LVM partition scheme but unlike some other
installers it doesn’t offer an option to upgrade to a new
release. However, the distro’s new FedUp tool handles the
task effortlessly and can use either a network repository
(repo) or a DVD image as the package source.
One of the most newbie-friendly installers is the Ubuntu
one that’s also borrowed by several other distros, including
Linux Mint. The installer is easy to use and intuitive enough
for new users. The original version in Ubuntu has options to
install updates and third-party software, such as codecs.
These options aren’t available in the Mint version, which
automatically installs the codecs and plugins. The installer
can also install into a LVM partition and offers the option to
encrypt the partition.
Again, this installer isn’t designed for upgrading the
distro. In Ubuntu this is handled by the Update Manager
which checks for the availability of new releases and helps
you upgrade. By contrast, the recommended method for
upgrading Mint is a clean install, but you can also use the
mintupdate app to upgrade your installation. Also bear in
mind that Mint developers don’t suggest that you upgrade
your installation whenever there’s a new release. The
current Mint 17.x branch is a LTS release that’ll receive
security updates and bug fixes until April 2019.

OpenSUSE’s
installer lets
you save
the current
configuration
into an XML
file that can
be used for
automated
installations.

OpenSUSE and Mageia have the two most mature
installers of the lot. Both distros have install-only DVDs that
weigh over 4GBs and are loaded with software. Both distros
offer several desktops, including KDE, Gnome, Xfce and LXDE,
while Mageia also includes Cinnamon and Mate.
The OpenSUSE installer allows creation of an LVM
partitioning scheme and it can encrypt partitions, and creates
users during setup. In addition, it’s the only installer that
allows you to select a network authentication method, such
as LDAP or NIS, as well as a password encryption scheme.
The partitioning mode in Mageia’s installer can be used in
simple or expert mode. The auto-allocate option creates an
easy layout with bare minimum partitions in simple mode,
while the expert mode offers options with separate partitions
based on whether you plan to use the installation as a
desktop or a server. Mageia is unique in that it enables you to
choose your bootloader and supports Grub, Grub 2 and even
Lilo. You can also install the distro on machines with UEFI.
Both OpenSUSE and Mageia allow you to review all changes
the installer is going to make.

Verdict
Fedora
Workstation 22
Linux Mint 17.2
Mageia 5
OpenSUSE 13.2
Ubuntu 15.04

The Mint and
Ubuntu installers
don’t have the
same flexibility
provided by
Mageia or
OpenSUSE.

Specialised distros
Besides the desktop distros we compare here
there are several other specialised flavours of
Linux designed to serve a singular purpose, eg
the Debian-based OpenMediaVault distro is
perfect for converting an old and unused
computer with multiple disks into a NAS server.
Similarly, IPFire is designed to convert a
machine into a hardware firewall and router.
Then there’s TurnKey, a Linux project which
produces JeOS appliances for quickly deploying
specialised servers, content management
platforms and web development platforms.
There’s also Kali Linux which is loaded with
hundreds of tools for penetration testing and
security auditing. The Caine distro is similarly
designed for computer forensic analysis and
includes applications for memory, database and

network analysis. If you’re concerned about
your privacy online look to the Tails Linux
distro that ships with a number of internet
apps pre-configured for anonymity. The
distro uses the Tor network to anonymise all
internet activities and includes cryptographic
tools to encrypt all files, emails and instant
messaging.
Then there are some unique distros that
you can install on your disks for repeated
use. The upcoming SteamOS from Valve is a
Debian-based distro that’s designed to run
Steam-powered games. But there are tons of
non-Steam games which won’t run on
SteamOS. To play these grab the Play-Linux
distro which uses its Ubuntu underpinnings to
build a perfect platform optimised for gaming.

Tails can camouflage itself as a
Windows desktop and also includes
the Electrum bitcoin client.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 11

Distros | Best distro

Installation and update

User experience
Navigating the nooks and crannies.
Since all the distros bundle almost the same collection of
tools and apps, the one factor that makes or breaks a distro is
the user experience. In addition to creating custom artwork,
distro developers spend a lot of time tweaking various
settings and components to ensure their users get a
wonderful experience. All the leading distros spend a
considerable amount of effort on making sure their final

product is a cohesive unit rather than a loose conglomeration
of its parts. They spend time homogenising software to help
the applications blend with the rest of the desktop. While the
main factor that has a strong bearing on the user experience
is the default desktop environment, some distros make
tweaks and adjustments to the default settings to deliver a
polished product that offers a smooth workflow.

Mageia 5
Mageia is a wonderfully put together distro that looks elegant
with its custom theme and customised KDE desktop. The
distro comes from a family of distros that have always been
aimed at the desktop user and Mageia 5 continues that
tradition. The distro greets users with a welcome app, but
unlike many other distros it can do a lot. It informs you about
the distro’s different repos and lets you install some of the
commonly used open source and proprietary apps
Besides the install-only DVDs, Mageia produces installable
live mediums for the Gnome desktop which are as robust and
reliable as the KDE edition. The distro also has an expansive
set of custom tools and utilities that can be used by first-time
users and many offer enough flexibility to satisfy advanced

users. The project complements its user experience with its
vast support infrastructure and detailed documentation.

Fedora Workstation 22
The usability issues with Fedora start with the distro’s installer
itself which looks prettier than some of the other distros but
isn’t well laid out. Out of the box, Fedora’s Gnome 3 desktop
is still very bland and has a deserted look. Unless users
enable extensions, they have to grapple with some of its
peculiarities, such as a missing bottom panel and the inability
to place icons or folders on the desktop. The paginated
applications view isn’t as effective as the categorised view
that is adopted by its peers.
That said, Gnome 3.16 in the latest release features several
usability improvements including a new notification system.
Fedora’s focus has always been on integrating the different
desktop environments so that applications from one look like

native apps on the other, and the latest release has also made
strides on that front.

Pre-installed apps Do you get what you pay for?
Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora produce
installable live CDs only, while Mageia
and OpenSUSE also have install-only
DVDs. All these distros support multiple
desktop environments (DE) in different
live CDs. However, none of the live CDs
allow package selection. OpenSUSE
and Mageia lead the others for flexibility
as they both offer multiple DEs. Mageia
offers the most options, although they
both default to KDE.
Once you’ve picked the DE, both
distros enable you to select groups of

12 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

software for various desktop functions,
such as office, multimedia and gaming
etc. Furthermore, both distros allow you
to install server-specific packages for a
web server, database server or a firewall
gateway. Finally, you can use both the
installers to fine-tune the package
selection and even choose individual
packages for installation.
Beyond package selection, all the
top distros include the usual apps for
everyday desktop use. You’ll find distroagnostic apps such as LibreOffice and

Firefox. Some distros require users to
equip browsers with plugins to play
Flash content or install codecs to handle
multimedia files in a proprietary format.
Ubuntu enables you to add these during
install and while the regular Mint
installer adds them automatically, the
project has editions for every release
without proprietary components. The
distros that don’t ship with the
proprietary bits, notably Mageia, Fedora
and OpenSUSE have a welldocumented process for adding them.

Verdict
Fedora
Workstation 22
Linux Mint 17.2
Mageia 5
OpenSUSE 13.2
Ubuntu 15.04

All the distros
have a fairly
similar selection
of default
applications.

Distros | Best distro

Linux Mint 17.2
Mint has climbed to the top of the Linux distro charts – at
least on http://distrowatch.com – by combining the best
features of the Ubuntu desktop with a familiar-looking and
desktop environment (DE). While it’s based on Ubuntu, the
distro modifies any tools it borrows to make them more
approachable to its user base. One of the best examples of its
custom tools is the Mint Software Manager, which predates
the Ubuntu Software Center and is just as slick.
A core strength of Mint is its Cinnamon DE. Cinnamon is
based on Gnome 3, but retains the look and feel of Gnome 2.
You’ll find all the familiar desktop furniture, including a panel
at the bottom showing a list of open windows and an
Applications menu in the bottom-left corner. Since it’s

homebrewed, the various components of Cinnamon, such as
the file manager are well integrated inside the spiffy desktop.

Ubuntu 15.04
Perhaps the biggest contributor to Ubuntu’s ease of use is its
installer, which can easily carve out space on your disk and
set up a dual-boot system without much effort. But while it
isn’t difficult to get the distro installed, operating its desktop
is another matter. While it doesn’t look as alien as Gnome 3,
Ubuntu’s Unity is still visually different to the desktops that
most users are familiar with. However, acclimatising to it
doesn’t take much time and once settled in, you can begin to
appreciate the tight integration of the desktop and the apps.
One of the nicest elements of the distro is the Messaging
menu that enables you to control your messaging status and
presence across various online services. Nifty little tools like
this and the Ubuntu Software Center give Ubuntu a usability

OpenSUSE 13.2
One of the most pleasant-looking distros to the extent that it
even customises the splash screens of some of the core apps,
such as LibreOffice. The distro also tweaks its rendition of
KDE with artwork to ensure that all the applications are
branded properly with OpenSUSE green, which gives a slick
overall look to the desktop.
The distro also gets marks for integrating its tools and
settings inside the Yast custom control panel for easier
access. While it could do with a little polish it really isn’t an
eyesore, However some of its tools, particularly the package
manager, aren’t nearly as pretty, eg Ubuntu Software Center.
That said, it does its job as stated and the distro’s one-click
install system makes the distro stand out. The distro is also

edge over its peers. It’s also one of the best documented and
most supported Linux distro.

well documented and supported. However, while a looker, it
isn’t as welcoming to first time users as Ubuntu or Mint.

Package management Flesh out or flush out your distro
While a distro might ship with many
applications, sooner or later you’ll need
to call on the distro’s package manager,
and virtually every distro has both a
command-line package manager and a
graphical front-end.
Version 22 of Fedora marked the
arrival of DNF, which replaces the
ageing Yum. On the desktop, it relies on
Gnome’s Software Tool. Ubuntu has
been leading the pack in graphical
package management. The distro’s
Software Center is one of the best tools

for fleshing out the distro. Like most
package managers, it lists, by default,
only packages in official repos. But the
distro includes the Software & Updates
tool, which you can easily enable and
add or remove additional repos, and
even control how the package manager
handles updates.
Mint doesn’t borrow much from
Ubuntu, its Software Manager is visually
different, but offers similar options to
Ubuntu’s manager. The distro also
includes the homegrown MintSources

Verdict

tool for managing software sources, and
the option of Synaptic package
manager for advanced users.
Package management in both
Mageia and OpenSUSE is handled by
modules of their respective custom
RPM-based control centres. OpenSUSE
uses a package manager called Zypper,
which has a One Click Install system.
Mageia’s tool, URPMI, isn’t as pretty to
look at, but is very functional and
intuitive enough. Mageia has a tool to
enable repos and mirrors as well.

Fedora
Workstation 22
Linux Mint 17.2
Mageia 5
OpenSUSE 13.2
Ubuntu 15.04

Mageia has a
slight edge for
fleshing out the
distro without
much effort.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 13

Distros | Best distro

Configuration options
Pop the hood and change the oil.
Linux users have always been able
to mould their installation based on
their workflow and use. However, the
degree of control varies from one
distro to another. Some projects,
such as Ubuntu, don’t offer many
tweakable settings. In fact, the
distro has received flak for hindering
customisation. Every subsequent
Ubuntu release has included more
customisation, but if you want
complete control over your distro
you’ll need to use a third-party tool,
such as the Unity Tweak Tool.
Fedora isn’t much different. The
distro doesn’t have a Settings panel of
its own and instead relies on the one
that ships with Gnome. The Gnome
Settings panel isn’t very different from
Ubuntu’s in terms of the bundled
configuration options.
While Linux Mint bundles its own
custom settings tool for changing the
appearance of the desktop and tweak
compositing effects, some elements
of the settings tool are similar to what
Ubuntu offers. The one key difference
is the Device Drivers tool. In contrast
to Ubuntu, the Mint tool has a

Mageia and
OpenSUSE
get additional
configuration
options, thanks
to the KDE
Control Center.

Verdict
Fedora
Workstation 22
Linux Mint 17.2

tweaked user interface and helps users
make an informed decision about which
drivers to use for their devices.
Both OpenSUSE and Mageia have
extensive control panels that you can
use to tweak all aspects of the
respective installation. OpenSUSE’s
Yast caters to both desktop users and
advanced Linux admins. The tool allows
tweaking of all the settings for a normal
desktop, bootloader and firewall
configurations, manage users, set up
the network, tune security settings, set

up system services and also doubles up
as a package manager. It can be used to
transform an installation into a Samba
server, an Apache web server etc.
Mageia’s Control Center offers a
similar number of configuration tools.
It has modules for managing software,
hardware peripherals and system
services. Advanced users can employ it
to share internet and set up a VPN etc.
The distro is working on creating a new
Control Center called ManaTools which
is included as a preview in Mageia 5.

Mageia 5
OpenSUSE 13.2
Ubuntu 15.04

The most
recognisable
feature of
Mageia and
OpenSUSE are
their respective
configuration
control panels.

Default desktops
Balancing form and function.
These days all the top distros offer
polished versions of multiple
mainstream desktops. Ubuntu is
somewhat of an exception in that it
only includes and supports its own
Unity desktop in the main Ubuntu
release and offers other non-Unity

Using Mageia’s Control Center you
can configure the graphical server as
well as the 3D desktop effects.

14 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

desktop as officially supported spins.
While the Unity desktop has had
numerous usability tweaks and
improvements, the desktop still looks
different and disorientating to firsttime users. If you’re willing to adjust,
you’ll find Unity is well put together
and is integrated nicely into Ubuntu.
Fedora, in many respects is Gnome’s
flagship desktop and the main
Workstation release ships with this
desktop. The Gnome 3 desktop is even
more disorienting than Unity and you’ll
most surely have to tweak it before use.
Unlike some other Gnome-based
distros, Fedora ships with an
unmodified Gnome release that’s very
bland and you’ll need to spend some

time playing around with its extensions
to make the desktop work for you.
Gnome is also offered as an option
on OpenSUSE and Mageia but the
default desktop on both these distros is
KDE. The KDE desktop builds on the
classic desktop metaphor and will not
startle first timers. Users familiar with
the desktop can explore its
revolutionary new features, not all of
which are intuitive and easy to
comprehend. The good thing is that
these stay out of the way and don’t
trouble users who don’t want to use
them. KDE also has no shortage of
tweakable options. Mint too offers a
familiar-looking desktop thanks to the
default Cinnamon environment.

Verdict
Fedora
Workstation 22
Linux Mint 17.2
Mageia 5
OpenSUSE 13.2
Ubuntu 15.04

Ubuntu and
Fedora lose out
to the others for
including
desktops that
take some
getting used to.

For those who need stabilisers.
elementary OS “Freya”
This distro has little in common with its
base distro, Ubuntu. It ships with its
own home-brew Pantheon desktop and
has several custom apps, including a
Mac OS X-inspired dock. The distro
places great emphasis on design and
its Apple fixation is evident from the
tools it supplies, such as Snap, a
webcam app, which is similar to Apple’s
Photo Booth. The distro supplies a
number of custom tools, such as the

Korora 22
Korora is based on the mainstream
Fedora distro and ships separate
Gnome and KDE-based live installable
editions. In contrast to Fedora’s
blandness, Korora ships with a heavily
customised desktop. The distro has
also enabled some Gnome extensions,
by default, to iron out some of its
navigation issues and includes the
Gnome Tweak Tool for more
customisation. The distro has full

Pinguy OS 14.04.2
Another desktop that attracts new
users with its intuitive design is
PinguyOS. The customised Gnome
desktop features a lively dock at the
bottom and the Application menu
brings up a categorised list of apps, and
includes both the Gnome and Ubuntu
Tweak Tools. The distro is chock full of
apps and even includes the Plex Media
server. Besides the best general

Geary Mail, Scratch text editor and
Audience video player, which are
designed to assist inexperienced users.
The distro even uses its own custom
window and compositing manager
called Gala, which consumes less
resources than some of its peers.
However, elementary OS doesn’t offer
many apps out of the box and doesn’t
include proprietary codecs or ship any
non-GTK apps which is why it doesn’t
include the likes of LibreOffice.

multimedia support, and enables thirdparty repos, such as RPMFusion,
Google Chrome and VirtualBox.
Korora also packs in popular apps
and its Firefox browser is equipped with
useful extensions. The distro has some
specialised tools as well, such as the
Audacity audio editor, OpenShot video
editor and Handbrake video transcoder
etc. For package management the
distro ships with both Gnome’s
package manager and YumExtender.

purpose and specialised open source
apps, it includes several popular
proprietary ones, including TeamViewer,
Spotify and Steam for Linux.
There’s also Wine that you can
manage with the bundled PlayOnLinux
front-end. If you need more software, it
has Ubuntu Software Center as well as
the Synaptic package manager. The
distro uses its own repos besides the
ones for Ubuntu and Linux Mint Debian.

Verdict Beginner-friendly distros
All three of the desktop distros we’ve rated,
above, have put in a great amount of effort to
polish the underlying components of their
base distro to a high finish. All three feature
incredibly good-looking desktops that are
intuitive and functional as well.
Of the three, elementary OS has perhaps
put in the most amount of effort into building
custom tools and libraries. Everything from the
window manager up to its apps is crafted to

adhere to its design principles. The one
disadvantage with the distro is that it isn’t as
usable straight out-of-the-box as the others.
Then there’s Korora which has turned the
clean slate of its Fedora underpinnings into a
fully functional smart-looking desktop. The
distro is a wonderful starting point for anyone,
and its strength lies in its customisation and
applications. The distro’s weakest point is the
Anaconda installer inherited from Fedora.

In contrast, Pinguy OS offers the best mix
of form and function. Its pleasing desktop
environment gives access to its vast number of
applications. But make sure you use it only on
an adequately specified machine – all its
customisations consume a lot of resources
and you’ll only be able to enjoy Pinguy OS on a
machine which has at least 4GB of RAM. On a
system with memory lower than that it’s best
to stick to elementary OS.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 15

Distros | Best distro

Beginner-friendly distros

Distros | Best distro

Server distros
For the overseers.
ClearOS 6.6
One of the biggest advantages of the
CentOS-based distro is its larger
repos of supported server software.
The distro offers server options
depending on whether you plan to
deploy it inside a protected network
(like an office), in a publicly
accessible network or as a gateway
server. The distro supports over 80
free services for various roles

NethServer 6.6
Also based on CentOS, NethServer
enables you to configure the installed
server through a web browser. The
distro taps into its progenitor’s vast
repos of software and includes its
custom software centre which lists all
the supported servers. You can filter
through this list depending on the
type of server you wish to deploy,
such as a firewall, file server, web
server and OwnCloud server etc.

Zentyal 4.1
Unlike the other two RPM-based
distros, Zentyal is based on the
Ubuntu Server distro. Zentyal boots to
a minimal graphical desktop, but still
uses a browser-based interface that’s
accessible from a remote computer
for configuring the installation. In
contrast to the other two, Zental isn’t
an all-purpose server but an office
server. Still, you can use a Zentyal
installation as a directory server, for
filtering email, scanning for viruses,

including a network server and a cloud
server and more. In addition to
common servers, you can use it as a
seedbox and a Plex Media Server.
ClearOS also includes several
system and network management tools
for creating backups, managing
bandwidth and RAIDs etc. New admins
who aren’t sure of the components to
install can use the Feature Wizard,
which helps pick services.

NethServer’s browser-based
dashboard is well laid out and every
section contains a ‘Help’ button which
explains the various options. From the
dashboard you can get an overview of
the various parameters on the installed
server. It also includes a log viewer for
tracking the logs of all the installed
services. In addition to the in-line
documentation, there’s detailed
guidance on the website, including
details for install third-party software.

managing printers, deploying VPNs and
other core infrastructure services, such
as DNS and DHCP, and for issuing and
managing secure certificates.
Once installed, you can configure
these services from the web interface
itself. Zentyal has a polished user
interface and its components are nicely
integrated. The distro doesn’t have an
option to install and configure a web
server, but you can set up Apache from
its Ubuntu repositories. If you get stuck,
there’s a community supported wiki.

Verdict Server distros
Deploying and configuring a server is an
involved process. The three server distros
we’ve covered, above, offer convenience and
flexibility, and let you build complex server
installations using a point-and-click interface in
a fraction of the time it would require you to set
them up manually. All three have low barriers
to entry and an expansive list of supported
servers. In a pinch they are all relatively similar
and, ignoring minor usability differences, all
offer pretty much the same user experience

16 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

when it comes to deploying and configuring
various servers and their components.
The real contest is the number of servers
and services each of them offers. Zentyal
brings up the rear since it offers the fewest
server options, followed by NethServer and is
pipped to the post by our winner, ClearOS.
While ClearOS does offer the maximum
number of possibilities for fleshing out the base
installation, it isn’t suitable for all types of
deployments, eg if you wish to deploy

OwnCloud, NethServer is a better bet. Also,
none of these servers would impress oldschool admins who prefer to build their servers
from the ground up. If you are one of these you
can go with either Ubuntu Server or CentOS
depending on how comfortable you are with
their respective package managers. There’s
also the newly inducted Fedora Server distro,
which will enable you to roll out specialpurpose servers, but it’s yet to make a case for
itself in comparison with CentOS.

Distros | Best distro

Rolling releases
Live on the bleeding edge.
Antergos
A rolling release distro based on Arch
Linux, Antergos uses the official Arch
repos along with its own custom
ones and offers the option to enable
the community supported Arch User
Repository (AUR) too. Officially,
Antergos uses a slightly modified but
heavily themed version of the Gnome
desktop but the distro’s custom
installer means you can replace it

Manjaro 0.8.13.1
Another rolling-release distro, which is
based on the ever-popular Arch is
Manjaro. This distro uses an installer
that’s similar to the one used by
Antergos. Manjaro recommends using
the Xfce desktop but also officially
supports the KDE desktop that’s
available as a separate live installable
disc. But community editions are
available for other desktop
environments, including Gnome,

Sabayon 15.07
Gentoo is another highly admired
rolling release distro. Based on
Gentoo’s testing branch, Sabayon
retains the rolling-release ethos of its
parent, but is a lot more welcoming to
first time users. The distro produces
different live installable variants based
around the Gnome, KDE and Xfce
desktop environments.
For installation, Sabayon uses a
highly customised version of the
Anaconda installer that’s well laid out

with a number of desktops: KDE,
Cinnamon, Mate, Openbox or LXDE.
By default, Antergos ships with the
Chromium browser equipped with
Flash plugin. However, during install you
can choose Firefox as well as some
other software that isn’t installed by
default, such as LibreOffice. The distro
uses Arch’s pacman package manager
and you can use the graphical Pamac
front-end to interact with it.

Cinnamon, Mate and Enlightenment.
Manjaro’s default desktop, Xfce is
themed and modified.
The distro also includes a custom
settings manager that doesn’t offer
very many options but enables you to
easily install a different kernel. Manjaro
ships with a wide range of apps
including Firefox, LibreOffice, VLC and
the Steam for Linux client. Like
Antergos, Manjaro too uses the Arch
repository, AUR and uses Pamac.

and easy to operate. The distro includes
proprietary applications, such as
Google Chrome and some quite bulky
open source software too, such as
Gimp, but no LibreOffice. Package
management is handled by the
excellent Rigo Application Browser
that’s very intuitive and verbose.
You can use Rigo to install and update
individual apps and it’ll also help you
install Linux kernels. The browser also
doubles up as an update manager and
can even manage repos.

Verdict Rolling release distros
The three distros we’ve compared on this
page, above, all work to reduce the pain of
building your system from scratch, which
would normally be required by their base
distros. However, both Gentoo and Arch are
wonderful rolling release distros that give
pervasive control to their users for building a
system from the grounds up.
Sabayon is perhaps the best Gentoo-based
rolling release distro that allows inexperienced
users to test the powers of its venerable base.

Sabayon’s strongest feature is the Rigo
Application Browser, which is a wonderful
graphical front-end to Gentoo’s entropy
package management system. While fleshing
out the distro isn’t a tedious job, the distro
loses out because of its odd package selection.
If you are looking for a rolling release distro,
irrespective of its base, both Antergos and
Manjaro are better alternatives built on Arch.
There are lots of similarities between the two.
Both do a wonderful job of exposing the power

and flexibility of Arch to the average desktop
user. The distros also have similar installers
and use the same graphical package manager.
However, Manjaro outdoes Antergos with its
installed applications. Antergos also uses the
Gnome 3 desktop by default, which is bulkier
than Manjaro’s default desktop, Xfce. This
makes Manjaro even accessible to machines
on the lower end of the resource spectrum.
Also, the distro has taken pains to ensure that
Xfce desktop isn’t as dull as the vanilla release.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 17

Distros | Best distro

Lightweight distros
For ageing computers.
Porteus 3.1
Porteus is unique in that it doesn’t
offer a singular download but rather
asks its users to build one via its webbased builder. The distro enables you
to pick a desktop from KDE 4, Mate,
LXDE and Xfce together with a host
of popular software, including web
browsers (there’s Firefox, Chrome,
Opera), word processors (LibreOffice,
AbiWord), VoIP client (Skype),

Slacko Puppy 5.7
Puppy Linux is extremely resource
friendly too and yet still includes a
very functional system. The Puppy
Linux project has several official
variants. There’s Wary Puppy for
dated hardware, Lucid Puppy built
from Ubuntu’s binary packages and
Slacko Puppy built from Slackware.
Slacko uses one of the lightest
window managers, JWM, and there’s
no beating the distro in terms of out-

Tiny Core Linux 6.3
Tiny Core is the smallest distro around
that boots into a graphical desktop.
It isn’t a distro that’s derived from one
of the mainstream distros, but owes
its slim stature to a careful choice of
lightweight components.
Tiny Core is available in multiple
flavours, besides the recommended
Tiny Core release that weighs in at a
mere 15MB. There is, in fact, an even
smaller command line-only 10MB
Core release and an all-in-one 72MB

graphics drivers for Nvidia and AMD
Radeon etc. Advanced users can also
define and customise boot parameters,
such as the tmpfs partition, and enable
kernel modules, such as zram.
You can use the Porteus installer to
install Porteus to a removable USB
drive or a fixed hard disk. Porteus is
based on Slackware and includes the
graphical Unified Slackware Package
Manager to help users install apps.

of-the-box functionality. The distro
bundles an application for virtually
every imaginable task that you can
perform with a desktop computer.
It also has all kinds of multimedia
applications including graphics viewers
and creators and apps to playback, edit
and even create multimedia. The
included Firefox browser is equipped
with all kinds of plugins and the distro
also has a custom application to
download and install the Flash plugin.

CorePlus variant which includes
multiple desktops and additional
functionality, such as support for
wireless network hardware.
As you might expect, the distro is
incredibly quick off the blocks and
drops you to a plain desktop running
the FLWM window manager. Tiny Core
uses its own package format and its
repository is flush with hundreds of
popular applications including the
Firefox browser, LibreOffice, Chromium
and Thunderbird etc.

Verdict Lightweight distros
If you need a distro to support older hardware
like dial-up modems, look no further than
Puppy Linux. But if you’re looking for a distro to
revive an older machine that’s been unable to
keep up with the demands of contemporary
Linux desktops, then you’ve got a few options.
Tiny Core Linux is the leanest of the lot.
But since the distro doesn’t ship with any real
applications, you’ll have to spend time with its
quirky tools converting the basic installation
into a usable desktop. Bear in mind that

18 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

despite the availability of applications and
conveniences like automated application
installers, it still takes some doing to transform
Tiny Core into a regular desktop. In fact, the
first application you’ll have to download is the
distro installer itself, which doesn’t ship with
the 15MB version. You’ll also have to familiarise
yourself with Tiny Core’s way of doing things.
The lack of familiarity also goes against
Slacko. While the distro does include an
incredible number of tools for a distro meant

for older computers, virtually all of them are
the distro’s own custom applications with
varying degrees of intuitiveness and usability.
To its credit, however, the distro includes ample
documentation to help you with the transition.
Porteus, on the other hand, manages to find
the right balance between familiarity and
peculiarity. You get the comforts of using your
favourite desktop environment and
applications along with the benefits of a
lightening fast malleable base.

Best distro 2015
The one thing free and open source software users don’t
have a shortage of is choice. The diversity of the sheer
number of software on offer makes the task of picking a
Linux desktop all the more difficult. For instance, the
Ubuntu and Fedora distros are a lot more than single enduser distros; they are complete ecosystems that cater to
the broader open source community and power everything
from handheld devices to large-scale servers. On the
desktop front, both provide a good stable platform for
other projects to build on.
If you’re not a fan of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment,
you can still benefit from the distro’s large software base by
using one of its officially supported spins. Similarly, if you find
Fedora too bland for desktop use, you can still benefit from its
uniqueness by installing the Korora distro.
Despite an active community of contributors, Linux Mint is
essentially driven by one individual. The project is primarily
supported by donations and can’t afford to spare much
resources on anything other than engineering the distro in
comparison with much bigger projects, such as Ubuntu,
Fedora, OpenSUSE and Mageia. Furthermore, the best thing
about Mint is its Cinnamon desktop, which is a key catalyst in
its meteoric rise. However, Cinnamon is no longer a desktop
environment that’s exclusive to Mint, and is offered by several
other distros, either as an official spin or in their repositories.

This leaves us with two RPM-based, KDE loving distros:
OpenSUSE and Mageia. There’s nothing inherently wrong
with OpenSUSE, but it loses out to Mageia for non-technical
reasons rather than technical ones. Mageia is championing
the open source movement both on the software and the
management front.
Mageia has learnt from the troubled past of its immediate
ancestors and is managed in a democratic open source
fashion. The distro also offers the widest choice of desktop
environments with the aim of making it of use to the most
number of users. On top of this, its users can manage their
computers using configuration tools that have been worked
on and improved for many years. The latest release also
makes itself usable on the latest UEFI-enabled hardware.
All things considered, Mageia offers the best possible
combination of choice, flexibility and ease of use.

Mageia ships
with only
open source
software but
tainting it
with popular
proprietary
applications
doesn’t take
much effort.

1st Mageia 5.0

4th Fedora 22

Builds on the solid foundation of its desktop-centric past
to deliver a very malleable distro.

The best supported Linux distribution, and flagship distro for
Gnome, which continues to push the envelope.

2nd OpenSUSE 13.2

5th Ubuntu 15.04

A very polished distro that can be customised for all kinds of
desktop deployments.

The ideal distro for users who wish to ride the curve
and get a taste of new and upcoming innovations.

3rd Mint 17.2

Over to you...

Makes good use of its foundation to produce a wonderful
desktop that’s usable straight out-of-the box.

Do you agree or disagree with our result? Share your top distro of
2015 with Linux Format magazine at lxf.letters@futurenet.com.

Also consider...
A quick visit to http://distrowatch.com will
inform you of the immense number of choices
on offer. PCLinuxOS and Chakra Linux are two
popular semi-rolling releases designed for
desktop users, and both use the KDE desktop.
However, Chakra is usually one of the first
distros to roll out the newest KDE releases.

If you like Ubuntu but not Unity, there’s
Ubuntu Gnome, Kubuntu and Ubuntu Mate
spins. KDE-loving Ubuntu users should also
take a look at the Kubuntu-based Netrunner
distro. For older hardware you may want to
consider Lubuntu and Xubuntu based on
LXDE and Xfce desktops respectively.

Mageia’s late parent, Mandriva, has also
spawned two similar distros with different
objectives. There’s the OpenMandriva distro
that’s two-releases old and focuses solely on
the KDE desktop, and the ROSA Desktop
Fresh with its innovative range of tools for the
KDE desktop.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 19

Distros | Best distro

The verdict

Distros | Alternative OSes

Alternative

OSes

We love Linux in all its flavours, but it’s not the only game in open source
town, so let’s follow up our top distro picks by looking at some alternatives.

How we tested...
It’s no secret when assessing
operating systems that the testing
and comparison methods used can
affect the results quite significantly.
For this roundup we’ve tried to
negate this as much as we can by
testing on both virtual machine
(in VirtualBox) and on real hardware
(an HP laptop with a dual-core AMD
CPU and Radeon graphics).
Testing a niche OS on a real-world
computer may return controversial
results, because the user experience
will rely on the actual drivers, but we
believe that while some people will
play with OSes in safe virtual
environment others will be curious
enough to run them on a spare
partition or a separate hard drive.
We’ll be comparing these OSes in
terms of performance, usability,
number of available features and
applications, online support and
development status.

here are plenty of operating
systems that are open
source but don’t use the
Linux kernel or, at least,
have their own user-land software
stack. But why on earth would you want
to try them out? Well, it can be useful
to study different OS designs; their
system tools set and generally how
they work, and it has to be admitted
that some alternative OSes are very
strong in particular tasks. For example,
OpenIndiana offers enterprise-grade
storage features (thanks to Sun
Microsystems of old), PC-BSD has all
the advantages of FreeBSD and is very

20 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

“We’ll highlight OSes that offer
the best practical application for
the average Linux user.”
good for web servers (and more), Haiku
is a unique project, and not related to
Unix-based systems at all, but is very
fast, and Chromium OS is the open
version of Google’s Chrome OS, which
powers the increasingly popular, fast
and battery-conserving Chromebooks.
So can Google’s cloud-based OS
compete with classical approach of

others? Let’s see, and we’re also going
to discover the purest open source
project of GNU/Hurd and put it on the
line with our other contenders. Our
perspective is going to tend to be more
desktop-specific and our goal will be
to highlight the OSes that are best
offering some practical application
for the average Linux user.

Will they run on your PC natively?

penIndiana will likely boot fine
from live USB stick or DVD
and most of system
components will work. There is a
community-maintained Hardware
Compatibility List (http://wiki.
openindiana.org/oi/Components),
which indicates that there’s even an
official Nvidia proprietary driver for
certain chips in OpenIndiana. Radeon
chipsets are supported with basic
VGA driver, and most of Wi-Fi chips
are reported to work.
PC-BSD provides the best hardware
support and is very close to what we
have on Linux. The system offers
official Nvidia binaries and Intel
drivers for hardware acceleration and
a Gallium3D support for most Radeon
chips. However, the best OpenGL
performance is delivered by Kwin in the
Plasma desktop environment.
In other aspects PC-BSD matches
the hardware compatibility tables of
FreeBSD as it uses the same kernel.
That means you can install PC-BSD on

a real computer and find most of its
components working out of the box,
including wireless network, printing etc.
Of course, not everything is complete:
eg Nvidia Optimus will work, but
without comfortable switching options
between chips, and also some
peripherals with Linux-specific blobs
can be left unsupported.
Chromium OS has a Linux kernel
under the hood and it should deal with
most devices acceptably. However, due
to forced limitations in the cloud-based
OS, it’s missing some vital features,
such as touchpad support – which is
strange considering the OS is targeted
at laptops – on some models. In other
aspects Chromium OS showed smart
chops with perhaps the best support
for external peripherals (thanks to the
Linux kernel again).
Haiku is a different story. Only two
developers work on Haiku’s code fulltime, so we can’t really demand decent
hardware support from this tiny OS.
Nevertheless, Haiku dealt perfectly with

OpenIndiana has the Device Driver Utility to show you
which drivers are currently in use.

various Wi-Fi adaptors we could find
around and surprised us with instant
access to WPA2-protected network.
The worst case in comparison with
all the others in terms of hardware
support is the Debian GNU/Hurd.
There’s no AGP GART support within
Mach, so almost any video chip will be
used with the VESA driver; a maximum
of 1.7GB of RAM will be used (the rest
will be silently ignored); there’s no
sound support at all; and no USB
support (though some keyboards and
mice will work thanks to the BIOS
emulating legacy interfaces). Finding
the right PC configuration on which
GNU/Hurd will run would be very tricky.

Verdict
Chromium OS

+++++
Debian GNU/
Hurd

+++++
Haiku

+++++
OpenIndiana

+++++
PC-BSD

+++++
You can try
booting all the
systems, but
skip Hurd.

Ease of installation
What does it take to get them up and running?

ll five contenders in this
roundup were all easy to set
up in virtual environment.
Selecting an ISO as a primary boot
device in VirtualBox enabled us to run
all of them, either in installation or live
mode. We also wanted to challenge
each OS on real hardware, writing an

ISO on a physical media; a USB stick,
for instance.
The OpenIndiana website offers a
USB image, which, it turns out, is a little
tricky to write on USB. Instead, a
regular ISO is easier to use, if you know
where to download it. (There is a
selection on this FTP page here:

Chromium OS is so simple to use, yet hard for a non-developer to set up.

http://bit.ly/1IfPr1m). This may be
an obstacle for people new to the OS.
PC-BSD is flashed to USB easily and
offers a clean and very good-looking
Qt-based installer. Logging into the
freshly installed BSD system only takes
a few minutes with no hassles.
Chromium OS is disappointing in
this area as there’s only one mode it
runs in. Once the OS image is flashed
onto a USB drive, it automatically
becames a bootable device with a
ready-to-run system. The Chromium
OS developer guide has an option to
install it on the hard drive, but it’s not a
real installer, but rather simple scripts
that flash a driver from a working
Chromium OS environment.
Haiku is the simplest OS to run and
install. It offers both live mode and a
very good (and fast) installer. Debian
GNU/Hurd offers several installation
modes, as you’d see in Debian Linux,
but it has no live mode, and it took
about an hour to install the system.

Verdict
Chromium OS

+++++
Debian GNU/
Hurd

+++++
Haiku

+++++
OpenIndiana

+++++
PC-BSD

+++++
It’s tie between
PC-BSD’s and
Haiku’s hasslefree installations.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 21

Distros | Alternative OSes

Hardware specs

Distros | Alternative OSes

Performance
How snappy they are?

eing used to booting your lightningfast Linux OS in tens of seconds tends
to foster the expectation you can do
the same in any other OS. Performance can
greatly influence the impression we have of an
OS, even if it fails in terms of features.

Performance matters since we want fast
installation, fast boot and low latencies
between a mouse click on an application’s
icon and its actual start up. If there’s a
deviation, we want to find out where it comes
from and if it prevents a user from a

comfortable computing experience. The
difference between th OSes’ performance was
apparent in the virtual environment, and it was
starkly apparent on bare-metal, although your
experience will be a little skewed depending
on your actual hardware.

Chromium OS +++++
There can be little or no complaints regarding Chromium OS’s
performance: it uses the Linux kernel, is based on Gentoo and uses the
most recent versions of all system components, wiping off nearly all
local applications. After the X.org server starts, the rest is handled by the
browser, including user login and session, managing windows etc.
Chromium OS tries to use pure versions of Gentoo source packages,
however a significant number of patches come from Google and the
community to optimise Chrome/Chromium OS on certain target
hardware, such as Chromebooks. So the OS’s performance is very good
and if something lags in the Chromium desktop, it’s the fault of the
browser code, not the underlying base system. Bearing that in mind, you
can play with the OS on hardware with 1GB of RAM and a low-end CPU.

Debian GNU/Hurd +++++
Debian GNU/Hurd has finally brought X.org support to Hurd as an outof-the-box experience. However, from the desktop user perspective the
system is incredibly buggy and unstable. To start with, it doesn’t bring
the graphical desktop under a regular user – we managed to get to the
LXDE desktop by issuing $ startx under root.
A system running Hurd also feels sluggish and slow to respond, and it
isn’t easy to determine whether this is due to the unhurried 2D
performance with the VESA driver or microkernel I/O issues. We tried to
run Phoronix Test Suite for Debian/GNU Hurd, but it turned out that only
a few tests would run, such as LAME MP3 encoding, C-Ray, 7-Zip
compression etc – and they all indicated a small under run of 4-6%
behind the regular Debian GNU/Linux distribution, but still didn’t shed
any light on why Hurd was so very slow.

Support level and quality
Verdict

How much help can you get on the web?

tepping outside the Linux world
means that sooner or later you
will encounter some problems,
so the important question will be:
where do you get answers?
OpenIndiana has the large website
(http://wiki.openindiana.org) with
detailed chapters on building, installing
and using the system, there is one
caveat – the information is targeted
mainly for developers and sysadmins,
and there isn’t anywhere else to look
too, other than googling around.

22 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

PC-BSD is significantly better
in terms of support, as it has a
gorgeous community support page
(www.pcbsd.org/en/community)
with an abundance of links to forums,
mailing lists, IRC rooms, blogs etc.
There are also many non-official
PC-BSD resources and Free-BSD
websites, that are relevant to both.
Chromium OS has a number of
guides at www.chromium.org/
chromium-os, including Quick Start
instructions, but it feels like very little

information is being shared with the
general public, while the main action
still takes place inside Google.
The Haiku project has an official user
manual, developer guide and other
materials at www.haiku-os.org/guides
and all information is quite concise.
Finally, the documentation at
www.gnu.org which makes good on
pages at www.debian.org/ports/hurd
is perhaps the best element in the
whole GNU/Hurd project. No wonder,
as it’s existed since the mid-1990s.

Chromium OS

+++++
Debian GNU/
Hurd

+++++
Haiku

+++++
OpenIndiana

+++++
PC-BSD

+++++
BSD systems
are strong rivals
to Linux in terms
of support.

OpenIndiana +++++
OpenIndiana’s performance dips when system configurations use the
basic VESA video driver, which lowers the desktop responsiveness.
Regardless of video driver, the OS shows noticeable latency when
starting and running various applications. The OS relies on ZFS
filesystem on its root partition, which adds some marvellous features
(such as snapshots) but adds a desktop performance overhead.
OpenIndiana also uses a mixed 32/64-bit mode. The Unix kernel can
run in fully 64-bit while most system components are 32-bit – that’s why
they perform slower. PC-BSD also uses ZFS and while the two are
different in most other ways, there is no visible difference on the desktop
performance side: file operations and 2D graphics are slower than in
Linux, but the lag isn’t excessive.

PC-BSD +++++
Once installed, PC-BSD boots to the login screen at a pedestrian speed
taking a minute or so. The overall desktop performance in KDE4 is rather
good, however, in both native and virtualised mode (and PC-BSD
automatically enables Guest Additions). It’s not as fast as the average
Linux distro due to slower ZFS desktop performance compared to ext4
and more basic Gallium3D support, but it’s still very usable. Applications
such as Firefox or LibreOffice would start in a few seconds, but AppCafe
(the PC-BSD software manager) took minutes to initialise, fetch the
updates and finally install them – a very unpleasant experience. In many
other respects the operating system performed well, it automatically
enabled VirtualBox Guest Additions and provided accelerated graphics
for our Radeon chipset.

Development status
Is the team behind your alternative OS thriving?

Verdict

Chromium OS

n actively maintained OS is
crucial for the future of any OS,
and each of our OSes has a
differing number of developers
beavering away on them, and so the
time between releases will differ greatly.
OpenIndiana may still be strong
thanks to the massive legacy from
OpenSolaris community, but the
current pace of development is snaillike. The latest release is 151a8, which
plopped out of the snail’s shell in
August 2013; a year after the previous

one. The development branch oi_151a9
seems to be alive, but we’re not
confident about its future.
PC-BSD is much more sprightly,
with a new version released every 3-5
months, while Chromium OS boasts
hundreds of developers, and its version
is synced with the Chromium browser
releases. However, there are no official
ISO images for the Google OS, but
rather a set of random builds from
various enthusiasts, which resembles a
semi-rolling release model.

Haiku OS development is extremely
slow, with the latest ‘official’ release
(Alpha 4) dating back to 2012. But the
Haiku movement is much more
promising with regular events and
participation in Google’s Summer of
Code. Nightly builds of Haiku show off a
constant development, even if official
releases are far less frequent.
Debian GNU/Hurd had a new release
in 2015, based on Debian 8 (Jessie)
codebase, which offers hope that
Richard Stallman’s dream is still alive.

+++++
Debian GNU/
Hurd

+++++
Haiku

+++++
OpenIndiana

+++++
PC-BSD

+++++
We’re just a
little worried
about the future
of OpenIndiana

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 23

Distros | Alternative OSes

Haiku +++++
We praised Chromium OS a lot for being very fast and fluid, so you might
think it would turn out to be fastest OS in the roundup. Why only four
stars then? Well, Haiku runs faster than Chromium OS; faster than any
Linux flavour and out and a way faster than other system in our tests.
Haiku surprised us, showing the best figures for each and every task
thrown at it. It takes 10 seconds to boot and 1-2 seconds to open any
application. Bearing in mind Haiku is 32-bit only with no options, built
largely with the ancient GCC2 compiler and without graphic acceleration,
which makes our results astonishing. Haiku is a clear winner here with a
perfectly optimized graphics stack and tiny footprint in all aspects.
Haiku won’t shine on CPU-heavy operations and compression, but it’s
blazingly fast forordinary desktop operations.

Distros | Alternative OSes

Features and applications
How many useful desktop apps do they offer?

penIndiana offers a basic set
of desktop applications in its
fresh installation (the ISO is
less than 900MB) and a few more in
two repositories (repos): main and a
legacy mirror of old opensolaris.org).
There are extra repositories at
http://sfe.opencsw.org and at
http://smartos.pkg.ec, but there are
very few desktop applications there.

PC-BSD comes with AppCafe, a
gateway to the system’s own repository,
and a classical FreeBSD ports support
(from command line only). Also, let’s
not forget a splendid Kldload
technology, which enables a BSD
system to run Linux binaries, including
Skype, Adobe Flash and some other
components, which are available for
Linux but not BSD (at least officially).

The kldstat command shows what Linux modules are being used by BSD now.

Chromium OS has the only one
place to install extra applications from
and that’s the Chrome Web Store,
which is an open marketplace for web
apps for both Google Chrome and
Chromium OS. But the sad thing is that
those web apps can’t compete with
classic local applications. They aren’t
entirely awful, but they don’t match
‘desktop computing applications and it
would be totally irrelevant to compare
desktop heavyweights, such as Gimp
with browser extensions on the store.
Haiku has a very modest set of
applications, mostly accessible from
HaikuDepot, its system’s package
manager. Antiquated sites such as
BeBits and Haikuware have been
discontinued, though you can find
some random apps available for Haiku,
such as Scribus and a few Qt4-based
apps. It’s not much, but still something.
The GNU/Hurd, Debian team, in
contrast, managed to port about 78%
of Debian packages to run on the GNU/
Mach kernel, but there still aren’t any
desktops environments other than Xfce
and LXDE.

Verdict
Chromium OS

+++++
Debian GNU/
Hurd

+++++
Haiku

+++++
OpenIndiana

+++++
PC-BSD

+++++
Chromium OS
lacks the desktop
applications of
the others.

First time experience
Are they easy to get used to?

penIndiana has a live mode
and it welcomes you with a
hardened Gnome 2.30
desktop and Firefox 10 but no
LibreOffice in its repositories, though
OpenOffice is there. If you don’t mind
the antiquated versions of OpenIndiana
packages, then you’ll feel comfortable.
The only real obstacle can be the
network card – if a connection isn’t
found automatically, you’ll be faced
with a manual setup. (Head to http://
bit.ly/1SYuPk2 for help.)
PC-BSD doesn’t have a live mode,
and the only challenging part to its
install is the partitioner. BSD systems
use a different naming convention for
disk drives (eg, /dev/sda1 will be /dev/
ada0s1a), but aside from that PC-BSD
can be safely installed alongside a Linux
distro on different partitions on the
same drive. The installer uses KDE4 as
default but others are in AppCafe.

24 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Chromium OS is tricky to
get started with but is easier
to work with later on. If
you’re not a Chromium
developer, you can get a prebuilt image at http://bit.ly/
ArnoldtheBat and flash
your USB drive with it using
dd . After you boot, you’ll
need to access a command
Haiku default browser, WebPositive, is a capable
prompt with Ctrl+Alt+t to
web application based on WebKit.
bring up the shell and
entering shell to access the
and set up, and its interface logic is
classic CLI. After that you issue $ sudo
quite similar to OS X, which is largely
/usr/sbin/chromeos-install followed by
thanks to Jean-Louis Gassée, a former
the root password (that’s password for
Apple executive.
the images from the link above) and
Debian GNU/Hurd requires extra
select target device (Note: it will wipe
post-install steps, such as $ dpkgthe whole device clean).
reconfigure x11-common to let users
As long as Haiku detects your
start an X session and some other
network card you’ll be surfing the
tricks (see http://bit.ly/HurdConfig).
internet from the WebPositive browser
But generally the system delivers a
horrible experience, with no live mode.
in seconds. Haiku is very easy to use

Verdict
Chromium OS

+++++
Debian GNU/
Hurd

+++++
Haiku

+++++
OpenIndiana

+++++
PC-BSD

+++++
Haiku can
outperform any
lightweight Linux
distro and it also
looks cool!

The verdict
T

he abundance of open source
operating systems proves that a
community of open-minded
developers can do great things, which
are worth at least trying out on your
home PC. We don’t insist that you
eventually switch from Linux to another
OS, as we love Linux but almost all of
them are more or less capable for
desktop computing.
PC-BSD is the winner overall with
very good performance in almost all the
tests we threw at it. The OS is fast,
reliable and able to recognise nearly all
hardware components and peripherals.
It may be missing the live mode, which
could garner it even more attention
from open source enthusiasts, but the
desktop experience with PC-BSD is
nearly the same as we’d expect in a
decent Linux distribution.
Haiku is a smart OS and really unlike
the other OSes. There are builds made
with an ancient GCC 2 compiler, which
can still run the original BeOS
applications together with relatively
modern Qt4 apps. Haiku development

1st PC-BSD

is not fast, however, but small changes
have accumulated into features that are
commendable, such as working WPA2protected Wi-Fi connections, better
USB support and more.
OpenIndiana is ageing, there’s no
doubt about that. In the past there were
great hopes for OpenSolaris and later
on for the OpenIndiana/Illumos project,
which was supposed to breathe a new
life into the ‘true’ Unix System V and
bring it to desktops. However, there’s
little work being done now and no fresh
releases in recent years. OpenIndiana is
still worth trying out though, as it has
decent support for modern hardware.
Chromium OS is an effort to replace
classic desktop computing with
so-called ‘cloud’ computing. If your PC
activity fits into the Chromium browser,
then it may be the system for you. It’s
fast, sleek and
intentionally hides
away your system’s
settings. We
appreciate this
approach but the

4th Chromium OS

+++++

Our first choice after Linux, when choosing an open source OS.

+++++

Web: www.chromium.org/chromium-os Licence: BSD Version: 41
A browser instead of a full-featured OS? Not this time…

5th Debian GNU/Linux

+++++

Web: www.haiku-os.org Licence: MIT licence Version: Nightly
A surprisingly usable, ultra-fast and stable OS for computers of all ages.

3rd OpenIndiana

truth is that cloud computing using thin
clients can’t beat classic local apps in
terms of features and flexibility.
The fifth place belongs to GNU/
Hurd, an infamous attempt to create
the most pure basement of a GNU
system. Debian developers made a
great job of delivering a working
distribution with a GNU/Mach
microkernel, but it is still far from
being stable and usable.

“PC-BSD is fast, reliable and able
to recognise nearly all hardware
components and peripherals.”

Web: www.pcbsd.org Licence: BSD licence Version: 10.1.2

2nd Haiku

You probably won’t notice that you’re not in a Linux
distribution until you get into a terminal.

+++++

Web: http://openindiana.org Licence: Mostly CDDL Version: 151a8
An old ox, which makes a straight furrow, with some rough edges.

+++++

Web: www.debian.org/ports/hurd Licence: GPL Version: Hurd 0.6
So many years, but still it’s in the early stage of development.

Over to you...
What is your favourite non-Linux open-source OS? We’d love to hear
from you. Write to Linux Format at lxf.letters@futurenet.com.

Also consider...
We could include a vast array of different
operating systems but we will restrict
ourselves to mention just four. If you love what
Google does, and that isn’t everyone we know,
why not try Android x86 (www.android-x86.
org) an unofficial Android port, which runs
perfectly on desktops PCs. It doesn’t have the

drawbacks of Chromium OS while still being a
Linux kernel based operating system. Android
x86 might not ever become an OS of choice on
a desktop, but it runs all those thousands of
Android apps perfectly, which could be a
painless cure if you don’t have an Androidbased smartphone.

Another option is ReactOS, which is an
open source Windows clone. It has a lot of
benefits, even if we’re afraid it could lead an
average Linux user back in the wrong direction.
There are plenty of other open source systems,
from the tiny KolibriOS to the massive Darwin
forks, so feel free to explore them all.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 25

Distros | Alternative OSes

Alternative operating systems

Distros | Linux vs Windows

LINUX
VS

WINDOWS

Take cover: Microsoft’s fired its latest salvo and
it’s time to square it up against the Linux batallion.
he latest iteration of Windows
is here, impressing, confounding
and upsetting early adopters.
As has become traditional, we
pit the Microsoft OS mano-a-mano with
Linux to determine the
ultimate operating system.
Of course, in reality this is
comparing apples and
oranges (and scoring them
with bananas): One is a free
codebase which can run on
most any hardware imaginable, the
other is a proprietary product with an
undecouple-able GUI that, until recently,
has run only on x86 PCs. Our approach
will be to consider features from the
Windows 10 build available at press time,

together with Microsoft’s own PR
announcements and compare them
with like-for-like equivalents from
various Linux distributions.
Much of the pre-release hype spoke

but rather the beginning of “Windows
as a Service”. Updates will be pushed to
consumers once Microsoft deems them
ready, while businesses will be offered
a choice of two release channels, dubbed
Current and Long Term which
offer more rigid release cycles.
Individuals who purchase
(or are entitled to a free)
copy of Windows will see it
supported “for the lifetime
of that device.” Another
intriguing development is that users
of the pre-release Technical Preview who
enroll in the Windows Insider Program
can continue to use that and will have the
privilege [pain, surely? – ED] of testing new
features – and won’t have to pay.

“We pit the Microsoft OS
mano-a-mano with Linux to
determine the ultimate OS”

26 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

to Windows 10 heralding a paradigm shift
across the Windows landscape. Certainly
there are a lot of changes and perhaps
most notable is that Windows 10 will be
the operating system’s last incarnation.
That doesn’t mean the end of Windows,

e can forgive Microsoft for
abandoning its previous strategy
of doing discrete releases as it
hasn’t on the whole worked out well.
Windows Vista was received with little
affection, mostly because of its demanding
system requirements, but let’s not forget
good ol’ user inertia. This is going to get us
in trouble, but Vista did have some good
points. Sure, the constant user account
control (UAC) interruptions were annoying,
but they were part of a well-intentioned
move to introduce proper account privileges
to Windows. DirectX 10 introduced new and
exciting multimedia features and the WDDM
driver model promised improved graphics
performance. But for the most part, Vista
was seen as a failure, ignored by users and
businesses alike. At its peak it managed
a paltry market share of about 21%.
In sum, having a single release of Windows
obviates fragmentation problems for Microsoft
and upgrade woes for customers. Assuming,
of course, that users upgrade in the first place.
Many an upgrade-refusenik cites Windows 8 as
a reason for staying put and it will be hard to
assuage their trepidations and get them to
move on. Cosmetically Windows 10 doesn’t
look or feel all that different to Windows 8.1.
This might just be because we Linux
enthusiasts prefer to work with
grown-up operating systems, but if
Microsoft really wanted to avoid
naming its latest progeny Windows 9,
then 8.2 would be a much better title.
Obviously it’s a secret how different the
underlying codebase really is, but digging

Camping beneath the milky way does not a revolutionary operating system make.

around the settings you’ll find the same Device
Manager that has been kicking about since XP.
You’ll even find win.ini and system.ini files
which date back to Windows 3.1.
The Microsoft of today is a different beast
to that of yesterday. They still enjoy desktop
dominance (albeit split between its last five
desktop OSes), but this is no longer enough,
and CEO Satya Nadella is only too aware of it.
The real battle is taking place on mobile
devices, and Microsoft barely has a foot in the
door. One of the most touted Windows 10
features is platform convergence: PC, Xbox,
Windows Mobile devices, giant Surface Hubs
and even the Windows 10 build for Raspberry
Pi will all run on a unified Windows core, so that
one app will run consistently on any of these
platforms. For convertible tablet/laptop
devices, there’s also the Continuum feature,
which ensures apps will undergo a seamless UI
transition whenever the device is transformed.

When Windows Phone 10 is released, it will
enable users to plug their phones into a
monitor, mouse and keyboard and use it as
they would a regular PC. In July 2014 Nadella
stated there was already 90% API overlap
between mobile, desktop and Xbox code.
Convergence has also been one of
Canonical’s buzzwords ever since the
introduction of its controversial Unity
desktop. Two Ubuntu phones have already
been released, but these rely on Unity 8
which incorporates the new Mir display
server. These technologies have a long way to
go before they are stable for desktop use,
although brave souls willing to try can do so
through the Ubuntu Next channel. In all
likelihood Microsoft will achieve convergence
before Canonical does, but the real challenge
for both parties (both small fish in the mobile
ecosystem) will be leveraging this feature to
win over consumers.

Market share
Windows 7, released three years after Windows
Vista, did a reasonable job of righting some of
its predecessors perceived wrongs and, credit
where credit is due, was generally a much
better OS than Vista.
Adoption was fairly cautious, but by Q3
2011 it had surpassed XP. Unfortunately for
Microsoft, many of those XP diehards refused
to budge and to this day continue not to move.
In a way, Microsoft’s most successful OS has
become its greatest bugbear. Even today, 14
years since being released and over a year after
it reached its prolonged End Of Life (EOL) the
blue and green XP dinosaur is still roaring (but
probably gulping for breath). No doubt
Microsoft enjoy the remunerations that go with
expensive post-EOL arrangements, but these
resources could be better directed elsewhere.

Which brings us to 2012, Windows 8, and the
interface formerly known as Metro. While a
boon for touchscreen users, desktop users
were lost and confused searching for the
familiar, and particularly the Start Menu and
the desktop. These were hidden behind
unintuitive shortcuts or touch gestures. The OS
was accused of being in the midst of an identity
crisis, with desktop apps and Metro apps
rendered entirely at odds with each other.
Windows 8.1 was released about a year later
and, heeding users protestations, backpeddled
on many of the design decisions. Its reception
was much warmer, but keyboard and mouse
navigation remains awkward. At the time of
writing, there are about as many people still
using Windows XP as are using 8.1, with both
enjoying around a 13% share of the market.

Currently, businesses still languishing with
XP are faced with a trilemma: Do nothing,
upgrade to the tried and tested Windows 7 or
take a gamble and aim for Windows 8.1. The
first is not a viable course of action for so many
reasons. The second seems like the safest
option, but this is an OS that’s already six years
old, and one for which Microsoft’s “mainstream
support” program ended earlier this year.
Extended support is promised until 2020, but
given the glacial pace of certain organisations’
(cough UK government cough) migrations, by
the time a Windows 7 rollout is complete it’ll be
getting on time to do it all again. Windows 8.1
may be mature enough by now, but given the
similarities between it and its successor, many
will skip this release until they judge Windows
10 to be stable enough.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 27

Distros | Linux vs Windows

Windows gone by

Distros | Linux vs Windows

Familiar features
A

s people do more and more on
their desktops – what with
multiple browser windows,
Skype conversations, music players, live
streaming setups or whatever is the latest
thing the kids nowadays are up to –
desktop real estate has become a scarce
resource. Thanks to high resolution,
widescreen displays the situation isn’t as
severe as it used to be, but imagine if you
had the ability to group lots of different
applications or windows together onto
a single ‘virtual desktop’.
The latest Windows offering lets you do
exactly this, with its new Task View feature.
Apparently, testing via Windows Insider
Program found that users preferred to have
only icons from the current desktop visible,
so this is the default setting. Previews of all
available desktops are available at the click
or tap of the Task View button or using the
Windows+Tab key combination. At the
moment this is a little clumsy
though, since invoking the
keyboard shortcut places the
focus inside the current
desktop preview. A couple of
extra key presses are required

to actually cycle through other desktops and
the applications running inside.
Virtual desktops have been available on
Windows through third-party programs since
the Windows XP days, but more often than not
these just used ugly hacks to hide and group
various entries on the taskbar. This confuses
a number of applications, which are hardwired
to believe there can be only one (desktop, not
Highlander). The discerning reader will, of
course, be aware that Virtual desktops have
been on Linux since the initial KDE and Gnome
releases in the late 1990s, and that they were
around, in various guises, long before that in
the days of the Amiga 1000 (1985) and the
Solbourne window manager (1990). It’s nice
to see Microsoft join the party. Better late
than never guys.
Task View in itself is also rather similar to
Gnome Shell’s Activities Overlay (the screen
that shows all running applications). Like
Gnome Shell, Windows 10 also features

a central notification area (which it has dubbed
the Action Center), so that a user’s tray is
spared domination by dancing icons and
toaster popups all vying for their attention.
Being able to livesearch applications (and
insodoing get unwanted web results) from the
Start bar is nice feature, although it’s been in
Unity and Gnome Shell since their inception.
The Unity Dash will even
categorise various web results
into ‘lenses’, but obviously it
loses points because of the
infamous Amazon sponsored
results, even if they can be

“Virtual desktops have been on
Linux since the initial KDE and
Gnome releases in the late 1990s”

Promises of being the ultimate Dragon Lord aside, the windows app store is rather threadbare compared to Ubuntu’s.

28 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

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Gnomes useful way to view your apps is implemented in Windows 10 in a clumsy way.

longer need to fire up Internet Explorer just to
download your favourite browser, it can all be
done by opening a Powershell window as
administrator and doing:
Install-Package -Name Firefox -Provider
chocolatey
Replace Mozilla Firefox with Google Chrome
if you’re that way inclined The -Provider

Microsoft has finally decided that its users are grown up enough to use a new concept it has
cooked up called virtual desktops. Little late to the party there, guys.

argument proved to be necessary for
disambiguation with another package called
xFirefox when we tested, but hopefully things
will have been tidied up come the glorious
29 July, when Windows 10 will become
available. Naturally, Microsoft will encourage
people to use the App Store as their first
port of call for new software, but Powershell
gurus will enjoy this method. Even if it’s not a
patch on APT or DNF.
Windows as a service can in some ways
be compared to a rolling-release operating
system, such as Arch Linux or Linux Mint
Debian Edition. At the same time the multibranch release model for businesses is
vaguely similar to Debian’s release model.
Indeed, the whole Insider Preview model
itself is a big old beta test itself, just like what
has been happening with SteamOS over the
past year-and-a-bit. But none of these are
really Linux ideas, and it’s actually quite
refreshing to see Microsoft co-opting them.
Also pleasant is the fact that this is offered
as a free upgrade for those already running
a legitimate copy of Windows 7 or later,
but this move is largely a deal-sweetener
for potential upgraders that are sitting on
the fence.

Windows SSH
Another development which isn’t strictly part of
Windows 10, but which we’ll happily include
here nonetheless, is that PowerShell is soon to
be blessed with SSH functionality. So you will
be able to connect to your Windows box and
use awkward PowerShell syntax to administer
it. While it has always been possible to run a
third-party SSH client, such as the venerable
PuTTY, running a server involved installing the

Cygwin environment which is pretty heavy duty.
Various bods at Microsoft have pressed for SSH
inclusion in the past, but traditionally they have
been struck down by management.
Nadella, though, is much more tolerant of
what his predecessor might have called
‘commie’ technology. In fact, Microsoft is going
to contribute to the OpenSSH community, and
it has just become an OpenBSD (custodians of

the OpenSSH project) Gold contributor by
flinging a five-figure sum into the pot. Likely this
will be greeted with scepticism by some all too
willing to quote the often referenced Microsoft
strategy: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. But
remember that didn’t work with (MS)HTML and
it won’t work with SSH either. Who knows,
maybe we’ll even be able to blame them for the
next Heartbleed.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 31

Distros | Linux vs Windows

disabled. Being able to see all installed
applications is a useful feature. It was vaguely
present in Windows 8 (and was in fact the
only way to find newly installed applications),
but again has been present in a much more
useable form in modern Linux desktops for
about five years.
Windows Powershell has been around since
2006, and the series sees a fifth instalment
with the latest OS. One of its most touted
features is that it provides something akin to
a package manager. This amazing technology
enables you to source software from a trusted
repository and install it without having to run
the gauntlet of ambiguously worded questions
relating to the installation of toolbars, smileys,
or other bloatware. Packages can then be
cleanly removed with a simple command.
The blurb from Redmond calls this Software
Discovery, Installation and Inventory (SDII). If
only we had something like this on Linux. Oh
wait. At present, OneGet (being the title of this
new tool) is just a collection of Powershell
cmdlets that talks to the repository used by the
third-party utility Chocolatey Nuget. This
provides just shy of 3,000 packages right now,
an order of magnitude smaller than any Linux
package manager. In future there will be many
other repositories available, perhaps even an
official Microsoft one. But at least you’ll no

Distros | Linux vs Windows

System performance
L

et’s be clear about some thing: our
experience of Windows 10 was
plagued with bugs and annoyances.
But we were testing a preview, and as such
it wouldn’t be fair to give any credence
to them. Bugs notwithstanding, the
new operating system, once installed
on a suitably specified computer, is
impressively quick in general use.
Heeding the frustrations of so many
Windows 7 users bemoaning lengthy startup
and shutdown times, Microsoft has taken
definitive action. So in Windows 8 a new trick
was introduced where system processes are
summarily dumped to the disk on shutdown,
so that they can be speedily
reloaded during the next
boot. This partial hibernation
means that only user
processes need to be loaded
from scratch, so the time it
takes to get to the login
screen (assuming the user is
not vulgar and passwordless) is slashed.
The technique is still in evidence with
Windows 10, which managed to boot from
an SSD in about six seconds, which is
roughly the same time as it takes to get from
Grub to the SDDM login manager on a
slimline Arch installation. Day-to-day
browsing and poking around the (still largely
unpopulated) App Store, was also swift and
responsive. The difference is that we’ve only
been using the Windows install for about a
week, once a few apps and a few (thousand)
obscurely titled runtime libraries are
installed the age-old curse of Windows

decline will kick in. Our Arch Linux install has
been used nearly every day for over a year, has
all manner of long-forgotten packages
installed, and remains blazing fast. One
exception used to be playing Flash videos,
which rapidly crippled the system. This was
easily solved by uninstalling the Flash plugin
because its entirely unnecessary nowadays
and serves only as a vector for the delivery of
viruses. A modern computer is required to
enjoy a smooth-running Windows 10 (see the
hardware section), running it on a virtual
machine proved particularly painful. By
comparison pretty much any computer built in
the last 10 years will happily run a lightweight

area where Linux continues to be trumped by
Windows. The situation is getting better –
there are now over 1,000 Linux games available
on Steam. Many triple-A titles have been
ported to Linux, and popular FPS adventure
game Dying Light even saw an unprecedented
Linux launch at the same time as its Windows
counterpart. Unfortunately, the numbers tell us
that Linux gaming is still something of a niche
occupation: Around 1% of Steam users (that’s
a staggering 1.2 million users, extrapolated
from the 125 million active accounts) are
running it on Linux (even if that doesn’t
indicate how many are dual-booters). Many
Linux users choose to maintain a Windows
install solely for gaming where
they can enjoy a bigger
selection of titles (around
5,000) and more often than
not better performance.
There are a wealth of indie
titles available for Linux titles
and many of these will run just
as swiftly as they do on Windows. High-budget
titles though are all-too-often poorly ported.
The main issue is the conversion from DirectX
to OpenGL, which is often sidestepped by
using a wrapper such as Wine or E-on. For best
results, users still have to resort to the
proprietary drivers for most games, and Nvidia
(despite its generally poor attitude towards the
open source community) tends to trump AMD
performance-wise. Mesa, the FOSS
implementation of OpenGL, currently only
supports up to OpenGL 3.3, which is over five
years old. Newer versions of the proprietary
drivers support version 4.5, introduced about
a year ago. AMD made efforts to break the
DirectX stranglehold with its new Mantle
technology which AMD promise is coming to
Linux, eventually. It saw much fanfare when
Battlefield 4 was launched (boasting a
performance boost of up to 45% over
Direct3D) but lately, while explicitly stating that
it’s are not abandoning Mantle, AMD seem to
have directed effort elsewhere. Newer OpenGL
techniques, dubbed Approaching Zero Driver
Overhead (AZDO), offer similar performance
boosts, as does DirectX 12.
OpenGL itself is over 20 years old and, like
the X protocol, will eventually be phased out.
Its stewards, the Khronos Group, has already
announced its successor – Vulkan. Valve’s
Source 2 engine already supports Vulkan and
more will follow suit. In the meantime, many
major game engines (Cryengine, Unity, Unreal
etc) support Linux through OpenGL, so the
number of Linux titles is only going to increase.

“One of the strange things that
Windows aficionados tend to
get excited about is DirectX 12”
desktop, such as LXQt or Mate, with no fuss
whatsoever. Add to that a slightly more modern
graphics card (being one that supports at least
OpenGL 1.4 and has 128MB of video memory),
and it will easily manage a standard Ubuntu
installation (the stated minimum requirements
are 1GB or RAM and a 1GHz CPU).
One of the many strange things that
Windows aficionados tend to get excited about
is the up and coming DirectX 12. Microsoft
announced it at GDC in March last year using
words including “richer scenes, more objects,
and full utilization of modern GPU hardware”.
Naturally this has implications for gaming, an

The Borderlands series is one of a growing number of AAA titles available for Linux and is
in good company with the recently ported Bioshock Infinite and Shadow of Mordor incoming.

32 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

he Windows 10 desktop will not be for
everyone – people coming from
Windows 7 will have to get their heads
around Live Tiles, and some system settings
are hard to find. The old Control Panel is still
there, but so too is a new one simply called
Settings, which you’ll find nestled in the
Start Menu. Such duality also features in the
Start Menu itself, which seems to be
composed of two largely autonomous panes:
the menu itself and the Live Tiles to the
right. Apps can be added, albeit clumsily,
from left to right, but going the other way is
verboten. In general, re-arranging live tiles
was a haphazard affair, sometimes they
coherently snapped to the grid, sometimes
they wound up at a seemingly random
location. Dragging tile groups around proved
to be much more reliable.
Besides gaming, one hitherto ineluctable
point that precluded many from migrating
away from Windows was the application
ecosystem. Whether its playing the latest
games (see Performance, left), tinkering with
TPS reports in Microsoft Word, or pushing
pixels in Adobe Photoshop, there’s always
going to be stuff that can’t be satisfactorily
replicated in a Linux environment. Outside the
workplace though, Microsoft Office is losing its
stranglehold. Most people will find everything
they need in LibreOffice and many people
prefer to work online with Google Docs. Gimp is
more than sufficient for basic photo editing,
but Photoshop gurus will still find much to
scoff at. As a Linux user, if you do ever find
yourself confronted with a DOC file that Google
or LibreOffice can’t comprehend, then you can
use Office Online (via a Microsoft account) to
convert it to PDF.
The UK government (not exactly known for
being digitally progressive) has even selected
Open Document Format as a standard. Many
major businesses, eager for another excuse
to bandy the word ‘cloud’ around, have
successfully transferred to Google Docs, so

Windows 10 makes much ado about this Maps application, it’s quite neat at showing us
Portland, but we could use Bing maps just as well on the web on any platform.

DOC, that most wretched of file formats, will
mercifully not be around forever.
Through Office365 and Creative Cloud
Microsoft and Adobe are moving their
operations skyward and changing to
subscription-based service models. At the
moment this still means that the relevant
applications still live on your computer, but in
future we could see these behemoths
transform into web apps and ascend into the
cloud. If that happens, and does so in an
appropriately standards-compliant manner,
then people will finally be able to live the dream
and ‘run’ them on Linux. Open source software
is inexorably improving, so by then Inkscape
and Krita could have usurped Illustrator, and
Scribus could have feature-parity with
InDesign. But don’t hold your breath.
Users of Windows 8.1 may lament the
demise of its affectionately-titled Charms bar
in the new release. However, the shortcuts it
housed, particularly the frequently sought for
Settings, are now all available from the Start

Menu. Windows 10 is surprisingly pleasant to
use on a touchscreen device, and while it still
has a split-personality feel to it these two
egos are sufficiently segregated so it pretty
much works like ‘old Windows’ when used
with a keyboard and mouse. Hot corners
have been abolished, so there’s no danger
that letting the pointer stray into some
reserved territory in the north-east will
trigger a massive occupation of the desktop
by a ‘Start screen’.
Overall, the Windows 10 desktop is most
closely resembled on Linux by Cinnamon,
excepting the Live Tiles. Part of the reason
for Linux Mint’s popularity is this desktop,
which is at once modern and traditional,
respecting the age-old WIMP (Windows,
Icons, Menus, Pointers) paradigm. Plasma 5,
the latest incarnation of the KDE Desktop,
is another fine choice that retains traditional
desktop idioms, and it even works with
touchscreens, assuming you can find a
touchscreen that works with Linux.

Old systems, new things
For users of older hardware, or just those that
don’t care for desktop frippery, there are all
manner of lightweight desktops available such
as Xfce, LXQt and MATE. People seeking a truly
beautiful desktop should check out
elementaryOS’s Pantheon. And then there are
Unity and Gnome, the pioneers of brave new
desktop territories. There’s no denying that
these are hard to get used to, but Gnome in

particular is gaining something of a following.
Once old desktop habits are shed, and a couple
of keyboard shortcuts learned, workflows can
be made much more speedy.
There’s also a new web browser called Edge,
which is basically Internet Explorer stripped of
support for IE6-isms. It looks slick, but the
Insider Preview version had some trouble with
some websites. Many people will use it just

because it’s there and has a familiar ‘e’ icon, but
it will be hard to tear people away from Google
Chrome or Chromium, which currently enjoys
cross-platform dominance by quite a margin.
The Edge browser has done away with the
old browser plugin architecture entirely,
it doesn’t even support Microsoft’s own
Silverlight, which we can only applaud as that
means workarounds will soon be unnecessary.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 33

Distros | Linux vs Windows

Desktop & apps

Distros | Linux vs Windows

Hardware and drivers
F

or those who have an older
computer dual-booting Windows 7,
or even XP, and are considering
upgrading to Windows 10, then bear in
mind the minimum system requirements:
1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM (2GB for 64-bit),
16GB hard drive and DirectX 9 video card
(with WDDM driver). These are pretty
modest, especially when we consider the
demands that Windows Vista imposed
back in the day.
DirectX 9 has been around since 2004,
but hardware from that era will likely not
meet the driver requirement. Plenty of
marginally newer hardware will though, eg
the Nvidia Geforce 600 series from late
2004, or AMD’s HD2xxx series from 2006
(which back then was made by a company
called ATI). These are the minimum
requirements though, so don’t expect a
particularly slick experience using them.
Using only 2GB RAM is no match for a
few tabs in Chrome, whatever your OS. Also
with an old processor, a 1GHz Celeron from
back in the day, for instance,
you’ll be spending a lot of
time twiddling your thumbs
waiting for Windows to catch
up with itself. It’s foolhardy to
compare raw frequency
numbers between old and
new CPUs too – multi-GHz processors have
been around for 10 years and an old Athlon
64 x2 4800 (2.4GHz) pales into
insignificance compared to the similarly
clocked Intel Core i3-370M found in many
budget laptops.
Credit where credit is due though: It’s
great to see Microsoft making an effort to
support (at least nominally) older hardware,
though it is in its interests to unfragment its
userbase. There’s a pretty lengthy array of
graphical features that the OS will
automatically tune so that your experience
is as slick as possible. Whether
manufacturers update their drivers

accordingly remains to
be seen.
When people begin to
consider switching to
Linux, they are often
concerned about
hardware compatibility.
The situation here is
always improving, but
there remain a few
unsupported devices:
Some older laptop
graphics chips are
modified by the OEMs,
so are no longer
Windows 10 comes with not one but two control panels to help
recognised by some
you tame – and presumably herd – recalcitrant hardware.
drivers (although if you
encounter such a thing the open source drivers offer Linux driver downloads on their website,
will happily accept your bug report). Likewise,
but more often than not these have been
there remain some budget peripherals, such as hacked together by some poor, overworked
remote controls and TV cards that lack Linux
engineer and will only work with whatever
support. No doubt you’ll have seen people on
distro said overworked culprit was using. Very
forums complaining about dysfunctional
often wireless drivers promulgated in this
wireless cards, but 90% of the time this is due
manner are just the relevant parts of the
Windows drivers glued to the
ndiswrapper program.
It’s easy to forget that driver
problems on Windows arise too.
Perhaps more than ever thanks
to Windows’ driver-signing
requirements. A motherboard
to missing firmware (which can’t be bundled
will require drivers for its chipset, network
with most distros, but is available in the linuxinterface, RAID controller, audio device and
firmware package or failing that can be
various other obscurely named platform
extracted from Windows drivers using tools
drivers. For modern hardware, these will be
such as b43-fwcutter).
available from the manufacturer’s website.
New converts to Linux often make the
But you’ll need to know the precise revision or
mistake of going and manually hunting for
you’ll risk a world of pain. Such downloads
drivers. This is almost universally a bad idea,
often run to hundreds of megabytes, due to
your distro will come with drivers for most
various manufacturers’ insistence on bundling
hardware that’s supported on Linux in the form all manner of bloatware. Linux drivers, in
of loadable kernel modules. These are loaded
contrast, undergo the scrutiny of the various
automatically as each bit of hardware is
subsystem maintainers (and possibly even
detected, and while they might need minor
Linus himself) and are guaranteed to be as
config tweaks occasionally, it’s rare that you’d
efficient and well-coded as available hardware
want to replace them. Some manufacturers do
knowledge allows.

“New converts to Linux often
make the mistake of going and
manually hunting for drivers”

Graphic drivers
Newer graphics cards will tend to perform
better on Windows on release, but eventually
the Linux drivers catch up performance wise.
They are usually available quite soon after a
new graphics card launches too, eg Nvidia
already provides drivers for the high-end 980 Ti
and Titan X cards. That said, Nvidia’s new
hardware requires signed firmware blobs to

34 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

work, and at the time of writing there seems to
be some paucity in providing these to the open
source Nouveau project. Hopefully this will all
be resolved soon.
AMD on the other hand is friendlier towards
the open source Radeon driver. Not only does it
provide specifications, it pays people to work on
it. AMD’s latest innovation has been to

introduce a
common kernel
module for both
its open source
and Catalyst
proprietary
driver, with the latter’s naughty bits annexed to
a separate userspace module.

he next edition of Windows Server
won’t be released until later in 2016,
but there are Technical Previews
available. The big new feature is in Active
Directory Federation Services (ADFS), which
allows users from foreign directories and
databases to be authenticated by Active
Directory domains. ADFS itself has been part
of the OS since Windows Server 2003 R2
and enables two realms to establish mutual
trust so users from one realm can use their
credentials on the other in a fuss-free way.
There are already commercial solutions for
authenticating Linux clients against an Active
Directory domain controller, and it’s possible
(though convoluted) to do it using FOSS
software. Active Directory uses LDAP and
Kerberos which are both open standards.
These need to be tied together with Samba
and PAM and the domain controller will likely
need tweaking as well. In the new edition, this
process ought to be much more streamlined.
Centralised authentication in a pure Linux
environment can be achieved using the
aforementioned protocols, or others such as
SASL or NIS. All of these approaches have their
advantages and drawbacks, and those coming
from a Microsoft background may struggle to
recreate the more advanced functionality of
Active Directory. It’s important to note that
Active Directory provides more than just
authentication, it handles all the related arcana
too – trust, certificates, domains and group
policies etc. Many of these are
only relevant on Windows
systems and the rest can be
dealt with using other Linux
tools. A common tactic in
heterogeneous environments is

Updates in Windows remain a pain, but we quite like the apologetic tone of this message.

to have non-Windows machines authenticate
to a directory server running something other
than AD but which is capable of syncing to and
from it; known as deflected integration.
Version 10 of Internet Information Services
(IIS) is included in Windows 10, bringing with it
support for HTTP/2. Naturally, our top three
Linux webservers (Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd)
have had support since not long after RFC7540
was published in May. And were supporting
SPDY, essentially the parent protocol of
HTTP/2, prior to that. Before the 7.0 release, IIS
was something of a laughing stock, being little
more than a bloated web server that didn’t
allow more than 10 simultaneous connections.
It has grown up now, incorporating a modular

extension system and being more scalable
on multiprocessor systems. To improve
performance IIS uses a kernel-level driver for
processing HTTP requests. An IIS
vulnerability discovered in April allowed
attackers to achieve remote code execution
on unpatched systems by exploiting this
driver and its status. Linux has had web
server bugs too, but its architects know what
does and doesn’t belong in the kernel.
Linux remains the undisputed champion
of the server world, which is why it runs
most of the internet. We have world-class
web servers and databases, industrial grade
distros (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or
the free CentOS) and the advantage of open
source on our side. Linux
virtual machines tend to be
cheaper than their Windows
counterparts, and are much
more efficient thanks to its
modular nature.

“Before the 7.0 release, Internet
Information Service was
something of a laughing stock.”

Windows IoT Pi Edition
Windows Server Core, introduced in 2008
provided a minimal Server OS sans the Explorer
shell and many other features not required by
most people. Continuing this theme, we now
have Windows 10 IoT core, aimed at small
Internet of Things devices. At present, builds
are available for five devices including the
Raspberry Pi 2. This doesn’t mean you’ll be
running Edge and have Live Tiles all over your Pi
desktop. No indeed, you won’t even have a Pi
desktop, all code is written in Visual Studio on a
Windows 10 machine and uploaded to the Pi.
All of the available builds allow programs built
on Windows’ Universal App Platform to run,
which means that they must be programmed in
C#, C++ or Javascript and with a XAML, HTML

or DirectX presentation layer. You can connect
to a Pi running Windows IoT Core using either
PowerShell or SSH.
We’re pretty far from impartial here, but we
think that reducing the Pi to minion status in
this way seriously detracts from its appeal.
Being able to boot into a proper desktop (even
if it is slow and clunky on the original Pi), or run
code straight from the Python interpreter, helps
new coders appreciate that this diminutive
board is very much a fully-functional computer.
Of course, if you’re a seasoned embedded
applications programmer then such a desktop
is just going to get in your way. There are all
manner of Linux distros designed to be run on
embedded devices, including Yocto Sancto and

Angstrom. It’s also worth mentioning that there
are already a huge number of embedded
devices already running Linux in one form or
another: sat-navs, set top boxes, the TV’s on
which the latter are set and the list goes on.
The latest Tux-flavoured innovation in this area
is Snappy Ubuntu Core, which is aimed at the
Cloud as well as Things.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 35

Distros | Linux vs Windows

Beyond the desktop

Distros | Server distros

Server
distros
Do you want to set up your own web, mail or file server, or any combination
of these? We compare five distros that cover your needs.

How we tested...
The distros were installed into
identical Qemu/KVM virtual
machines to make back-to-back
comparisons easier. They were also
tested on real hardware to make
sure they worked in the real world,
too. If you are setting up a
commercial server you’ll either pay
for a turnkey system or employ
experienced sysadmins. We looked
at these servers from the point of
view of those wanting to set up a
home or small office server, and
wanting to spend more time using
it than reading man pages. So ease
of installation and configuration,
along with flexibility were important
considerations.
That’s not to say that you can’t
use these in larger environments or
that you can’t build your own server
using a standard distro like Debian,
as you can on both counts. You can
build from scratch but if you want
something that ‘just works’, read on.

inux has always been strong
in the server space, but which
distribution (distro) should
you use if you want to set up a
server? As with so many of these
questions, it depends on what you want.
Just about any distro can be used as
a base for a server, although those that
install a complete desktop suite are the
least suitable as it means removing all
that before you add in what you need.
That leaves two options: use a distro
where the installer lets you choose what
you want, such as the Debian net install,
or pick a distro that is aimed at the

36 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

server space and provides a ready to
use environment in the way that the
home version of Ubuntu and friends
provide a ready to use desktop.
If you are looking at commercial use,
in a business setting you are going to
either pick something with a service
contract or you have sysadmins
capable of putting together a server

suite for you. So we will look at the
other server option here, and that’s
ready to go server distros. Some of
these come from familiar names while
others are based on well-known distros
but are variants that are targeted
specifically at server usage. That just
leaves the burning question: which one
is right for you? Let’s find out.

“Some of these come from
familiar names while others are
based on well-known distros.”

How easy is it to get onto your computer?

ll of these distros are intended
to be installed and run from a
hard disk, they come as pure
install discs, not live CDs, with one
exception. The installers are the same
as you would see on a desktop distro –
usually the text version – so you will
need a monitor and keyboard, and
maybe a mouse too, attached for the
initial installation.
All of them can be run headless after
this. In general, there are not many

choices to be made during installation,
you are unlikely to want a server that
dual boots, so it is more or less a case
of what goes where.
ClearOS, which is based on CentOS,
uses the Red Hat Anaconda graphical
installer. NethServer has an unattended
install option that installs the distro to
the first hard disk with default choices,
which does use a graphical display even
though you cannot interact with it. You’ll
still need a keyboard attached to press

Here is NethServer being installed with no user input whatsoever.

Verdict
ClearOS

+++++
NethServer

+++++
TheSSS

+++++
Ubuntu Server

+++++
Zentyal

+++++
NethServer
wins because of
its useful
automated
install mode.

Popular services
All servers are not created equal.

he word ‘server’ is a wide-ranging
term, we normally think of a
black box serving web pages,
emails and files. These are the most
popular uses for a server and all of
these distros do all of this; with a couple

of exceptions. Zentyal doesn’t provide
web or FTP services as it’s intended
more as an office server. It’s based on
Ubuntu, so you can easily install
Apache or another server if you want to,
but you will have to set it up yourself.

Most of the candidates provide Apache, but you have to find the content!

TheSSS is an extremely lightweight
distro, so it’s no surprise that it has the
fewest services available. It does
provide a web server, and it is Apache
not one of the lighter alternatives you
might expect. FTP is also included but
not the more common (these days) file
sharing protocols like NFS or Samba.
The most obvious omission is a mail
server, but that wouldn’t fit in with the
lightweight aspect. Handling thousands
of mails for each of a number of users
isn’t the workload you would give to the
sort of hardware TheSSS is aimed at.
The other three, ClearOS,
NethServer and Ubuntu Server, all use
much the same software for these
services: Apache, Postfix and Dovecot
(cyrus-imapd on clearOS) so the main
differences in this respect are how easy
they are to work with, and NethServer
has the edge when it comes to
administering mail accounts.

Verdict
ClearOS

+++++
NethServer

+++++
TheSSS

+++++
Ubuntu Server

+++++
Zentyal

+++++
Both ClearOS
and NethServer
have access to
many CentOS
server packages.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 37

Distros | Server distros

Installation

Down+Enter+Enter to select this from
the boot menu. TheSSS (it stands for
The Smallest Server Suite) does things
slightly differently as it boots to a
console login from where you can either
run servers or the install program, once
again this provides minimal options and
expects to use the whole disk.
One area that these installers handle
surprisingly poorly is hard disk
partitioning. Most of them set up a
single partition for everything. ClearOS
and NethServer are even worse in using
LVM but then filling the volume group
with a single logical volume, negating
the benefits of LVM. Ubuntu Server
handled this very well, using LVM but
asking how large the root filesystem
should be and then allowing you to add
further logical volumes and give their
mount points. This is particularly
important on a server where you
usually want to keep the contents
separate from the OS, which means
having /var on its own filesystem.
NethServer’s unattended install
is a definite bonus, enabling you to
get things installed then set it up
afterwards. Conversely, ClearOS,
Ubuntu and Zentyal let you make more
choices during install. Which is best
depends on how you prefer to work, but
the NethServer approach is better if
you are installing more than one server.

Distros | Server distros

Web administration
Most servers run without a monitor and need remote administration.

ard core sysadmins do everything in a
terminal using Emacs, or even
(heaven forbid) vi, to edit
configuration files. Mere mortals prefer a
graphical interface, especially for tasks they
aren’t familiar with. So it can be important for

a server distro to have a good administrative
interface and the usual way of doing this, as
the servers often run headless, is to run it in a
browser session. That way you can administer
your server from anywhere on your network. A
server distro typically has a lot of components

to look after, so it’s important for the admin
interface to be clear and well organised.
Of course, you shouldn’t be locked into
using such an interface. If you know what you
need to do it’s often faster to dive into a shell
session, so SSH access is also important.

ClearOS +++++
ClearOS boots to a graphical display showing the details needed to
connect to it and a link to change your network settings. When you
connect to the ClearOS web interface you are presented with the install
wizard, where each page includes a help panel making the process easy
for less experienced users. This process does involve registering an
account, which may make some people nervous.
The last part of the wizard enables you to choose the applications
you want, either by function or name, or you can skip this section and do
things yourself later. The ClearOS marketplace provides free and paid
applications, it’s clear (no pun intended) that this is a free version of a
commercial product. The interface is slick and easy to navigate but parts
of it, particularly the marketplace, can be slow.

NethServer +++++
NethServer enables you to set the IP address when you install it, so you
can load it straight into your web browser after it has booted. The Server
Manager interface is clean and well laid out, making it easy to find and
change any settings with the minimum of fuss. Each page contains a
‘Help’ button should you need any explanation of the options. The pages
cover user management, service configuration, software installation and
updates, network configuration and much more. Setting up the various
services you want to run is also done easily from here.
There are options available to backup and restore your system
configuration, and daily backups are automatic but you can do them
manually more often when you are experimenting with the setup.
Scheduled backups of data are also taken care of and can be sent to a
network share or USB drive.

Working with Windows
Sometimes a server needs to cater to those less fortunate.

Verdict

ClearOS

owever much we love Linux,
and we do quite a lot in fact,
there are a vast amount of
people that do not use it, so we usually
need a server that will work with other
operating systems.
For web and mail that’s not an issue,
there are standard protocols and the
server generally doesn’t care about the
operating system that is being used to
talk to it. However, there are some
protocols designed for Windows, how
well are these supported?

38 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Of most importance is the
groupware facilities of Microsoft
Exchange, which is considered by many
to be an essential requirement for a
mail server on a network that includes
Windows systems.
ClearOS has Zarafa as an additional
(paid) option. Zarafa provides MS
Exchange-like groupware services. That
is, it does what Exchange does, but it’s
not directly compatible, but it does
work with all desktop and mobile
platforms. If you want native

compatibility with Microsoft Exchange,
you should consider OpenChange
instead, which you will find included as
part of Zentyal.
NethServer uses SOGo. This is
similar to Zarafa in that it provides
Exchange-like services, but it can also
use OpenChange for true Exchange
compatibility. In contrast, Ubuntu
Server isn’t restricted by the contents
of a web interface, so you can install
whatever you want, and all of the above
options are available for it.

+++++
NethServer

+++++
TheSSS

+++++
Ubuntu Server

+++++
Zentyal

+++++
NethServer has
OpenChange,
but Zentyal wins
for its ease of
configuration.

Despite its diminutive size, TheSSS includes a web administration
interface. It is pretty basic and mainly an interface to editing various
configuration files, but it does help. You still need to use SSH to perform
some operations, but you are not left to your own devices as some
helper scripts are provided to help you administer the server, run
helpme at the terminal prompt to see a list of the commands. For a list
of server commands, run server , which lists various sub-commands for
each of the servers. TheSSS does run directly from CD or USB stick so
you can try it without installing to your hard drive, but if you are not
comfortable using the command line, you will probably find TheSSS is
not for you – but what do you expect from a 54MB install image?

Ubuntu Server +++++
The only remote admin tool installed with Ubuntu Server is OpenSSH.
You can install the Zentyal packages, but if you’re going to do that you
may as well install the Zentyal distro. The only other method of admin
documented by Ubuntu is to use Puppet, which is intended for
administering multiple systems at once, and not a tool for running a
SoHo server. Ubuntu Server is pitched at the pro end of the market and
expects an experienced sysadmin to maintain it, which means the UI for
the purposes of this comparison is effectively nonexistent.
You could also install Webmin, a generic web-based system
administration program. However, Ubuntu is never going to win in this
area and if it is important to you you should consider an alternative.

Zentyal +++++
Zentyal boots to a full X desktop, running LXDE with Firefox open at the
configuration login page, even though you’ve just logged in as that user.
You can use this interface from another computer on the network, which
is the usual way of doing things, unless you intend to regularly admin the
server from its own desktop. A few seconds with a search engine will tell
you how to stop the desktop loading, which you shouldn’t have to do.
The interface is slightly unintuitive in that pressing the ‘Change’
button in a module isn’t enough to apply changes, you also have to
press the global ‘Save‘ button at the top right to commit all changes.
Once you get used to this behaviour, the interface is responsive and
reasonably well laid out. This is good as there is very little in the way of
online help, and it’s not always easy to find what you need on the wiki.

Stability and security
Above all else, a server should be reliable and security bug free.

e use the term ‘stability’ in
this section in the Debian
sense of the word, which
means not changing too often – none
of the software crashed while we were
using it. What matters is that there is a
solid Linux distribution behind the
scenes, and one that will continue to
provide timely security updates and
fixes for significant bugs. You don’t want
to be running rapidly changing software
on a server, you just want it to work, and
to keep on working.

TheSSS is effectively the server
version of 4MLinux, which is a
completely independent distro. As such
it has no big infrastructure behind it,
making it unsuitable for anything that
you might consider vaguely critical.
However, TheSSS is generally unlikely
to be suitable for a role where such
stability and security is a key factor
anyway. It’s most suitable, in every way,
for a small home network setup,
especially if you want to able to run it on
old hardware.

The other candidates are all based,
directly or indirectly, on major distros.
ClearOS and NethServer are both
based on CentOS, which is the free
rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and
you don’t get much more major than
Red Hat. Support, packages and
security updates for them will be
around for a long time. The same is true
of Ubuntu Server and Zentyal (which
builds on Ubuntu) as Ubuntu support
LTS releases for five years and you also
have the work put in by Debian.

Verdict
ClearOS

+++++
NethServer

+++++
TheSSS

+++++
Ubuntu Server

+++++
Zentyal

+++++
ClearOS and
NethServer tie.
Both have access
to the RHEL
server software.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 39

Distros | Server distros

TheSSS +++++

Distros | Server distros

Documentation and support
More features mean more learning – good documentation is vital.

oint and click configuration tools
are great, but you really need to
have some understanding of
what your clicks are actually doing,
especially if you intend to expose your
server to the internet.
NethServer provides good online
help in its web interfaces and, if you

need more, there is detailed
documentation on the NethServer
website, including information on how
to install third-party software. The inline
help for ClearOS is not quite as detailed
but it makes up for it with a wealth of
online resources, including manuals,
howtos and a knowledge base.

NethServer – detailed inline help, backed up by online documentation.

ClearOS comes in two versions:
the free Community release and the
paid Professional with support. There’s
a 30-day free trial of the Professional
system. The ClearOS application
market also includes paid software.
NethServer also has free and
supported releases, but it doesn’t keep
reminding your of the paid support
while you are using the free version.
Ubuntu Server has no web interface
and so relies purely on the online
documentation. That’s not such a bad
thing, because it is up to Ubuntu’s usual
excellent standards: being both
comprehensive and comprehensible.
There’s also the option of a support
package with Ubuntu.
Zentyal has brief inline help and a
community wiki for the main
documentation. This includes a section
containing official documentation from
the Zentyal staff and help in languages
other than English. As with most of the
other distros, there are community
releases and those with paid support.
The documentation for TheSSS is
very much like the distro: minimal.
To be fair, there is much less to
document and detailed information on
software configuration is probably best
obtained from the upstream websites.
This is a purely free distro.

Verdict
ClearOS

+++++
NethServer

+++++
TheSSS

+++++
Ubuntu Server

+++++
Zentyal

+++++
The clear help,
both inline and
on the website,
gives NethServer
the edge.

More than LAMP
Server life after sending web pages.

part from the usual LAMP and
email services, there’s a lot
more you can use a server for.
While TheSSS stopped at the last
section, with the exception of a firewall
and web proxy, the rest have much
more to offer. All of them can be used
as a gateway server, sitting between
your network and the internet, a firewall
in front of it or a VPN connecting
remote users directly to your network.
With the exception of TheSSS, all of
these distros have their roots in big,
established distros, so packages are
available for anything you want to do.
While Zentyal doesn’t provide web or
FTP services, it includes almost
everything else: file sharing, domain

40 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

controller, firewall, VPN, you
name it. It even includes
OpenChange, an
implementation of
Microsoft’s Exchange
protocol, making it a good
choice for a mixed office
network. ClearOS and
NethServer provide just
about everything, both are
based on CentOS and so
There is so much more to being a server than
have access to the wealth of
good
old LAMP, as Zentyal shows.
software. Aside from the
usual LAMP, mail, FTP, file
and print services, this includes web
installing and configuring it yourself,
and mail proxies, chat servers, webmail,
Ubuntu Server has the full range of
firewalls, time servers and even a fax
Ubuntu and Debian packages to
server. Because you are responsible for
choose from, but you do the work.

Verdict
ClearOS

+++++
NethServer

+++++
TheSSS

+++++
Ubuntu Server

+++++
Zentyal

+++++
Zentyal edges
out the others
here, thanks to
the range of
services on offer.

The verdict
T

here is no simple ‘this distro
makes the best server’ answer
here. Which one is best for you
depends on what you want to use it for.
Most of them have something that sets
them apart from the rest, and not
always for a good reason. The obvious
outsider is TheSSS. This doesn’t even
try to be a full distro: it is tiny and light,
the server equivalent of Damn Small
Linux, making it only suitable for light
duties. But that also makes it uniquely
suitable for such duties, and it is the
only distro here that can be run from a
CD or USB stick.
Ubuntu Server also stands out as
the only candidate without a web
configuration tool. This is a deal breaker
if you need this, but Ubuntu ticks all the
other boxes. It provides all the server
features you could want, courtesy of its
massive package repositories, and the
ease of adding more via PPAs, and
provides the five-year support of the

1st NethServer

LTS releases. It also has a wealth of
documentation and community
support, which partially alleviates the
lack of a GUI.
Zentyal stands out for two reasons:
it’s excellent integration into a multi-OS
environment and its lack of a web
server (actually Apache is installed for
internal use but not available through
the interface). This clearly states its
purpose as an office server, a role in
which it excels. As this is basically
Ubuntu Server with the Zentyal frontend, all of the previously mentioned
advantages of that distro will apply
here too.
That just leaves ClearOS and
NethServer to choose between, which
is an almost
impossible task.
Both are based on
CentOS 6.6;
provide a similar
range of service;

+++++

This enhanced CentOS wins by a short head.

4th Ubuntu Server

+++++

Web: www.ubuntu.com/server Licence: Various Version: 14.04 LTS
Lots of ubuntu goodness, but no administration interface beyond a shell.

5th TheSSS

+++++

Web: www.clearos.com Licence: Various open source Version: 6.6
Very slick repackaging of CentOS 6.6, well worth trying.

3rd Zentyal

and have access to the same
collections of other software. The
automated install and the more
comprehensive inline help just swings it
for NethServer, but the clearOS GUI
won in some areas. If either one of
these looks suitable for your needs, you
really should try both – it’s that close.

“If either one of these servers
looks suitable for your needs,
you really should try both.”

Web: www.nethserver.org Licence: GPL3 Version: 6.6

2nd ClearOS

NethServer’s interface isn’t pretty, but it’s very helpful.

+++++

Web: http://thesss.4mlinux.com Licence: GPL3 Version: 13.0
Nice for a lightweight option, but no competition for the others.

Over to you...

Web: www.zentyal.org Licence: Various open source Version: 4.1
How an Ubuntu server should be done.

Do you run your own server. Is it one of these or another setup
entirely? Tell Linux Format! Write to lxf.letters@futurenet.com

Also consider...
If you don’t want to use a pre-packaged server,
why not try installing the software you need on
a general purpose distribution. Even your
favourite desktop distro will be a good starting
point, and you can remove the desktop
packages once the operating system is ready
to run headless and you will be working with
something familiar.

Alternatively, you could use Gentoo or Arch
Linux to install a server distro from scratch,
including exactly what you need and no more.
If you want browser based administration,
Webmin is also a good general purpose option,
but It’s not quite as slick as some of the
interfaces that we’ve shown you here, but it
works with everything.

The decision rests, at least in part, on what
you want a server for and why you need it.
If you need something for your office setup
that just works with the minimum of fuss, at
least the top three candidates here will work
admirably. If your server is really more of a
hobby project, you will learn more by building
your own.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 41

Distros | Server distros

Server distributions

Distros | 15 years of Linux
Take a walk down memory lane as we examine how Linux
has changed over the Linux Format magazine’s lifespan.
t was a cold grey morning in May 2000.
Winter should have departed but that
doesn’t happen in Britian. So Reader
Zero, seeking respite from the icy rain
and miserable population,
stumbled into their local
newsagent. Zero was hoping for
some stimulating and edifying
reading material, but was
mostly resigned to the notion
that the shelves would be
populated with the usual feuilletons, corrupt
gaming magazines and various ‘zines
pandering to interests Zero did not possess.

And then he saw it, fluorescent orange, a light
in the darkness: “Join the revolution!” the
coverline told our enraptured reader. Amazed
that frustrated tinkerings at the terminal,

powerless to resist. There was a free disc too,
a whole Linux distribution (Definite Linux) was
on there! That would take about a month to
download over dial up. And there would be
another one in four weeks, and
eventually there would be not
just a CD but a DVD. Zero’s life
was changed, and while Definite
Linux definitely didn’t last long,
and the magazine would
change hands many times over
the next 15 years, it remained a bastion of
quality publishing [until Jonni joined – Ed] that
would inform, entertain and delight.

“A light in the darkness: ‘Join
the revolution!’ the coverline
told our enraptured reader.”

42 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

considered by their peers an affectation rather
than a hobby, could be part of something so
exciting and dynamic as a ‘revolution’, Zero was

Amazing projects to get
the most from your Pi!
OUT
NOW!
WITH

FREE
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EDITION

DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR
Order online at www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk
or find us in your nearest supermarket, newsagent or bookstore!

Distros | 15 years of Linux

ack when Zero was having their
cathartic moment in the newsagents,
Linux was already about nine-years
old. Some distributions (distros) had already
established themselves, and one of the
earliest was Softlanding Linux System (SLS),
which appeared in May 1992. Unlike its
contemporaries, SLS provided more than just
the kernel and some GNU tools for preparing
filesystems, instead it shipped with a
networking stack and the X display server.
This was considered ambitious and buggy,
and efforts to fix this culminated in
Slackware’s release in 1993. Also that year,
and again in response to frustration with SLS,
Debian came into being. Red Hat Commercial
Linux appeared the following year, which
would engender many popular distros of the
late 90s, including Mandrake, Yellow Dog and
Definite Linux. KDE was released in 1998, with
Gnome following in 1999. Gnome was in part
created due to KDE’s reliance on the then nonfreely licensed Qt toolkit. By May 2000, the
most popular distributions were Debian 2.1,
Red Hat 6.1, Linux-Mandrake 7.0 (this was how
it addressed itself back then), Slackware 7.0
and SUSE Linux 6.3. Some of these even
featured in the very first LXF Roundup.

What’s user experience?
If you’re a recent Linux convert who’s had to
engage in combat with rogue configuration
files, misbehaving drivers or other baffling
failures, then spare a thought for
those early converts whose bug
reports and invective utterances
blazed the trail for contemporary
desktop Linux. Up until
comparatively recently, it was
entirely possible to destroy your
monitor by feeding X invalid timing
information. Ever had problems with Grub?
Try fighting it out with an early version of Lilo.
In the early days, even getting a mouse to
work was non-trivial, requiring the user to do
all kinds of manual calibration. Red Hat
released a tool called Xconfigurator which
provided a text-mode, menu-driven interface
for setting up the X server. It was considered a
godsend, even though all it did was generate
an XF86Config file which otherwise you’d

The Human theme was an attempt to make Ubuntu Linux more friendly, because as
everyone knows brown is beautiful, especially if you’re a warthog.

have to write yourself. So while Windows users
whined about Windows ME being slow and
disabling real mode DOS, your average Linux
user would jump for joy if their installation
process completed. Even if you got to that
stage, it would be foolishly optimistic to

In January 2001 Kernel 2.4 was released
and with it came support for USB and exciting
new Pentium IV processors, among other
things. It was of particular importance to
desktop users thanks to its unified treatment
of PCI, ISA, PC Card and PnP devices as well
as ACPI support. The dotcom bubble was
just about to burst, but all
the excitement
and speculation around
it meant that many
computer enthusiasts
had a broadband
connection in their home, some even enjoyed
the luxury of owning more
than one computer. This solved some major
entry barriers to Linux: people could now
download it much more easily; up-to-date
documentation was easily accessible;
and when Linux saw fit to disappear one’s
internet connection (or render the system
unbootable), the other machine could be used
to seek guidance. But the user experience

“Even getting a mouse to work
was non-trivial, requiring all
kinds of manual calibration.”
suppose the OS would boot successfully.
Hardware detection was virtually non-existent,
and of the few drivers that had been written
for Linux, most weren’t production quality. Yet
somehow, the pioneers persisted – many
were of the mindset that preferred the DOS
way of working, which began to be sidelined
as the millennium approached. Windows
users were having their files abstracted away
– ‘My Computer’ epitomises this movement.

Timeline
Pre-history – Linux Answers
In late 1999 Future plc published
a one-off magazine, this was
borne off the back of the success
of, the now closed, PC Answers
and PC Plus [the flashbacks! –
Ed]. All we’ll say is that this was
successful enough to launch a
monthly magazine…

44 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

May 2000 – Linux Format #1
Renaming the title in line with
Future’s most successful print
magazines: Amiga Format and
PC Format, Linux Format was
released with editor Nick Veitch of
Amiga Format fame and writing
talent from PC Plus mag. It came
with a CD and was an instant hit.

Enjoy software freedom

Discover Linux!
OUT
NOW!

DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR
Order online at www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk
or find us in your nearest supermarket, newsagent or bookstore!

Distros | 15 years of Linux

was still, on the whole, woefully inhospitable.
While some installers had evolved graphical
capabilities, these more often than not were
more trouble than they were worth. Users
were expected to understand the ins and outs
of disk partitioning, and be able to discern
which packages they required from often
terse descriptions.
Windows XP was released around October
2001, and while this was seen as a vast
improvement over its predecessor, many
users found that their machines weren’t up to
running it. After all, it required 64MB RAM and
a whopping 1.5GB of disk space. Remember
that BIOSes had only recently gained the
ability to address large drives (there were
various limits, depending on the BIOS, 2.1, 4.2
and 8.4GB were common barriers). So many
people couldn’t install it on their hardware, and
many that met the minimum specs found the
performance rapidly degraded once the usual
pantheon of office suites and runtime libraries
were installed. This provided the motivation for
another minor exodus to Linux, and the retrohardware contingent continue to make up an
important part of the Linux userbase (and
berate us for not including 32-bit distros).
Before 2006 all Macs had PowerPC
processors, and many of these (as well as

early Intel Macs), long-bereft of software
updates from Apple, now run Linux too.
The Gnome 2 desktop environment was
released in 2002 and this would become a
desktop so influential that some still seek
(whether out of nostalgia, atavism or
curmudgeonly dislike of modern alternatives)
to reproduce it. It aimed to be as simple,
tweakable and intuitive, and it’s hard to argue
against its achieving all of these adjectives.

Oh, we’re so pretty
One of the major enablers was its strict
adherence to the Gnome Human Interface
Guidelines which set out some
key principles for application
designers. This meant the
desktop was consistent not
just internally, but in respect to
all the GTK apps that people
would go on to write for it.
Also released was KDE 3, which vaguely
resembled Windows – in that it was
cosmetically similar and slightly more
resource-demanding than Gnome. People and
distributions sided with one or the other.
SUSE Linux (predecessor of openSUSE)
always aimed to be desktop agnostic, but
most of its users preferred KDE. Heeding this,

though not until 2009, it changed position and
today is the leading KDE-based distro.
In late 2002, ‘DVD’ Jon Johansen was
charged over the 1999 release of the DeCSS
software for circumventing the Content
Scrambling System (CSS) used on
commercial DVDs. This software enabled
Linux users to play DVDs, a feat they had been
hitherto unable to do since DVD software
required a licence key from the DVD Copy
Control Agency, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.
It later emerged that CSS could be broken
much more trivially and Johansen was
eventually acquitted. By this time iPods and

“Gnome 2: A desktop so
influential that some still
seek to reproduce it.”

The LiMux project branded Tux with Munich’s emblem, the Münchner Kindl. Apparently
it didn’t a hurt a bit. The project is estimated to have saved around ¤11 million.

piracy meant that MP3 files were
commonplace. These were, and still are,
dogged by patent issues with a number of
bodies asserting ownership of various parts of
the underlying algorithm. As a result, many
distros shipped without patent-encumbered
multimedia codecs. The law is murky though,
and rights holders have shown restraint in
filing suit against FOSS implementations of
these codecs. Most distros are prudent and
leave it up to the user to install these, although
Ubuntu offers users the licensed (but
proprietary) Fluendo codecs on install.
Fortunately, many of the MP3 patents have
expired and many more will have done so by
2017, it doesn’t really matter – we have plenty
of open formats and codecs now (OGG, FLAC,
VPx and x264). It’s still technically a DMCA
violation to use libdvdcss (a modern and
much more efficient way of cracking CSS,
used by the majority of media players on
Linux) to watch a DVD, but that only applies in
some [backwards – Ed] countries and to date,
no one has challenged its use.
The city of Munich announced in 2003 that
it was to migrate all of its infrastructure from
Windows NT to Linux. As well as saving costs,
the Bavarians claimed the main impetus for
the move was freeing them from vendor lock
in. Steve Ballmer visited the mayor personally,

Timeline
November 2000 – LXF007
Corel Linux, the
Debian-based
distro, was on the
CD. The OS may
have failed but it
was a super-easy introduction
to Linux and pointed the way
forward for distro developers.

46 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

April 2001 – LXF013
The beginning of a
new century called for
new media, so the
DVD age finally hit
Linux Format! On the
first LXFDVD you
could find SuSE Linux
7.1 and Red Hat 7.0.

May 2001 – LXF014
First a DVD and next an all-new
look for LXF! The first redesign
of the magazine cemented
favourites such as HotPicks,
Roundup and Answers. The
International Space Station
was in the Linux news and
AMD64 was on the cards.

By 2003 Ati (now part of AMD) and Nvidia had
both released proprietary drivers to leverage the
3D capabilities of their latest hardware (in 2005
flagship cards were the X1800 and Nvidia’s
6800 series). There were open source drivers
available, but performance was poor.
ATI were much more forthcoming in releasing
device specifications than their opponents, as a
result of which their open source drivers
developed much more rapidly. Nvidia, through
its nv driver, released only some obfuscated
source code which left developers puzzled and
frustrated. Binary drivers proved troublesome,
even with helpful management tools such as
Ubuntu’s Jockey. Repositories would lag behind

the latest release, which spurred users into
downloading packages direct from the AMD or
Nvidia. These were notoriously badly-behaved
(we still don’t like them now) and would wreak
havoc with existing driver arrangements. Since
they existed outside the package manager’s
purview, whenever there was a kernel update
the driver module would need to be recompiled.
Otherwise there would be no graphics next
reboot, which, understandably, some users
found upsetting.
This particular situation has been
ameliorated thanks to DKMS, but graphics woes
continue to be a major source of teeth-gnashing
for many users. The story is in many ways still

the same: open source drivers are slow and
binary ones break things.
In response to the poor performance and lack
of 3D support through the nv driver, the
nouveau project was announced in 2006. This
was a mammoth effort of clean room reverseengineering, which relied in part on crowd
sourced data: Participants would download the
REnouveau program which would prod some
registers, draw some graphics and then take a
snapshot of the register space for developer
analysis. It took until 2012 for nouveau to reach
a stable release, but it appeared in some
distributions some three years earlier, since
even in its buggy state it proved superior to nv.

but even his charm and eloquence (and,
presumably, offers of hefty discounts) weren’t
enough to convince the revolutionaries.
The project was completed ten years later
with some 15,000 machines migrated to the
custom ‘LiMux’ distro. A scare story emerged
in 2014 that the city was to revert to Windows,
but turned out to be false. It’s estimated that
the move saved Munich some 11 million euros.

O kernel! My kernel!
After two years in development Kernel 2.6 was
released in 2003. This was a vastly different
beast to 2.4, featuring scheduler
enhancements, improved support for
multiprocessor systems (including
hyperthreading, NPTL and NUMA support),
faster I/O and a huge amount of extra
hardware support. We also saw the Physical
Address Extension (PAE) so that machines
could address up to 64GB of RAM, even on
32-bit architecture. Also introduced was the
venerable Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
(ALSA) subsystem, which enabled (almost)
out-of-the-box functionality for popular sound
cards, as well as support for multiple devices,
hardware mixing, full-duplex operation and
MIDI. The most far-reaching new feature was
the old device management subsystem, devfs,
being superceded by udev. This didn’t appear
until 2.6.13 (November 2003), at which point
the /dev directory ceased to be a list of
(many, many) static nodes and became a

April 2002 –
LXF026
The second new
design for the
magazine in as
many years! This
issue also ran a very popular
interview with Samba co-engineer,
Jeremy Allison.

Asus’ EeePC Linux was based on Xandros and IceWM, but beginners didn’t like it,
and professionals just replaced it.

dynamic reflection of the devices actually
connected to the system. The subsystem
udev also handled firmware loading, and
userspace events and contributed to a much
more convenient for desktop users. Although
you still relied on such arcana as HAL and
ivman in order to automount a USB stick with
the correct permissions.
Linux (having already been ported to nonx86 64 bit processors) supported the
Itanium’s IA64 instruction when it was

May 2002 – LXF027
This issue saw the
long awaited results to
the reader-voted Linux
Format Awards 2001.
Mozilla won and
Apache too, while
Mandrake picked up
best distribution.

released in 2001. This architecture was
doomed to fail though, and Intel eventually
moved to the more conservative AMD64 (or
x86-64) architecture, which (we delight in
reminding our readers) has been around since
2003. Thanks to open source software, Linux
users were running 64-bit desktops right
away, while Windows users would have to wait
until 2005 for the x64 release of XP. Various
proprietary applications (notably Steam and
its games) run in 32-bit mode, which provides

February 2003 – LXF037
We asked possibly for the first
time: Is this the year of Linux on
the desktop? To quote us back
then: “I expect 2003 to be a real
breakout year.” We reviewed
LindowsOS 3.0, Unreal 2003,
while we still liked IceWM, KDE
and WMaker.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 47

Distros | 15 years of Linux

Graphics drivers and their discontents

some motivation for distributions to maintain
32-bit releases, but the day will come when
these are no longer tenable to maintain, and
eventually they will go the way of the 386, no
longer supported on Linux since 2013.

Enter the archetype
The 2004 release of Ubuntu 4.10 ('Warty
Warthog') was, without a doubt, a major
boon for Linux on the desktop. Using the
megabucks he’d amassed from creating and
selling Thawte, Mark Shuttleworth formed
Canonical Inc. The goal was to sell server
products and support and at the same time
make a desktop Linux “for human beings”.
Using Debian (it having proven itself by this
point) as a base, Canonical added driver
tweaks, a very brown Gnome 2 theme and an
ambitious six-month release cycle. We also
saw the launch of http://ubuntuforums.org,
where well-meaning but ill-informed members
of the community would post ‘solutions’ to
various Ubuntu problems.
In 2004, a sound server called Polypaudio
was released by a hitherto unknown developer
called Lennart Poettering and some others.
At this time desktop environments relied on
sound servers to overcome shortcomings in

Raspberry Pi revolution
The Raspberry Pi was released in 2012.
Inspired in part by the success of the BBC
Micro (hence the monogram model names)
in the early 1980s, the Raspberry Pi aimed to
bring practical computer science to the
classrooms and bootstrap the UK electronics
industry. The low-cost, credit-card sized
computer has sold in excess of 5 million units.
While many of these are now empowering
young coders, a great deal have become part
of diverse man cave projects: The 30somethings who cut their teeth on BBCs,
Spectrums, C64s reliving and reviving the
thrills at the interface of coding and creativity.
The Pi’s GPIO pins mean that all manner of
add-ons have been developed, so that the Pi

ALSA’s dmix system: Gnome was using the
Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESD) and KDE
was using the analogue Realtime synthesizer
(aRts). Polypaudio was designed to be a drop
in replacement for ESD, providing much more
advanced features, such as per-application
volume control and network transparency.
In 2006 the project, citing criticism that
nobody wants polyps, renamed itself

The Raspberry Pi has inspired a whole new maker generation. When the robot overlords
rise up we can blame the Foundation...

can power anything from robots to remote
watering systems.
The lingua franca of Pi projects is Python
which, like Basic, is easy to learn. Unlike Basic,
though, it is consistent, extensible and won’t
need to be unlearned should users move on to
more advanced languages. The Pi’s support for
3D graphics is impressive, but CPU-wise it is
more limited. The original Pis struggle to
function as a desktop computer, even with the
modest Raspbian distribution (although recent
work on the Epiphany web browser has
improved this). In 2015 the Pi received a
reboot, gaining a quad-core processor and
extra RAM, so now it is a truly multi-purpose
computer, and it still only costs £25.

PulseAudio (it was in fact named after the seadwelling creature, not the medical condition).
With its new name and increased demand
for a sound system comparable with that of
OSX or the newly released (and much
maligned) Windows Vista, PulseAudio enjoyed
substantial development and began to be
considered for inclusion in many distros. As is
traditional, Fedora was the first to adopt,
incorporating it as the default in version 8,
released in late 2007. Ubuntu followed suit in
8.04, although its implementation attracted
much criticism and resulted in much antiPulse vitriol. Poettering at one stage even
described his brainchild as “the software that
currently breaks your audio”. It took some
time but eventually Ubuntu (and other
distros) sorted out implementation issues,
and it now mostly works out of the box.
Before tablets, and smartphones that
people could afford, netbooks were the
pinnacle of portable computing. The first one
was the Asus EeePC 701. Due to its low
hardware spec (it had a 700MHz processor,
800x480 display and 512MB of RAM) running
Windows on it was not an option. Instead it
came with a customised version of Xandros
Linux, which was functional, but lacking in
polish. On the whole most people were
unhappy with it, but netbooks still proved
great platforms for more experienced Linux
users. As newer netbooks were released

Time line
December 2004 –
LXF060
The first review of
Ubuntu 4.10 by a
chap called Jono
Bacon, scandalous
we’re sure; he liked
it oddly enough. No, it wasn’t on
the disc but Mandrake 10.1 was!

48 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

January 2005 – LXF061
LXF runs the stalwart Best Distro
feature and Mandrake easily wins,
poor Ubuntu comes joint 9th.
Some chap called Graham
Morrison starts as a staff writer
and we run Ubuntu on the
LXFDVD for the first time,
alongside Fedora Core 3.

October 2006 –
LXF084
The last redesign of
LXF landed, and the
magazine here is
largely the design
still used today – with the odd
section change – the LXFDVD
was also moved inside the mag.

June 2008 – LXF106
Boy genius, Paul
Hudson was
promoted to editor/
High Commander
and we put the Asus
Eee PC centre stage,
Jonni still has his
running Arch Linux…

The cost of progress
The year 2010 may be remembered by some
as the one Ubuntu started to lose the plot. Up
until now, the distro had been going from
strength to strength, gaining more users, more
stability. It was the poster child for the (dead
or irrelevant depending on who you ask)
dream of Linux on the desktop. But things
started to go awry in the 10.10 release. Its
Ubuntu Software Center now included paidfor apps (the first one was Fluendo’s licensed
DVD player) and the Netbook remix used a
new desktop environment called Unity. In the
11.04 release though, this became the new
shell for the main release too. Ubuntu had
long taken issue with the new Gnome 3
desktop, which at the time of the Ubuntu
feature-freeze was not considered stable
enough to include in
the release anyway,
and Gnome 2 was
already a relic. So in a
sense Ubuntu had no
choice, but no one likes
change, and users
were quick to bemoan
the new desktops. Ubuntu has persisted with
Unity and it’s much improved today, but a low
point came with the 12.10 release when users
noticed ‘suggestions’ from Amazon as they
typed queries into the search lens.
Gnome 3 is not without controversy too –
the criticisms it attracted were threefold: First,
many preferred the old Gnome 2 way of doing
things and this clearly was not that. Second,
all the fancy desktop effects required a
reasonable graphics card (and also working
drivers). There was a fallback mode, but it

Thanks to Steam on Linux, Tux gamers finally have thousands of games to play, and
LXF writers can peruse the Summer Sale offerings and still claim to be doing work.

severely crippled desktop usability. Finally, this
appeared to be something designed for use
on mobiles or tablets, yet even today mobile
Linux (not counting Android) has never taken
off, so why should users be forced into this
mode of thinking? Many found though, that
once some old habits are unlearned and some
sneaky keyboard shortcuts are learned (and

“The last couple of years
have been full of Linux
developments and dramas.”

July 2009 –
LXF120
We celebrate
Ubuntu 10.04
by putting it on
the cover and
interviewing Mark Shuttleworth,
again. The man just won’t leave
us alone!

Gnome Tweak Tool is installed), that the
Gnome 3 way of working could be just as
efficient, if not more so, than its predecessor.
KDE users looked on smugly, having already
gone through all the rigmarole of desktop
modernisation (albeit less drastic than
Gnome’s) when KDE 4 was released in 2008.
Around this point we ought to mention
Systemd as well, but there’s not much to say
that hasn’t been said elsewhere: the old init
system was creaking at the seams, a new and
better one came along, it wasn’t everyone’s

August 2010 –
LXF134
What’s this Android
thing and how can
it even possibly
have a chance of
taking on the iPhone?
We explained why, plus Mint 9 and
Fedora 13 on the LXFDVD.

cup of tea, but we use it anyway, the internet
slanders Lennart Poettering.
There has always been a niche interest in
gaming on Linux, but this was mostly done
through Wine, which has been around since
the mid 90s. Things changed when Valve
released its Steam for Linux client in 2013.
Today there are over 1,000 games available for
Linux, with more being ported all the time.
Granted, many of the high profile ports
incorporate either a Wine layer or a wrapper
such as eOn, but we are also seeing a good
proportion of indie releases running natively.
Valve even made an OpenGL version of
zombie splatterfest Left 4 Dead 2, which
outperformed the DirectX/Windows release.
Linux users make up about 1% of the Steam
userbase at present, but this may change if
Valve’s plan to conquer the living room
[why not the desktop!? – Ed] through Steam
boxes, running the Debian-based Steam OS,
comes to fruition.
The last couple of years have been full of
Linux developments and dramas too, including
the Heartbleed bug, a partial resolution to the
long-running SCO-IBM lawsuit and a much
less adversarial stance from Microsoft. But
there just isn’t enough space, alas.

April 2012 –
LXF156
We reported on
this thing called
the Raspberry Pi
back in LXF147,
but finally the
world could buy this tiny PC
marvel and the world loved it.

January 2014 – LXF179…
A new editorial team lands at
Linux Format Towers as the
old team departs for pastures
new. LXF179 is the top-selling
issue of the year and LXF181
is the best seller for almost
two years! Thank you for helping
us keep LXF the UK’s best seller!

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 49

Distros | 15 years of Linux

(many based around the more suitable Intel
Atom chips) they started to ship with
Windows XP (some seven years after its initial
release) and then the crippled Windows 7
Starter Edition. Asus later backpeddled on its
Linux enthusiasm: Teaming up with Microsoft
it even launched an ‘It’s better with Windows’
campaign, designed to deter people from
purchasing Linux-based laptops. This smear
campaign used phrases like ‘major
compatibility issues’ and ‘unfamiliar
environment’ to scare people away.

From apps to games to the Linux
environment – change it up!
52

Systemd
The Linux startup process is changing,
and it’s for the better. We explain why.

Top 100 Linux tools
Beef up your toolbox with the most
essential software: your distro can do
more than you ever imagined...

Linux desktops
A change is as good as a rest. So give
your old desktop environment a rest
and change it for a new one.

Build your own Steam machine
Take some time off: Linux is turning into
an awesome gaming platform.

Remote desktops
VNC is not the only way to gain access to
distant machines as if you were right there.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 51

Software | Intro

Software

Software | Systemd

Systemd
Wait! Don’t leave. Systemd really isn’t going to eat
your computer, and in fact it isn’t all that bad...

ince being made the default init
system by Fedora 15 in 2011,
Systemd has, despite the
controversy, seen steady
adoption by other
distributions. Having made it
into both the latest Debian
and Ubuntu versions, only
Gentoo and Slackware
remain as major stalwarts of
ye olde SysVinit.
There are, of course, a number of smaller
and niche distros that do likewise, but the lack
of any major exodus of users to any of these

distros provides anecdotal evidence that they
are at least satisfied with Systemd’s
performance and are unswayed by the
ideological concerns surrounding it. Indeed,

it unifies what is a disparate collection of
scripts and daemons makes it much more
appealing for junior sysadmins, and Linux
Format magazine has covered Systemd fairly
extensively [Tutorials, p68,
LXF191, Tutorials, p70,
LXF188]. But new features are
being added all the time and
many users are unaware of
those that have been there for
some time. We’ll probe
Systemd’s innards and see what it’s up to,
what it can do, and how to stop it doing what
we don’t want it to. But first some background.

“Unifies a disparate collection
of scripts and daemons makes
it much more appealing.”

52 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

desktop users will typically have witnessed
much improved start up times thanks to its
parellelisation of startup services and the way

ystemd is a system and service
manager. Its primary modus
operandi is as an init system, so its
main binary is symlinked to the file /sbin/
init, which is run as Process ID (PID) 1 after
the kernel is loaded. Systemd will then
dutifully start all services (making it,
literally, the mother of all processes) and
continue to manage them until shutdown,
whereupon it unloads itself and the
machine is halted and powered off.
The previous init system, known as
SysVinit, originated in System V – an early
version of Unix – and as such is little more
than an arcane collection of scripts held
together by greybeard magic. This worked
well enough, but as Linux distributions
(distros) evolved it began to falter.
It defined six runlevels which distros
either ignored or abused, and service
dependencies and priorities were particularly
awkward to work with. So in 2006 Canonical
set about developing a replacement, known as
Upstart. This was entirely backwardscompatible with SysVInit, but also provided
much better dependency handling and
enabled things to be done and responded to
asynchronously. Besides Ubuntu, Upstart was
adopted by all the Red Hat distros as well as
Chrome OS. But by 2013 the major distros
had all gone the Systemd way. In 2014, the
Debian Technical Commitee voted to move
to Systemd, as opposed to Upstart, which
led to Ubuntu following suit. In a sense, this
was the final nail in Upstart’s coffin, at least
on Linux (Systemd doesn’t support other
kernels, such as the BSDs or Hurd, which is
a bone of contention).

Seats and sessions
One reason for Systemd’s widespread
adoption is its unified provision of desktopcentric features. Its logind component
(besides usurping the old login service)
formalises the concepts of seats, sessions and
users, so that – with suitable hardware –
managing concurrent local desktop sessions
is trivial. While not everyone will use this, a

Devuan is a Debian fork which eschews Systemd. It’s still in a pre-alpha state though, so
you’d be better off with Slackware, PCLinux OS or Gentoo if you want a Systemd-free distro.

side-effect is that the older ConsoleKit logic is
now entirely obselete. Back in the day, anyone
not using a full desktop environment would
have had to fight with this mess in order to be
able to mount USB sticks or shut down the
system without requiring root privileges,
resulting in many an angry post on many a
forum. Systemd-logind also enables the X
server to be run as a user which increases
security. Conversely though, desktop
environments, particularly Gnome, have
started to rely on Systemd components (not
the init system itself – this is irrelevant here)
which has attracted some ire since installing
these components alone (or using them
without using Systemd’s init system) can be
tricky. The commands reboot, halt,
shutdown all require root, however systemdlogind (together with the polkit package)
enables these functions to be performed by
any locally logged-in user with an active X
session. Such a user will be able to turn the
computer off with:
$ systemctl poweroff
provided, of course that no other users are
logged in, and if there are the user will be

prompted for the root password. You can also
substitute poweroff for suspend or
hibernate provided their hardware supports
it. Systemd-logind also handles power and
sleep button events, which traditionally have
been the job of acpid. These are configured in
the file /etc/systemd/logind.conf which
provides the following self-explanatory
defaults:
IdleAction=ignore
HandlePowerKey=poweroff
HandleSuspendKey=suspend
HandleHibernateKey=hibernate
HandleLidSwitch=suspend
HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore

Internal (infernal?) Journal
Gone also is ye olde syslog service, (well
mostly, Systemd can forward messages to a
syslog daemon if required). Systemd’s
journald daemon will be more than sufficient
for Joe User’s log management requirements.
Prior to journald, messages were gathered
from the kernel and any running (or failing)
services by a syslog daemon, which would
filter those messages into text files in /var/

Life without Systemd
Some distros, while using Systemd by default,
will permit you to use an alternate init system if
you so desire. Support for this varies, eg Ubuntu
15.04 makes the process very easy: both
Systemd and Upstart are installed out of the box
and you’ll find an ‘Ubuntu … (upstart)’ entry in
the Advanced options for Ubuntu Grub
submenu. Those who are seeking a more
permanent switch can install the upstart-sysv
package and run:
$ sudo update-initramfs -u

For now, most Ubuntu users will not run into
any difficulties with (and many will probably not
even notice any difference between) the two
systems. This will change in the future though,
especially after the LTS release next year, as the
dust settles and Systemd becomes ingrained
into the Ubuntu ecosystem.
It would be remiss of us not to mention
another init system: OpenRC. While technically
not a replacement for SysVinit, it does extend
and modernise everything that happens after

PID1. OpenRC is maintained – and used by
default in – Gentoo, which up until 2007 used a
clunky pure-shell solution. Since udev has been
merged into Systemd, refuseniks have to use
eudev, another Gentoo machination forked from
udev prior to its assimilation. But don’t fret, you
can use both OpenRC and Eudev in other
distros too: Arch Linux has packages in the AUR.
Some de rigueur packages (eg X.org) rely on
Systemd libraries so you won’t be able to purge
the beast entirely.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 53

Software | Systemd

log. Userspace processes would also put their
own logs in here directly. In order to prevent
this directory becoming humoungus, one
would install and configure logrotate . With
Systemd all logs are centralised and can be
accessed with the journalctl command.
Of course, if you still need a syslog
implementation then this can be run in
tandem with journald, but most people will
manage without. Executing journalctl will
show logs going back as far as journalctl
remembers. These are automatically piped
through less for ease of scrolling. By default,
historic logs won’t be deleted unless disk
space falls below what is specified by the
/etc/systemd/journald.conf file. There are
three options that you may decide you want to
tweak here:
SystemMaxUse This specifies the
maximum disk space that the journal will
occupy, this defaults to 10% of the filesystem
storing the journal.
SystemKeepFree The minimum space that
Systemd will try to keep free on the filesystem

holding the logs. If this is set higher than
available space, the value is adjusted to the
amount of free space when Systemd was
started.
SystemMaxFileSize The maximum size of
each individual journal file. Ultimately this tells
Systemd how many files to break the logs into,
so that when they are rotated this much
history will be lost.
History’s all well and good, but if one just
needs to see logs from today, then the -b
switch will show only messages from the
current boot. Whenever something doesn’t
work, the Linux aficionado’s instinctive
response might be to check the output of
$ dmesg | tail
for any telltale error messages from the
kernel, or
$ tail /var/log/messages
for messages from elsewhere. The Systemd
equivalent is to run
$ journalctl -e
which allows you to scroll upwards from the
end of the journal. Of course, dmesg still

Unit files everywhere. These are the lifeblood of Systemd and by extension your computer.

works, but this way we see messages from
sources besides the kernel as well, and the
timestamps are automatically displayed in
local time, rather than seconds since system
boot. If something went wrong on a previous
boot, then we can check those logs by adding
a number to the -b switch. Adding -1 refers
to the current boot (the default for -b ), -2
the previous boot and so on. You can also use
absolute indexing here, so 1 refers to the
earliest boot in Systemd’s logs (the same as if
you call it without the -b option), 2 the next,
and so on.

The binary debate
Systemd’s logs are stored in a binary format
for ease of indexing. This allows for a lot of
data to be searched swiftly, but is also
something of a bone of contention. Binary
logs are more prone to corruption, so in
theory a disk failure might only nerf a 4k
sector of a text file, but could corrupt the
entirety of a journald binary.
Text files lend themselves to parsing with
Perl, grep, sed, awk and the like, and many
sysadmins make use of scripts incorporating
these for working with log files. The fact that
scripts will no longer work seems to have
drawn a fair amount of ire from some
sysadmins, but we think such criticism is
unwarranted: if you need text files then newer
versions of syslog-ng will pull them out of
journald for free.
Systemd’s most fundamental units are
imaginatively-titled unit files. The command
$ systemctl list-unit-files
will display a list of all of them and show their
statuses. Unit files all live in either the
system/ or user/ subdirectories of
Systemd’s main directory (usually /usr/lib/
systemd/). Unit files may be services (eg,
sshd.service) which start programs, daemons
and the like, or they can be more abstract
things, such as mountpoints, sockets, devices
or targets. Targets are a more flexible
interpretation of SysV’s runlevels, they define

Systemd – what’s not to like?
By far the most vociferous complaint against
Systemd is its supposed contravention of
traditional Unix philosophies around having one
tool that does one thing well, and plays nice with
other tools that in turn do their thing well.
Systemd stands accused of being a
monolithic blob which usurps (among others)
udev, cron, PAM, acpid, and logind. Having all
these components all rolled up in a single binary
running as PID1 upsets some people, but much
of the cant and invective flying around is largely
ill-informed. The fact that Systemd has been so

54 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

widely adopted ought to corroborate its
appropriateness, but instead the naysayers
claim a conspiracy, a ‘do-ocracy’ even, is afoot,
where the developers are imposing their
preferences on users.
In its praise, Systemd provides all kinds of
modern features: fair apportioning of resources
through kernel cgroups, remotely accessible
logs, much improved chroot environments
(through systemd-nspawn and machinectl) and
faster boot times, to name but a few. Trying to
understand the boot process is always going to

be daunting for a novice user, but at least with
Systemd the problem is easier with components
being cleanly divided and using modern syntax:
the polar opposite to the Lovecraftian
nightmares you would encounter in days of yore.
Of course, Systemd is still relatively young,
and some upcoming features that have been
whispered fuel further concerns: Do we really
want to amalgamate PID1 with its own
bootloader? Do you want to run a stateless (no
static configuration files) system? We’ll see how
it all pans out.

When things go wrong
It is an ineluctable truth that, from time to
time, stuff will break [Ed – isn’t that the
second law of thermodynamics). Sometimes
that which breaks will leave in its wake
unbootable systems, and nobody likes
working with an unbootable system.
Commonly, graphics drivers will be at fault,
and the system, having failed to start the
graphical login manager, will just sit there,
helpless and silent. To rectify this, you should
reboot (and hopefully the machine will still let
you do that gracefully) and add the following
option to the kernel commandline (press e to
edit it from the Grub menu):
systemd.unit=multi-user.target
Booting with this option (by pressing
Ctrl-X) will prevent the errant display manager
from loading, so that driver problems can
(hopefully) be repaired from the command
line. For more serious boot-impeding
problems, you may have to recourse to the
rescue or emergency targets, or in extreme
cases chroot-ing in from another OS.
Of course, not everything that breaks will
result in an unbootable system. Symptoms
might be strange error messages flashing past
too quickly to read, or sometimes things will
be subject to an annoying 90s timeout before
the boot can continue. Besides looking at the

Software | Systemd

a set of services to start for a particular
purpose. Desktop systems will boot into the
graphical target by default, which is pretty
much runlevel 5 insofar as it (hopefully) ends
with a graphical login, such as Gnome’s GDM
or the lightweight SDDM. Servers will boot into
multi-user.target, analogous to runlevel 3,
which instead boots to a console login. If one
examines the graphical.target file one will
see, besides others, the lines:
Requires=multi-user.target
Wants=display-manager.service
This tells us that our graphical target
encompasses everything in the multi-user
target, but also wants a display manager to be
loaded. The system can be forced into a
particular target (but only with root privileges)
using, for example:
$ systemctl isolate multi-user.target
The display-manager.service file is actually
a symlink which gets set up when a display
manager is installed, it points to a service file.
Services are added to Systemd targets using
the command $ systemctl enable , which just
makes the requisite symlinks. For example, to
start the SSH daemon on next boot, run:
$ systemctl enable sshd
and you will be informed of Systemd’s actions:
Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/
multi-user.target.wants/sshd.service to /usr/
lib/systemd/system/sshd.service.

Nobody enjoys a good plot more than we do, especially one that provides detailed
information about the boot process made by systemd-analyze.

journal, you can get a helicopter view of
system health with:
$ systemctl status
which shows any queued jobs and lists all
currently running service files and processes
(again piped through less for your scrolly
enjoyment). If the second line reads:
# State: degraded
(with the adjective coloured in a particularly
panic-rousing red) then something is wrong.
Typically a unit file has failed to load for some
reason. This can be investigated further with:
$ systemctl --state=failed
Once the rogue unit has been identified,
we can use journalctl to see if it left any
useful information in the journal, eg If the

3.12, X.org logs are no longer written to the oft’
scrutinised (and now oft’ searched for) /var/
log/Xorg.0.log file. Instead, they now reside
in the journal, which you can filter with either:
$ journalctl -e _COMM=Xorg
or using:
$ journalctl -e /usr/bin/Xorg
If you’re using Gnome on Fedora or Arch
Linux, then you will need to use Xorg.bin or
gdm-x-session in the _COMM argument that
we’ve mentioned above.

Speed up boot
One particularly nice feature of Systemd is its
ability to analyse boot times. The command
$ systemd-analyze
will show you a
summary of how
much precious time
was taken by the
kernel and userspace
portions of the boot
process. For more
detail add blame to the command which will
show you the time taken by individual
services. This will list the most timeconsuming processes first, but be aware that
since things are, to use the Systemd parlance,
aggressively parallelized”, the times listed here
may be much longer than the time it takes to
get from Grub to your login screen/prompt.
For our final trick, you can even make a nice
SVG plot showing all the glorious timing
information using:
$ systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg
After reading through our guide you’ll now
find Systemd to be a less scary prospect and
perhaps slightly less of a villain of the piece in
the sometimes ranty sysadmin world.

“Systemd’s fundamental
units are imaginativelytitled unit files.”
above command reported something wrong
with sshd.service we can go on to query
anything it recently wrote to the journal by
using the command:
$ journalctl -eu sshd
This will hopefully provide sufficient
informations to diagnose and resolve the
issue. Restart the service with:
$ systemctl restart sshd
and hopefully all will be well, in which case
Systemd’s status will change from a
worrisome ‘degraded’ to a business as usual
‘running’. Some userspace processes will also
write to the journal, which we can also filter by
process name (using the _COMM= option),
absolute path or PID (_PID= ). Since Gnome

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 55

Software | Top 100 tools

TOP 100
LINUX TOOLS
Take a stroll through the open
source garden as we pick
the best apps, tools and utilities
available to all Linux kind.

With

Raspberry Pi
top apps!

e all have our favourite
open source apps that work
for us better than any
available alternative.
But take a moment and step back from
the Emacs vs vim type battles raging on
in the Linux-verse and marvel at the
sheer number of apps at our disposal.
Your distros’ software repositories give
you access to thousands of
apps, and you can install
everything from fully featured
app suites to nifty commandline utilities literally with the
touch of a button.
There are open source apps
and tools for all kinds of
applications today. There’s hardly any use
case that isn’t catered for by a community
contributed app. Many of these apps have
proved their mettle and offer features and
performance benefits that surpass their
proprietary counterparts. They have also

proved themselves to be invaluable to
home and business users in more than
one sense of the word. According to rough
estimates on www.openhub.net, some
popular apps such as LibreOffice, Firefox
and Apache would take several hundred
person-years to develop and cost millions
of pounds. Yet they are all available to you
for no-cost.

Some ship with well-designed graphical
interfaces and others show their more
versatile sides when operated from the
command-line.
In this feature, we traverse this diverse
and vast collection of open source gems
on offer and pick the ones that are at the
top of their game. In this list of the 100
best apps we’ve covered a wide range of
categories. Whether you are a
business owner, an
educational institution, a
developer, a home user, or a
gamer, we’ve got something
for everyone. While you’ll be
familiar with some of the
most popular tools in this list,
rest assured there are quite a few that
might have missed your attention. If
you’ve been unable to escape the clutches
of commercial software, we’re sure you’ll
find quite a few tools on this list that are
suitable replacements.

“Many of these apps have
proved their mettle and surpass
their proprietary counterparts.”

56 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Open source apps come in many
shapes and sizes and you can grade
them based on their usability. There
are feature-rich apps, task-oriented app
suites, well put-together tools, and
newfangled novelty apps and games.

Gufw

A Linux desktop isn’t complete without them.
LibreOffice

Thunderbird

orked from OpenOffice.org,
LibreOffice has become one of the
most popular office productivity suites.
It includes programs for word processing,
and can create spreadsheets, slide shows,
diagrams and drawings, maintain
databases, and compose mathematical
formulae. It also offers good compatibility
with documents in proprietary formats
and has recently had a face lift.
www.libreoffice.org

nother gem from the
Mozilla Foundation,
Thunderbird is one of the best email
clients, being easy to setup and is
brimming with features. Simple setup
wizards aid syncing with popular webbased email services and it can manage
multiple accounts, supports encryption
and is extended through add-ons.
www.mozilla.org/thunderbird

ou may not be using a firewall
currently, and if that’s because they
are difficult to set up then you need Gufw.
It features an intuitive graphical interface
for managing the inbound and outbound
traffic rules for various apps and services
and even individual ports. Its wizard-like
graphical menus are designed especially
for inexperienced users.
www.gufw.org

KeepassX
Wine

espite the increasing
number of cross-platform
apps that work on Linux, there are some
that still only support Windows. This
includes big third-party proprietary apps,
such as Adobe Photoshop or just small
niche home-grown tools that you can’t do
without. For such situations, you can use
Wine, which generally run these Windowsonly apps and games with ease. The
project supports over 20,000 apps. Some
work flawlessly out-of-the-box while
others require minor configuration tweaks.
www.winehq.org

Remmina
ith Remmina you can access a
remote computer from the
comforts of your desktop. It supports the
widest range of protocols and will connect
to all kinds of remote desktop servers.
The app is easy to use, and has enough
features that make
it a viable option
for occasional use.
http://remmina.
sourceforge.net

VLC
Distros ship with a
functional video player.
But if you need more
control, there’s no beating
VLC. It supports virtually
every video and audio
format out there and
includes handy CLI tools
for advanced users.
www.videolan.org/vlc

rying to remember different
passwords for the various services is a
challenge for most humans (that don’t
count cards in Las Vegas for fun). You can
defer this task to KeePassX which stores
password in an encrypted database. It can
fill in the password automatically and also
includes a random password generator.
www.keepassx.org

BleachBit

distro accumulates a lot of digital
gunk over time. BleachBit helps you
spring clean it and protect your privacy. It
also removes temporary and other
unnecessary files, and has tools to
securely delete files or wipe them.
http://bleachbit.sourceforge.net

Gufw has profiles and preconfigured
rules to aid inexperienced users.

VirtualBox
hen Wine doesn’t cut it
you can use VirtualBox to
run an entire Windows installation inside a
virtual machine. The software is also
useful for installing experimental apps
that you don’t want to deploy on a real
computer, and for testing other OSes
without exposing it to real hardware.
www.virtualbox.org

Clonezilla
OpenSSH

hen you need to interface
with a remote computer,
you cannot do without OpenSSH. It’s a
family of tools that provides secure
tunnelling capabilities by encrypting all
traffic and includes several authentication
methods, and supports all SSH protocols.
www.openssh.org

PeaZip
PeaZip is a graphical
archiving tool that can
work with over 130
different types of archive
files and can even create
encrypted ones. It
integrates with popular
desktops and also has a
CLI for advanced users.
http://bit.ly/PeaZipSF

Gparted
Use Gparted to
restructure a disk on your
computer. It’s available as a
live CD and can also be
installed inside your distro.
Gparted can create, resize,
move, delete, reformat or
check partitions and
supports many filesystems.
www.gparted.org

his is a cloning solution that’s
distributed as a live CD and is popular
for doing bare metal backup and
restoration of individual PCs. It can also
deploy an image to multiple computers in
a lab. Clonezilla can work with a large
number of popular disks, partitions and
filesystem types.
www.clonezilla.org

ZuluCrypt
Create an
encrypted
disk within a
file or within a non-system
partition or USB disk.
ZuluCrypt has an intuitive
user interface and can be
used to encrypt individual
files with GPG.
http://bit.ly/zuluCrypt

HomeBank
This is a featurerich finance app. It can
import data from other
apps and bank statements
in popular formats. It can
also detect duplicate
transactions and features
dynamic reports and is
easy to use for budgeting.
http://homebank.free.fr

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 57

Software | Top 100 tools

Essential apps

Software | Top 100 tools

Internet apps

Midori

Get the best of the web with these tools.

Firefox

RSSOwl

ne of the most widely
recognised pieces of open
source software, Mozilla’s Firefox web
browser is the default browser on virtually
every Linux distro. It’s pretty responsive
and known for its privacy features. You can
customise it to the hilt and also extend it
with an impressive number of extensions.
www.firefox.com

n excellent desktop alternative to
Google Reader, RSSOwl is a news
aggregator for RSS and Atom News feeds
that’s easy to configure. The app gathers,
organises, updates, and stores news in an
easy to use, and saves selected items for
offline viewing and sharing.
www.rssowl.org

FileZilla

or those who use FTP a lot, there’s
FileZilla. The client supports FTP,
SFTP and FTPS protocols and has just
about any configuration option you can
imagine. It also has a tabbed interface so
you can browse more than one server and
even transfer files simultaneously
between multiple servers.
https://filezilla-project.org

gFTP
he gFTP client is a feature-rich client
that’ll get the job done, if you need to
download files via FTP occasionally. It has
a simple two-pane interface that shows
the content of the local and remote
filesystem. Using gFTP you can also
transfer files between two remote servers.
http://gftp.seul.org

Tox

rivacy conscious users should try the
new decentralised IM and VoIP client
called Tox. This relies on a distributed
network, which uses P2P connections, the
same technology used by BitTorrent to
provide a direct connection, between
users for chats and, unlike other Skype
alternatives,
Tox uses no
centralised
servers or
supernodes,
which could be
compromised.
All chats are
also encrypted
using the peeraudited NaCl
crypto library.
https://tox.im

Games

Jitsi

0 A.D.
This is a real-time
civilisation-building
strategy game that
features impressive
graphics and intense
battle gameplay. It’s yet
to have a final release but
has already won accolades
in its current state.
http://play0ad.com

58 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

he go-to browser for anyone
concerned about resource
consumption, Midori is popular with
lightweight distros. Despite its lightweight
nature and design, Midori has all the
features you’d expect from a web browser
including a speed dial, tabbed interface,
bookmark management and configurable
web search as well as an incognito mode.
www.midori-browser.org

itsi is the best VoIP app, as
long as you’re not adverse to
Java apps. It supports IM and make oneto-one audio and video calls, as well as
audio conference calls. It supports many
of the widely used IM and telephony
protocols, including SIP, XMPP, AIM, ICQ,
MSN, etc. Jitsi has all the features you’d
expect from a softphone, and more, such
as encrypt text chats with OTR and voice
and video by establishing a ZRTP session.
https://jitsi.org

Deluge

itTorrent is popular for downloading
Linux distros and there are numerous
download clients. One of the best is
Deluge which has multiple front-ends,
including a graphical and a web-interface.
It has features that enable advanced users
to tweak it to their liking and also has a
nice library of plugins.
www.deluge-torrent.org

Pidgin
Aria2
hat makes Aria2 a unique utility is
that it can download the same file
at the same time using different protocols.
The lightweight CLI app can download via
HTTP, FTP, BitTorrent and Metalink and
can also open multiple connections to
download the file faster.
http://aria2.sourceforge.net

FreeCiv
Another strategy game
that challenges players to
lead their tribe 4,000B.C
to the space age.
www.freeciv.org

Alien Arena
A popular first
person shooter with a scifi theme and the
tournament style
deathmatch of Quake and
Unreal Tournament. The
game has several game
modes and over 60 maps,
and is quite configurable.
http://red.planetarena.org

idgin is a wonderful app
for instant messaging over
many network protocols. You can sign in
with multiple accounts in the single client
and chat with many friends in different
networks. You can use it to connect to
AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC
and more chat networks all at once.
www.pidgin.im

OpenMW
OpenMW is a new game
engine that recreates the
popular Morrowind RPG.
The aim of the project
isn’t to improve game
assets or add additional
features but to provide
gamers a more moddable
edition of the game.
https://openmw.org

FlightGear
For fans of aircraft
simulators there’s
FlightGear that aims to
offer flight across real
world terrain. It includes
scenery for more than
20,000 airports, and can
be extended with your
own aircraft and locations.
www.flightgear.org

Enhance your workflow with these apps.
Calligra

Zathura

nless you feel you need
LibreOffice’s superior
compatibility with proprietary formats,
you may want to consider Calligra. It’s a
continuation of KOffice and unlike
LibreOffice, Calligra has a modern-looking,
modular design, and also uses Open
Document as its native file format. It ships
with a large clutch of apps. In addition to
the Words word processor, Tables for
spreadsheets, Stage for preparing
presentations, and Kexi for managing
databases, it also benefits from Krita for
digital painting.
www.calligra.org

GnuCash
nome users have GnuCash which
is similar to KMyMoney in terms of
features, but also handles and categorises
entries differently. GnuCash is a personal
and small business accounting app that’s
based on double-entry for professional
reporting and
besides dealing
with monetary
transactions, it
can track things
such as stocks,
bonds and
mutual funds.
www.gnucash.org

his app is very handy for when you
need to scribble bits of information
down for later. As well as typing out notes,
you can use it with either a mouse or a
stylus. It can also be used to add
annotations to PDF files.
http://xournal.sourceforge.net

This is a web-based
resource management
tool with a simple
interface for accessing its
CRM, HRM and project
management and
planning tools. You can
also track resources
across multiple projects.
www.achievo.org

biWord is usually paired
with the lightweight
Gnumeric spreadsheet app. However, the
app isn’t light on features and offers a lot
more functionality than proprietary
spreadsheet apps. Gnumeric will import
data from Microsoft Excel files and there
are import filters for other apps as well.
www.gnumeric.org

his is a simple and a lightweight PDF
reader that supports almost all the
usual features you’d expect. You can
search text strings, jump pages, zoom in
and out, rotate pages, add bookmarks and
more. In addition to PDFs, it can display
DjVu and even encrypted documents.
https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura

KMyMoney
AbiWord
he wide gap between rich
text editors and word
processors is occupied by
AbiWord. It’s lightweight but still offers
commonly-used word processing features,
which makes it a popular for lightweight
distros. It also offers cloud-based
collaboration capabilities via its AbiCollab.
net service.

esigned for KDE users, KMyMoney
is a feature-rich accounting app.
It supports different account types, such
as Cash, Checking, Savings, etc and can
categorise incomes and expenses, and
can reconcile bank accounts. If your bank
allows it, you can have KMyMoney
connect to your bank directly to retrieve
your account activity.
https://kmymoney.org

ProjectLibre

Calibre

project management tool helps you
stay on top of ongoing projects and
ProjectLibre is one of the best. It’s an
award winning app that’s used widely by
many enterprises around the world.
ProjectLibre has several useful features
and can also visualise tasks with various
charts and reports.
www.projectlibre.org

ou can use Calibre to manage your
collection of ebooks, and supports a
wide range of readers and smartphones.
The app can import ebooks manually or, if
you prefer, by syncing a reading device
such as the Kindle. Any files imported can
be sorted and grouped by metadata fields,
which can be pulled from various online
sources, such as www.goodreads.com.
www.calibre-ebook.com

OpenLDAP

Xournal

Achievo

Gnumeric

penLDAP is great for
when you want to run a
directory server. It implements the LDAP
protocol and has all the expected features,
including logging, replication, access
control, user and group management etc.
It also integrates with Active Directory.
www.openldap.org

Okular
The default PDF
viewer for KDE and
includes a good number of
useful features. Besides
PDF it can also read a
number of other file types,
including Postscript, DjVu,
CHM, XPS, ePub, TIFF,
CBR, and others.
https://okular.kde.org

LaTex

Shutter

ClamAV

LaTex is a document
preparation system and
document markup
language based on TeX. Its
purpose is to simplify TeX
typesetting for documents
containing mathematical
formulae and is widely
used in academia.
www.latex-project.org

Besides capturing the full
screen, Shutter can
capture a specific area, or
a window. You can also
upload to a hosting service.
www.shutter-project.org

While most viruses and
trojans will have no effect
on Linux, you still can have
infected files in your distro
that can wreck havoc
when accessed on a
Windows machine. So be
a good admin and use
ClamAV to scan files.
www.clamav.net

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 59

Software | Top 100 tools

Office and productivity

Software | Top 100 tools

Hobbyist
Follow your passion.
RawTherapee

o you shoot with a digital single lens
reflex camera (DSLR)? Then take a
look at RawTherapee which includes a
wide range of tools for processing and
converting RAW files. In addition to basic
manipulations, the app has extensive
options for working with RAW files. Using
the app you can adjust the colour and
brightness values of your images, correct
white balance, adjust tones, and a lot
more. Besides RAW files you can also use
RawTherapee for editing traditional image
files, and it also includes Adobe Lens
Correction profiles.
www.rawtherapee.com

OpenShot

Krita
lthough Krita is part of
the Calligra suite it needs
a special mention of its own. Krita is a
digital painting and illustration app that
offers many expressive brushes, HDR
painting, filters, perspective grids, painting
assistants, and many other features you’d
expect from such an app.
www.krita.org

Stellarium
tellarium is a free open source
planetarium for your computer.
It calculates the positions of the Sun and
Moon, planets and stars, and draws the
sky as per the users location and time.
It can also draw the constellations and
simulate astronomical phenomena such
as meteor showers, and eclipses.
www.stellarium.org

Inkscape

Media

comprehensive desktop
publishing program.
Scribus can be used to create professional
press-ready online and print documents
including brochures, booklets, books and
magazines. It has a feature-rich interface
and has features, such as PostScript
colour separations, support for CMYK and
spot colours, ICC profiles, and printer
marks. Scribus also includes a variety of
templates and styles and you also get an
array of settings and tools to precisely
define and position the various layout
elements you require.
www.scribus.net

een to contribute to the mapping
project, OpenStreetMap? Then use
JOSM. It’s a Java-based offline map editor
that can help you plot GPS traces. You can
load GPS track-logs into JOSM and start
adding streets to OpenStreetMap
instantly. Although OpenStreetMap has
several other editors available, most
contributors use JOSM for their edits, as
it lets them upload changes back to OSM
quickly and easily enough. JOSM offers
several features and can be extended with
plugins and styles.
https://josm.openstreetmap.de

Comix

FontForge

CairoDock

Digital comics are
distributed as comic book
archive files that mainly
consist of a series of
image files, typically PNG
or JPEG files, stored as a
single archive file. Comix
can read digital comics in
virtually every format.
http://bit.ly/ComixApp

FontForge is a feature-rich
app for creating and
editing fonts and supports
all common font formats.
It can extract information
from a font file as well as
convert from one format
to another, and can be
used for previews.
http://bit.ly/FontForge

CairoDock is a MacOS X
dock-like app. One of its
main advantages over
other docks is that it
doesn’t require a
compositing window
manager to work and can
add bling to older lowpowered machines.
www.glx-dock.org

60 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

here are only a handful of video
editors for Linux and OpenShot offers
the best combination of features and ease
of use for the home user. You can use it to
combine videos, audio tracks, and still
images together and add in captions,
transitions, and more, and export the final
product in a variety of formats. Openshot
can also use Blender to create 3D
animated titles
www.openshot.org

JOSM

Scribus

nother pro-quality tool,
Inkscape offers advanced
vector graphics editing and is popular for
drawing vector art, line art, and designing
logos and graphics. It’s brimming with
features, such as markers, clones, alpha
blending and more, and is often compared
to expensive proprietary apps such as
Illustrator and CorelDraw.
www.inkscape.org

Cinelerra

inelerra is excellent if you need to edit
more than home videos, as it’s the
most advanced non-linear video editor
and compositor for Linux. It supports HiFi
video and audio and is resolution and
frame-rate independent, which enables it
to edit videos of any size. The app has
several advanced features, such as
overlays, denoising, normalisation, time
stretching, color balance, compositing,
real time effects and a lot more. It also
includes a compositing engine for
performing tasks such as keying.
www.cinelerra.org

Audacity
If you need to work
with audio, you should use
the powerful Audacity
sound editor. You can trim
audio, combine tracks,
and even stack multiple
tracks, as well as export to
a number of formats and
quality settings.
http://bit.ly/AudacityApp

MPD
The Music Player Daemon
is an audio player with a
server-client architecture,
which means you can
control it remotely from
another computer. It plays
audio files, organises
playlists and can maintain
a music database.
www.musicpd.org

Power tools and programs for power users.
jEdit

Meld

graphical diff tool, Meld enables
you to compare two or three files as
well as whole directories. It includes
features, such as syntax highlighting and
direct file editing, and using the tool you
can easily isolate and merge the
differences. Meld can also be used to
browse various popular version control
systems such as CVS and Subversion.
www.meldmerge.org

his is a text editor for programmers
that supports auto indent, and syntax
highlighting for more than 140 different
programming languages. The app enables
you to define complex macros and offers
a powerful and user-friendly keyboard
mapping system. It’s highly configurable
and customisable, and you can extend its
functionality by adding plugins.
www.jedit.org

ith Blender animators can
create 3D printed models,
visual effects, art, interactive 3D
applications and video games. The app
provides a wide range of features that can
be used to create 3D animation films. It’s
a one-stop 3D package and includes a
gaming engine, a video sequence editor,
production-ready camera and object
tracking, a large library of extensions, and
an advanced physics engine. It can render
fluid dynamics and simulate the
movement of elastic objects and clothes.
www.blender.org

Geany

ou don’t need a full-blown IDE if you
only program occasionally, which
makes Geany a good choice. It’s a cross
between a plain text editor and an IDE
with support for the popular languages
and nifty features like a compile/run
button, a listing of functions defined in the
currently opened file, and much more.
www.geany.org

Eclipse
here’s no beating Eclipse,
the most feature-rich IDE.
Although Java is its speciality, Eclipse
supports a range of languages via plugins.
In fact, its plugin marketplace is an
indispensable resource. Eclipse does code
refactoring and you can use it to extract
the selection as a local variable or method.
Since it can target multi-person installs,
it handles version control very maturely
www.eclipse.org

BlueFish
o you develop for the web? Bluefish
is a multi-language editor that’s
designed for web developers. It supports
many programming and markup
languages and focuses on dynamic and
interactive websites. It supports code
block folding, unlimited undo/redo,
automatic tag closing, and syntax
highlighting. Another useful feature is the
snippets bar from where you can add the
most common snippets of code for a
variety of languages. Bluefish also has
support for popular open source web
apps such as MediaWiki and Wordpress.
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl

KompoZer

ew and experienced HTML
programmers will save a lot of
amount of time and effort with the
KompoZer editor. It has an intuitive
interface and includes a colour picker, an
FTP site manager, CSS editor,
customisable toolbars, forms, spell
checker, markup cleaner and can also
validate code using W3C’s HTML validator.
www.kompozer.net

Gimp

APTonCD

uddenly realise that you need to
move your Ubuntu installation or
need to give a friend a copy of your setup?
With APTonCD Ubuntu users can back up
all of their installed packages to an ISO
image, which can then be added as a
software source on another installation.
You can use this source to restore the
packages on to the system or keep
everything in the APT cache.
aptoncd.sourceforge.net

espite its name, Gimp is
a powerful, comprehensive
image manipulation program. It offers a
wide range of tools for professional-quality
photo retouching and image manipulation
capabilities for free. It also offers a huge
list of features and supports all the
common graphics file formats.
www.gimp.org

Clementine

Icecast

Use Clementine to play
locally stored music and
streaming audio. The app
has an attractive interface
and it also helps organise
and transfer music to
various devices, and
integrates well with
popular cloud services.
www.clementine-player.org

With Icecast you can
stream music across the
network. Icecast supports
many audio streams
simultaneously and
listeners can access a
stream via a remote media
player and also configure
MPD as a source.
www.icecast.org

Amarok
If you use KDE your
distro may already include
this music player, Amarok.
It too integrates with
several online audio
services, and its features
include creating dynamic
playlists, bookmarks,
scripting, context view.
https://amarok.kde.org

LMMS
LMMS is digital audio
workstation that produces
music by synthesising
sounds, arranging
samples, and playing
them on a MIDI keyboard.
It also has a song editor
and plugins to simulate
instruments and effects.
www.lmms.io

Kodi
Until recently Kodi
was known as XBMC. It’s
an excellent option for
users who wish to turn
their PCs into media hubs.
It plays most kinds of
media files and works with
TVs, IR and bluetooth
remote controls.
www.kodi.tv

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 61

Software | Top 100 tools

Development

Blender

Software | Top 100 tools

Utilities

Handbrake

Apps that let you do more with your computer.

Gnome Tweak Tool

Grub Customizer

rub 2 is the most popular Linux
bootloader that’s used by virtually all
major distributions. It’s an impressive
piece of software with lots of options.
The Grub Customizer is a simple to use
graphical tool,which enables you to
quickly customise all aspects the
bootloader, including its appearance.
www.launchpad.net/grub-customizer

ot satisfied with the stock Gnome
desktop? Use the Gnome Tweak Tool
to customise several aspects, including
the appearance settings of the desktop.
With this tweak app you can also change
the behaviour of the Windows and
Workspaces, manage extensions and you
can even circumvent the design
philosophy of Gnome 3 by placing icons,
files and folders on the Gnome desktop.
http://bit.ly/GnomeTweakTool

DOSBox

digiKam

ne of the best photo management
tools for Linux is digiKam and it has
features that’ll appeal to all kinds of users.
It recognises all major image file formats
and can organise and sort images based
on metadata. The app also has plugins to
export images to various online services.
www.digikam.org

K3b

Terminal

lthough it’s designed for
KDE, the K3b optical media
burning utility is one of the finest for the
job. The app can burn multiple El Torito
boot images, audio CDs, VCDs, SVCDs,
mixed-mode CDs, eMovix CDs, and DVDs.
It can also rip DVDs and write ISO images.
www.k3b.org

Ncmpcpp
This is a command-line
MPD client that’s easy to
use and customisable.
It provides useful features
such as the ability to sort
playlists, song lyrics, item
filtering, fetching artist’s
info from last.fm, tag
editor and much more.
http://bit.ly/Ncmpcpp

62 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

elive the good ol’ days with
DOSBox and play your
favourite classic DOS games that won’t
run on your modern hardware. This is an
x86 PC emulator that creates an IBM PC
compatible computer complete with
compatible graphics and sound cards. The
app can also simulate networking
hardware for multiplayer games on the
local network and even over the Internet.
The Wine project even uses code from
DOSBox to bolster support for DOS apps.
www.dosbox.com

Avidemux

videmux is a video editor and
converter that can be used for basic
cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.
It supports many file types, including AVI,
MPEG, and MP4. The app is designed for
users who know what they want to do but
also provides an intuitive interface so that
tasks such as cutting and appending
videos are pretty straightforward. The app
has some presets and users can also save
custom settings that make the app easier
for new users to operate.
http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux

Samba
Samba is a suite of
programs that enables
Linux users to access and
use files, printers and
other commonly shared
resources on a Windows
PC on a network and does
this by supporting the
SMB protocol which.
www.samba.org

hen the need to convert a
video arises, Handbrake,
the video transcoder app does a
commendable job. It can convert nearly
any format and supports a wide range of
video codecs. One of its best features is
built-in device profiles for popular devices
that make the conversion process easier.
www.handbrake.fr

EasyStroke

ant to control your PC with the flick
of the mouse? The EasyStroke app
lets you define and manage gestures by
recording the movements of your pointing
device while holding down a specific
mouse button. You can then configure
actions that’ll be executed when the app
recognises the defined stroke.
https://easystroke.sourceforge.net

Vokoscreen

feature-rich screencasting app
worthy of note is Vokoscreen, which
is based on FFmpeg for handling
multimedia data. Vokoscreen can capture
both video and audio, with options to
record the entire screen, window or a
selected region, along with video from a
webcam. The app supports MPEG4, x264,
MP3 and Vorbis codecs and can save files
in either .AVI and .MKV containers.
The app offers some controls such as the
ability to change the video quality and
frames captured per second and can be
used to make screencasts of games.
www.kohaupt-online.de/hp

rTorrent

Links2

Here we have a commandline BitTorrent client with
an ncurses interface.
You can run it as a
daemon and manage it
with screen and since it
supports SSH you can
manage your torrents
from any remote machine.
http://bit.ly/rTorrent

There are lightweight
browsers and then there’s
Links2. This is a web
browser that can render
complex pages and even
has a pull-down menu. It’s
also special because it’s a
CLI browser that you
operate via the keyboard.
http://links.twibright.com

Midnight
Commander
Before the days of
graphical file managers,
real hackers used
Midnight Commander,
known as mc. It’s still your
best option if you regularly
find yourself in the console
environmen a lot.
http://bit.ly/MidnightCdr

Take charge of your distro with these power apps.
Redo Backup

Qemu

e’ve mentioned the Clonezilla
cloning solution earlier in the
feature, but if all you need is a tool to swap
out an old disk for a new one, then you use
Redo Backup and Recovery. The tool is
designed for inexperienced users and has
the simplest of interfaces.
www.redobackup.org

XAMPP

t’s is a feature-rich multi-purpose
processor emulator and virtualiser. You
can use it to create virtual machines and
even emulate various hardware
architectures. If you have the right
hardware on tap (a processor with
hardware virtualisation extensions), you
can use Qemu with KVM in order to run
virtual machines at near-native speed.
www.qemu.org

he XAMPP stack gives you
a single package that you
can use as a sandbox to test and develop
web apps. It includes all the necessary
components such as Apache, MySQL,
PHP, and Perl as well as several other
libraries, modules and tools, such as
phpMyAdmin and FileZilla for managing
the stack components. Once installed, you
can manage the various services via a
graphical control panel.
www.apachefriends.org

oncerned about the resource
utilisation on your PC? Conky is a
nifty little app that lets you keep an eye on
your system. It can monitor and report on
the states of various components. The
tool is very flexible and highly configurable
and can also display information from
apps, such as weather updates.
http://conky.sourceforge.net

Turnkey Linux

he Turnkey project produces
appliances which you can use to
deploy a new server in a jiffy. A Turnkey
appliance is a self-contained system that
packs in a fully functional web app that
runs on top of Just enough Operating
System (JeOS) components required to
power that particular app. All the
appliances are based on Debian but are
available in several formats depending on
the hardware that you want to deploy it
on. Once they’re up and running you can
manage each appliance using a browserbased interface.
www.turnkeylinux.org

Mondo Rescue
ondo is a unique backup solution
that creates bootable backup and
restoration disks customised for the
system being used. Mondo has a textdriven interface and works with a wide
range of file systems and can use a variety
of media as backup mediums.
www.mondorescue.org

Déjà Dup

he app’s minimal GUI sets itself
apart from the various other backup
apps you’ll find, and it lets you configure
backups within a matter of minutes. Déjà
Dup is based on Duplicity and provides
just the right number of features for
desktop users who aren’t used to the
ways of a backup tool.
http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup

Open Media Vault

hen you need more
protection for your data
than a simple backup then you need to
deploy a NAS server. The Open Media
Vault project is a Debian-based server that
offers the power of commercial options in
a way that’s easy to setup and manage.
www.openmediavault.org

Mutt

Profanity

Canto

Mutt is to email what
Links2 is to the web
browser. It’s a text-based
mail client that is highly
configurable and it
supports both POP and
IMAP protocols and has all
the usual features you’d
want from an email client.
www.mutt.org

Profanity is a consolebased client for the XMPP
protocol that supports
multi-user chats and OTR
message encryption.
www.profanity.im

Want to do more from the
command-line? Get the
Canto CLI RSS feed
reader. It supports RSS,
Atom and RDF feeds and
imports and exports feeds
in OPML format. It has lots
of customisation and even
configure it with Python.
http://bit.ly/CantoRSS

Zentyal

he Zentyal distro has all the
components you need to run a
gateway server. The distro simplifies the
process of setting up, monitoring and
controlling the components of the server
with a host of custom management tools
and helps you configure the servers
without mucking about with config files.
www.zentyal.org

mpg123
This is an MP3
audio player for the
command-line that
supports gapless
playback. It’s so good that
its decoding library,
libmpg123 is used by
other audio players for
MP3 playback
www.mpg123.de

FFmeg
One of the most versatile
media conversion utilities,
FFmeg can manipulate
virtually any type of media
file in various ways, such
as changing bitrate,
extract audio, record
streams, extract stream
and much more.
www.ffmpeg.org

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 63

Software | Top 100 tools

Admin tools

Conky

Software | Desktop environments

Linux
desktops
Not entirely happy with your distribution’s default desktop environment?
Let’s check out some of the mainstream alternatives.

How we tested...
Some distros rally behind a
particular desktop environment
by actively participating in its
development. For example, Fedora,
through its corporate sponsor Red
Hat, has several Gnome developers
on its payrolls. Similarly, many fulltime KDE developers draw their
paychecks from OpenSUSE.
This being the case, we felt the
test needed a neutral environment,
so we installed the desktops on top
of the main Ubuntu distro that ships
with Unity and has nothing to do
with the development of any of the
desktop environments. However, we
also used the native environment
suggested by the desktop to fully
experience all the components.
We’ll also compared their level of
configurability while commenting on
their native configuration tools and
any third-party or communitysupported extensions.

or most desktop Linux users,
a desktop environment is the
paramount medium for
interacting with their
distribution. It’s the collection of all the
graphical elements that you can see on
the desktop of the computer, including
windows, toolbars and icons, etc.
Desktop environments (DEs) also
include a Window Manager that’s
responsible for the appearance of
windows in the GUI.
Like all things Linux and open
source, users are spoilt for choice when
it comes to selecting a DE. The ability to
change and alter the DE is just as

64 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

“The ability to alter the DE is
as important as being able to
alter the default applications.”
important as being able to change and
alter the default applications.
Most major distributions officially
support multiple desktops. Fedora,
Mageia, OpenSUSE all support KDE,
Gnome and a number of other
desktops. Then there are distros that
officially support only a restricted
number of desktops, such as Ubuntu
that only supports Unity and Linux Mint

that prefers Cinnamon and Mate.
However, that still doesn’t stop you
from replacing the official default DE
with another option.
In this Roundup, we’ll look at some
of the most popular DEs and their
advantages. The one mainstream DE
missing from our list is Ubuntu’s Unity,
which despite being open source, is
best experienced on Ubuntu only.

Who supports them and how do you get ‘em?

ou can switch to another desktop
environment without going
through the pains of changing to
a new distro. For all intents and
purposes, a DE is just another piece of
software, and you can install it as you
would any other. Every desktop in this
Roundup is supported by almost all
distros, so they’re just a visit to the
package manager away.

Gnome is the default DE on many
popular distros. The Fedora, Mageia
and OpenSUSE projects all release an
officially supported installable live CD/
DVD version based around the Gnome
desktop. In fact, Gnome was also
default on Ubuntu until it started using
its own shell. However Ubuntu does still
use the core Gnome 3 libraries.
Next up on the popularity list is KDE.
OpenSUSE, Mageia,
and Fedora are some
of the top distros that
officially support the
desktop and produce
an installable live CD/
DVD image based on
KDE. If you prefer the
KDE desktop on top of
Ubuntu, you can grab
the Kubuntu distro.
Some distros such as
Linux Mint include
multiple bundles of the
desktop with a
different packages,
such as kde-standard,
The Ubuntu project has an officially supported
and kde-full.
flavour for the KDE, Gnome and Mate desktops.

Cinnamon is the default
environment that ships with the Linux
Mint distro that also spearheads its
development. The desktop is available
in the official repositories of Fedora,
Mageia and Ubuntu and you can install
it via their respective package
managers. Mate has carved a name for
itself among distros that are designed
for older computers.
Enlightenment is one of the oldest
desktops in this Roundup and yet it
doesn’t ship by default on top of any
popular mainstream distro. Its biggest
promoter was Bodhi Linux which has
shut up shop recently, however, you can
find Enlightenment in the official repos
of virtually every distro.
Once you’ve installed multiple
desktop environments you can easily
switch to another one. To do this just
log out of the desktop environment.
Then tinker with the buttons on the
login manager and one of them will
reveal a drop-down list of all the
installed desktops. Select the one you
want to use and the login manager will
log you into that desktop.

Verdict
Cinnamon

+++++
Enlightenment

+++++
Gnome

+++++
KDE

+++++
Mate

+++++
Most of the
mainstream
distros ship with
either a KDE or
Gnome desktop.

Default applications
What’s shipped in the prepackaged box?

documents, contacts to playing music
and videos.
One of the highlights of Gnome 3 is
the tighter integration with online
services through Gnome Online
Accounts. This enables you to sign into
services, such as Google Docs and
Flickr, and share
data for offline
use. Gnome 3
also has a
number of apps
that use these
configured online
accounts, such as
Gnome Contacts
that enables you
to search for and
edit your contacts,
whether stored
locally or online.
Unlike the old days, the major DEs have become
KDE also has
increasingly interoperable and you can run the apps
a similarly large
designed for one desktop on another without anomalies.
esktop environments usually
ship with their own core
applications. For instance, a
typical Gnome installation will have a
collection of over two dozen core
applications for virtually every desktoprelated task, from managing images,

list of applications in its software
collection. These compilations consist
of packages, such as KDE-Graphics,
KDE-Admin and KDE-Utilities and
each includes related applications, such
as a document viewer, an image viewer,
utilities such as an archiving tool and a
calculator, and various tools to aid with
system administration.
The other desktops don’t match up
to these two and only include the most
essential apps. Cinnamon uses many of
Gnome 3’s apps with appropriate
modifications of its own, such as the
Nemo file manager forked from
Gnome’s Nautilus. Similarly, the Mate
desktop ships with a number of apps
that the project has forked from Gnome
2, such as the Caja file manager, Pluma
text editor and the Eye of Mate image
viewer. Enlightenment brings up the
rear. It isn’t a complete desktop
environment and lacks apps of its own.

Verdict
Cinnamon

+++++
Enlightenment

+++++
Gnome

+++++
KDE

+++++
Mate

+++++
Gnome and
KDE shine, but
both Mate and
Cinnamon offer
the essentials.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 65

Software | Desktop environments

Installation and distro support

Software | Desktop environments

Appearance
Which gives the best desktop experience?

efore Unity and Gnome 3 came about,
the Ubuntu and Fedora distros
dominated desktop options. But their
respective new releases took DE design in a
controversial new direction, re-imagining the
desktop for the next gen of computing devices

that didn’t use the trusty mouse and keyboard
combination. In accommodating new touch
devices, both DEs alienated a huge swathe of
desktop users, who were suddenly forced to
learn new ways of interacting with their
computers. Mate and Cinnamon were both

born out of this controversy. But, as is usually
the case with FOSS, in time both Unity and
Gnome 3 have become malleable enough to
win back some of their old audience. However,
what sets them apart from each other is how
they look, and how you operate them.

Cinnamon +++++
Cinnamon is the other desktop environment that sticks to the standard
desktop metaphor, and came into existence as a result of the
community’s dissatisfaction with Gnome 3 and Unity.
The Cinnamon desktop is a standard-fare with an icon-laden desktop
and a panel at the bottom, which shows notifications alongside a list of
open windows and an Applications menu in the bottom left-corner of the
screen. Like Mate, the Cinnamon Applications menu is a refresh of the
standard menu and extends the categorised text-driven layout of the
traditional menu with usability features borrowed from other
environments, such as the Favourite Apps bar. It also has widgets that you
can place on your Panel as well as the desktop. There’s also an Exposélike hot corner feature that presents an overview of open windows.

Enlightenment +++++
The Enlightenment Window Manager was born in 1997, with it’s
pleasantly different and refreshing view of the desktop, when the viable
choices back then were Gnome or KDE.
The default desktop has a Workspace Switcher on the top and a
panel at the bottom with an application launcher. You can also left-click
anywhere on the desktop to bring up the launcher, and drag and drop
icons on the desktop. Enlightenment gives you quite a few new
mechanism for interacting with the windows; for example, there are six
different options for maximising a window. The latest Enlightenment is
still as graphically stimulating as ever. The desktop has a range of
widgets you can add known as gadgets. Appealingly, unlike the other
desktops, graphical effects on Enlightenment, such as fading menus and
maximising windows, work well on older underpowered hardware.

Help and documentation
Verdict

Need some hand holding?

ll the desktop environment
projects have adequate
avenues for dispensing help
and support. Gnome, for instance, has a
help portal (http://help.gnome.org)
for users and there’s also http://wiki.
gnome.org which hosts pages for the
various Gnome projects. There are also
several mailing lists and IRC channels.
KDE too has lots of documentation
suitable for all kinds of users. There’s
documentation for almost every KDE
app on http://docs.kde.org and there

66 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

are also app tutorials and tips in the
UserBase wiki. Similarly there’s the
TechBase wiki for advanced users,
which has a Sysadmin’s guide. Again,
for support subscribe to one of the
mailing lists, forums boards or visit the
IRC channels.
Mate has a wiki with bit-by-bit
instructions to help install the desktop
on top of several distros, as well as a list
of Gnome 2 apps and their matching
Mate app. Users looking for help should
head to the official forum boards or the

IRC channel. Surprisingly there’s no
official documentation for Cinnamon
itself, although the Linux Mint user
guide has a section on it. Enlightenment
has a wiki with some details about its
components and you can ask for help
on IRC channel or the users mailing list.
Many projects such as Gnome and
KDE also help you keep in touch with
their developers by aggregating their
blog feeds in special Planet portals,
such as http://planetkde.org and
http://planet.gnome.org.

Cinnamon

+++++
Enlightenment

+++++
Gnome

+++++
KDE

+++++
Mate

+++++
All the DEs
have some kind
of support
infrastructure in
place for users.

KDE +++++
In contrast to Gnome, the KDE desktop is a malleable shell that’s all
about customisation. The default layout and behaviour of the desktop
and the Kickoff app launcher will be feel familiar even to users from nonLinux operating systems.
KDE ships with different Views designed to make the best of the
available desktop real-estate for regular screens and netbooks, and
doesn’t force the user to stick to either. The default layout is the Desktop
View, which encourages you to use desktop widgets and you can also
add widgets to the panels. Most distros place the Folder View widget on
the desktop to display the contents of a folder in a neat little box that
you can place anywhere on your screen. The new release features flatter
icons and its Activities feature is now more accessible and configurable.

Mate +++++
The Mate desktop is a fork of the Gnome 2 desktop and mimics its look
to the letter. Linux Mint’s Mate looks different and ships with a panel at
the bottom and an application launcher on the left. Clicking on the
launcher reveals a three-pane application menu. In the first-pane you get
quick links to Places and System tools including the Package Manager,
Control Center etc along with the power off options. In the second-pane
you get the typical software categories, such as Accessories and Office.
You click on any one of these to reveal its contents in the third-pane.
Many of the items in these panels are just controlled via plugins that
you can easily turn off from the Panel preferences. You can create icons
and shortcuts on the desktop and place files and folders. You can also
add a panel on top and add applets to it as you could in Gnome 2.

Performance
Verdict

How do they impact boot times?

n important criterion for
selecting a DE is the age of the
hardware that will power it.
Newer desktops need accelerated
graphics and oodles of RAM. On such a
system, you should stick to a DE
designed for the regular user, such as
Gnome 3, KDE or Cinnamon. On older
hardware, Mate and Enlightenment will
give you a smoother experience.
Gnome boots up slow on older
machines and takes a lot of resources.
KDE on the other hand will be more

responsive on the same machine and is
more resource efficient with every
release. However, for a solid experience,
you should only use them on a machine
with at least 2GB of RAM.
The key difference between
Cinnamon and Mate is that the former
takes advantage of modern hardware
to provide slick graphics while Mate
runs more efficiently on older hardware.
Mate is often pitched as the desktop for
users that crave the productivity of
Cinnamon, but lack the resources for it.

On our test machine, Mate booted
almost twice as fast as Gnome and KDE.
It also managed to shave off about five
seconds on average compared to
Cinnamon, while having almost an
equal memory footprint. Unlike many
lightweight DEs, the Enlightenment
desktop is full of eye candy that you’d
expect from a full-blown DE, but at a
fraction of the resources. In fact, in our
tests the SparkyLinux Enlightenment
edition booted about seven seconds
faster than the distro’s Mate edition.

Cinnamon

+++++
Enlightenment

+++++
Gnome

+++++
KDE

+++++
Mate

+++++
Gnome still
needs a fairly
modern system
to flex its
muscles.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 67

Software | Desktop environments

Gnome 3 +++++
Gnome 3 has a revolutionary UI that still takes some getting used to, and
we note that its apps look best when viewed full-screen and run inside
windows that lack a Minimise button. The desktop begins with the
Activities Overview, which gives you access to installed apps and has a
launcher-like Favourites bar for pinning frequently used apps.
The Workspace Switcher is folded in the right-hand side of the screen
and always lists any additional workspaces; switching to a second
workspace and adding windows will automatically add a third workspace.
At the top is a search box that matches strings to apps and documents
stored locally or linked online services. Omissions that will jar with
traditionalists are the inability to fill the desktop with icons and the lack
of an options menu when you right-click on the desktop.

Software | Desktop environments

Extensions and add-ons
I need add-ons, lots of add-ons

xtensions have played a very
important role in the
acceptance of Gnome 3 and the
project has quite a few of them and an
innovative way of installing and
managing them. The Gnome
Extensions website lists a variety of
add-ons and extensions that add
missing functionality. You can install
them from the website itself in just a
few clicks. Some of the popular ones

enable features that were mainstays of
the Gnome 2 desktop and will help ease
the transition for users moving to
Gnome from the likes of Windows.
One of the remarkable features of
KDE 4 is its extensibility. The desktop
enables you to even replace the
standard Kickoff app launcher with the
classic application launcher, or the
modern Lancelot launcher. Add-on
widgets are known as Plasmoids in KDE

Enlightenment has a range of widgets, which it calls gadgets, that you can
place on the Shelf (what Enlightenment calls the toolbar) or add to the desktop.

Configurability
Are they tweakable?

available in the official repos of most
Gnome-based distros, such as Fedora.
With the tool, you can tweak the
appearance of the desktop, display icons
on the desktop, tweak the top panel and
change the behaviour of the windows
and workspaces etc.
There’s literally no end to
KDE’s customisation
options. Customising KDE is
an on-going process and not
a one-time affair. The
desktop is designed to grow
and mutate as your usage
requirements. KDE has a
well-laid out System
Settings module. Settings
are housed under the top
two categories of the panel.
Using the Application
Appearance option you can
Some KDE distros, such as OpenSUSE also
pick the theme for the
include their own configuration wizard.
nome has basic configuration
options including changing
wallpapers, configuring online
accounts, and basic privacy preferences.
For more extensive tweaks you need the
third-party Gnome Tweak Tool that’s

68 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

parlance and you can find dozens of
them for everything from displaying
RSS feeds to automatically uploading
images to an image sharing website.
Cinnamon ships with an Extensions
module in its Control Panel. This
doesn’t house any extensions by
default, so you’ll first have to switch to
the Available Extensions (online) tab to
download them. The tab lists almost
two dozen extensions including several
Alt+Tab app switching mechanisms,
such as the Coverflow App Switcher,
and the 3D App Switcher. Other popular
extensions include the Desktop Scroller
and Wobbly Windows.
Mate doesn’t have any official
extensions, but the community has
contributed some to extend the
functionality of some of the core
components. For example, the Cajaactions extension, which adds apps to
the context-menu and the soundconverter extension which enables you
to convert audio files to different
formats. There are also a set of plugins
for the Pluma text editor and the Eye of
Mate image viewer, as well as some
panel applets.

widgets and also influence individual
elements, such as its colour, icons and
fonts. Also take a look at the Desktop
Effects option, which, as the name
suggests, enables you to activate and
configure the compositing effects.
Both Cinnamon and Mate include
many customisation options in their
respective Control Centers. Under Mate
the Control Panel lets you influence the
styling of the desktop as well as setup
hardware and configure system tools.
Both desktops include the Appearances
module which houses settings for
changing the look of the desktop, and
Cinnamon also has the Effects module,
where you can enable or disable many
compositing effects. The bulk of the
settings reside under the Preferences
section. Using the Panel module, for
example, you can tweak the panel’s
layout, move it to another corner of the
screen or auto-hide it to maximise
desktop space on smaller devices.
Enlightenment also lets you
customise every detail of how it looks,
feels and behaves. Its configuration
panel is overflowing with options.

Verdict
Cinnamon

+++++
Enlightenment

+++++
Gnome

+++++
KDE

+++++
Mate

+++++
How things
change – Gnome
3’s many addons make it
very flexible.

Verdict
Cinnamon

+++++
Enlightenment

+++++
Gnome

+++++
KDE

+++++
Mate

+++++
The other DEs
score higher than
Gnome 3 as their
customisations
are built in.

The verdict
A

desktop is about personal
preference. It wasn’t like
everyone ditched Gnome 3
when it debuted its new fangled version.
Nor did everyone embrace Cinnamon
or Mate with glee. Each desktop
environment is designed with a
particular purpose and suits a particular
type of Linux user.
Enlightenment is the esoteric
desktop of the lot. All that beauty and
bling comes at the cost of usability. A
better lightweight distro, minus the
bling, is Mate. However, it isn’t of much
use as an everyday desktop without
third-party apps.
If you want your desktop to be
usable straight out the box, you can’t
beat Gnome and its default set of apps.
But it saps usability with its eccentric
layout and to be productive with the
desktop you need to rely on a thirdparty customisation tool. If you have a
particular style of working, and want to
take charge of the layout and behaviour

1st Cinnamon

of your desktop, then nothing is likely to
suit you better than KDE. The desktop
is so malleable that you can even tweak
it to resemble Gnome 3. This is why
distros, such as OpenSUSE, Mageia,
ROSA and Chakra all look slightly
different from each other despite all
shipping the KDE desktop. However,
KDE is one of the least friendly
desktops for new users and all its
configuration options might actually be
a turn off.
We’re awarding this Roundup to
Cinnamon, then. The desktop
environment is one of the reasons
behind Linux Mint’s success. The distro
was willing to go the extra mile to please
users who were turned off by the new
Gnome and Unity desktops. While
Cinnamon lacks the
customisation of
KDE, it does offer
adequate options.
It’s also intuitive to
use which is why

+++++

The desktop successfully bridges the old with the new.

4th Mate

+++++

Web: www.mate-desktop.org Licence: GPL, LGPL Version: 1.8
For those who like to maintain status-quo.

5th Enlightenment

+++++

Web: www.kde.org Licence: GNU LGPL Version: 5.1
The desktop of choice for tinkerers.

3rd Gnome

it’s offered as an option by a number of
leading distributions, such as Mageia,
Fedora and OpenSUSE. In fact, with a
few exceptions, major distros officially
support multiple desktops. OpenSUSE,
Fedora, Mageia support KDE, Gnome,
Cinnamon and a number of other
desktops, so you really should try a
couple to see which better suits you.

“Cinnamon: the desktop
environment is one of the reasons
behind Linux Mint’s success.”

Web: http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com Licence: GPL v2 Version: 2.2

2nd KDE

Some distributions rally behind a particular desktop and
offer a much better experience on that.

+++++

Web: www.enlightenment.org Licence: BSD Version: e19
Ideal for adding bling to old PCs that can’t power mainstream desktops.

+++++

Over to you...

Web: www.gnome.org Licence: GPL, LGPL Version: 3.14
It’s bold and its different and still takes some getting used to.

Do you agree? Or do you use a desktop environment that we’ve
overlooked? Tell Linux Format at lxf.letters@futurenet.com.

Also consider...
There’s no dearth of desktop environments
that you can install on top of your favourite
Linux distributions. There’s Unity which isn’t
really supported outside of the Canonicalbacked Ubuntu.
Before Mate came along, people looking for
a lightweight alternative to the mainstream
desktops went with either Xfce or LXDE, and

when Gnome 3 came out many people went to
Xfce, because of that desktop’s similarity to
Gnome 2. Then there’s LXDE which is designed
for low resource usage and has much simpler
tools than even Xfce. However, both LXDE and
Xfce have officially supported flavours of the
Ubuntu distribution, which are called Lubuntu
and Xubuntu, respectively.

If you need an even faster desktop, there’s
the ROX Desktop. It’s based on the ROX Filer
file manager and was inspired by the user
interface of RISC OS. Some distros also use
the Openbox stacking window manager. If you
want something even more esoteric, then
there’s JWM which is used by Puppy Linux and
works admirably well on older hardware.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 69

Software | Desktop environments

Desktop environments

Software | Steam gaming

Build your own
Steam Machine
Explosive AAA gaming has arrived on Linux with
over 1,000 titles available. Building your own
dedicated gaming box has never been easier.
aming on Linux has been plagued
with problems in the past, usually
because many developers rush
out Linux support – or leave it
out altogether – and focus on Windows.
The hard truth is Microsoft's
OS is found on the vast
majority of gaming PCs (eg
Steam’s Hardware Survey
(Feb 2015) has the Windows
user base at 95.68% out of
over 125 million active clients),
and that’s even with the company leaving a
trail of broken promises and an even more
broken online infrastructure and DRM – try
mentioning Games for Windows Live to a
PC gamer and see them visibly shudder.

Thankfully, the tide has turned and gaming
on Linux is in rude health. Microsoft's desire to
create a walled garden with Windows 8 worried
Valve, the video game developer behind the
much-loved Half-Life series, and the company

high profile enough to grab the attention of PC
gamers who hadn't considered Linux before.
With Valve's backing, an increasing number of
developers are porting their games to Linux,
while hardware manufacturers, particularly
graphics vendors, are making
decent strides in supporting
Linux through their drivers.
It's now easier than ever to
game on Linux – we get access
to the latest titles, powerful
hardware is supported and we
don't have to struggle getting games working
via Wine or waste money on a Windows
licence. Even better, many PC gamers can
even see an impressive improvement in
performance just by switching to Linux.

“It’s now easier than ever to
game on Linux – we get
access to the latest titles .”

70 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

behind the Steam service, of course, enough to
create a Debian-based distro called SteamOS
that is squarely focused on gaming.
Although Valve's embrace of Linux left a lot
of us wondering what took them so long, it was

Agreement. It's worth
reading this to understand
what SteamOS and Valve's
Steam service is.
Although SteamOS is
Linux-based and uses open
source software, it's primarily
an interface for Valve's
proprietary Steam Store.
Proprietary drivers are also
used, and although Steam is
less obnoxious than some
DRM-infused store fronts,
you should know what you're
getting into before you install
it. You will, for instance, be
You can enable a Gnome desktop in the SteamOS settings,
able to access the Gnome
which will allow you to run non-Steam programs and games.
desktop that’s installed as
part of SteamOS to install non-Steam
it, as going ahead and formatting the wrong
programs and games at least.
one can be devastating.
Another thing to consider is that the
Once you've identified your USB drive
SteamOS is a 1GB download, so if your
make a note of its path under where it says
internet connection isn't the fastest, it's best
Filesystem, for example /dev/sdc1. You'll
to have a cup of tea (or four) while you wait.
need to unmount the drive by using:
If you agree to the terms of use click the
sudo umount /dev/sdc1
Download SteamOS
where sdc1 is put the path of your USB
Beta button to begin.
drive. Next format the drive with the FAT32
Once downloaded
filesystem with:
you'll need to extract
sudo mkfs.vfat -n 'SteamOS' -I /dev/sdc1
the contents of the
Once again, where we've written dev/sdc1,
SteamOSinstaller.zip
make sure you put the correct path. Also the
file onto a USB stick.
-n 'SteamOS' part of the code is optional.
The USB stick needs
This just names the partition you've created
to have a capacity of 4GB or higher and will
on the drive for ease of use. If you'd rather not
need to be formatted to the FAT32 filesystem.
name the partition, feel free to leave this out.
To format the USB drive to FAT32, insert it
Hopefully, by this point the SteamOS file
and bring up the terminal. Next, type in df to
will have downloaded as a ZIP file. We'll need
bring up a list of the drives installed in your
to unzip the files to the freshly-formatted USB
machine. Look carefully at the list to identify
drive. To do this, you'll first need to make sure
your USB stick (capacity is a good indicator).
you have the correct programs installed.
It's almost goes without saying, but what the
As root user type in:
hell we'll say it anyway, but it's vital you
apt-get install zip
correctly identify your drive before you format
apt-get install unzip

“The UI has been specially
built for navigating with a
control pad on a big screen.”
a lot more than what most people have – or
even need. The second option is to download
the custom SteamOS beta installation. This
method gives you more control over the
install, using an installer that's based on
Debian's default, and it means you can install
SteamOS on to a more realistically sized hard
drive. Clicking Download, the default SteamOS
beta installation takes you to a page which
displays the Steam End User Licence

The hard stuff for your Steam Machine
When building a machine to play games in
the living room you need to consider a few
things. For starters, since this is for the living
room you'll want it to look good, not take up
too much space and run quietly.
For a great looking, yet small PC case
we'd suggest going for the BitFenix Phenom
Mini-ITX, which can be bought for around
£60. Next you'll want a CPU, and although
Intel's processors are more expensive than
AMD's, they perform better, and will futureproof your Steam machine.
The quad-core Core i5-4570 is a great
choice that runs at 3.2GHz and costs
around £150. Choosing a case and a CPU
narrows down our motherboard options.
We've gone for the MSI Z87I AC, which costs

around £50, as it's a Mini-ITX board and
compatible with our processor. Even better, the
board comes with built-in Wi-Fi so you don't have
to trail Ethernet cables through your living room.
Next up you'll want to think about a graphics
card. For ease of compatibility we've gone with
Nvidia. Some micro-ITX cases have limited space
for GPUs, so we've gone for the Asus GeForce
GTX 970 DirectCU Mini. This is an excellent and
tiny card that will run the latest games with ease.
It is, however, a bit pricey at £280, but well worth
the money. If you want to save some cash then
the slightly older Asus Nvidia GeForce GTX 760
2GB GDDR5 DirectCU II Mini is a great choice
and costs a more palatable £187.
You'll also want a cooler (such as the Gelid
SlimHero for £25), memory (Crucial Ballistix

Tactical LP DDR3, 8GB for £70 is a good shout),
a power supply unit (GX Lite 500W PSU for
£41) and a hard drive (any old one will do, we'd
recommend 500GB if you're thinking of having
lots of games). Hey presto, you've now got an
amazing Steam Machine that blows the PS4
and Xbox One out of the water.

All these lovely
components will
build a formidable
gaming machine.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 71

Software | Steam gaming

ou could, of course, buy a Steam
Machine from many reputable
manufacturers now (such as
Alienware, Asus, Cyberpower, Scan and Zotac
etc), but to get yourself a dedicated machine
for playing Linux games, we think your best
bet is to download and install SteamOS
yourself. This distro has been designed from
the ground up for gaming, with Steam's Big
Picture Mode as the default interface. The
interface has been specially built for
navigating with a control pad on a big screen,
such as a TV, though this means if you want to
use your machine for tasks other than gaming
then SteamOS isn't for you in it's current form.
However, if you want to make the ultimate
Linux gaming machine that blows the PS4 and
Xbox One consoles out of the water, then head
over to http://bit.ly/BYOSteamOS.
On this page you’ll find two options, the
first is to download the default SteamOS
beta installation. Although this is probably
the most straightforward way of installing
SteamOS, it does require a hard drive with
a whopping 1TB capacity, which is probably

Software | Steam gaming

Now navigate to the folder where the
SteamOSInstaller.zip was downloaded
(usually Downloads), for example:
cd ~/Downloads/
then type in
unzip SteamOSInstaller.zip -d /path/
where /path/ is enter the path of your USB
drive. Next, you'll need to install the USB stick
into the machine that you're using for the
installation. With the USB stick installed, start
up the PC and load up the BIOS. This can
usually be done by repeatedly tapping F8, F11,
or F12 as soon as your system is turned on.

Once in your BIOS make sure that UEFI
support is enabled and select the UEFI entry
to boot from.
If you don't mind having the entire hard
drive formatted and replaced with SteamOS,
select the Automated install option from the
menu when it appears. If you have additional
disks and partitions that you want to keep,
and you want to install SteamOS in a select
location choose Expert install.
If you've ever used the Debian installer
you'll be pretty familiar with what comes next.
First, you'll be asked to choose your language,

location and keyboard layout. The installer will
then begin setting up your hardware which will
usually take a few minutes. Once done you'll
see your hard drives and partitions. This is
where you can decide which partitions and
drives to use to install SteamOS – useful if you
don't want to use all of your hard drive or if
you're planning on going the dual-booting
route with SteamOS for gaming and another
distro for day-to-day tasks.
Select the free space for installing
SteamOS – it should be a minimum of 10GB.
Select Create a New Partition if you need to

companies offer some great alternatives for
controlling SteamOS games. Roccat has built a
Sova lapboard especially for SteamOS which
offers a small mechanical keyboard and large
mouse pad that can rest on your lap. You can also
use games controllers from game consoles, such
as the Xbox 360 and PS4 as SteamOS does a
good job of recognising them as soon as
you plug them in. If you're a fan of
racing games then the good news is
that renowned racers, such as Project
Cars are coming to Linux. What's not so great
is the support for steering wheel controllers.

If you have a Logitech controller you can install
the LTWheelConf tool. Full instructions on how
to use it can be found on the Steam network
(http://bit.ly/LTWHeelConf).

Peripherals
So you've built an amazing, yet compact,
Steam Machine and loaded up SteamOS. Now
what? You'll want to get some great gaming
peripherals for comfy gaming from your sofa.
Valve itself has been working on a dedicated
Steam controller with the lofty ambition that it
will combine the convenience of a game
controller with the precision of a keyboard and
mouse setup. It's certainly a tall order and one
that Valve appears to have struggled with as
the controller has been delayed until late 2015.
While we wait for Valve's official controller,
which will cost $50, a number of other

The Roccat Sova has
been built especially
for SteamOS devices.

The 20 best games on Linux
Five best open source games

Strife: Veteran Edition

Stunt Rally - version 2.5

This is an awesome first
person shooter built on
the open-source
Chocolate Doom engine.
Grab the game from
http://bit.ly/StrifeVE.

Race and performing stunts
in fantastic environments.
This game features 167
tracks, 19 cars and a track
editor. Download the game
at http://bit.ly/StuntRally.

Annex: Conquer the
World 4.0

BYOND: Space Station
13 Remake

Galaxy Forces: Moon
Lander Action!

If you enjoy real time
strategy games, then this
open source game is for you.
Download the game from
http://annexconquer.com.

This remake of a criminally
overlooked classic is
completely open source.
Download the code from
http://bit.ly/SS13Remake.

Hark back to a simpler time
for games with this retrofuelled moon lander shootem-up. Download from
http://bit.ly/GalForcesV2.

Dying Light

Borderlands 2
This fun and frantic first
person shooter makes a
post apocalypse world
seem like a lot of fun. Play in
co-op mode with friends.

Amnesia: The
Dark Descent

Broken Age

An action survival game
presented in first-person.
Navigate a dangerous
zombie-filled open world to
help survivors.

Five best AAA games

The Witcher 2:
Assassins of Kings
An epic tale of monsterslaying and alchemy, The
Witcher 3 is coming soon,
but play this first.

72 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Games don’t come much
scarier than this, so if you’re
after a good horror game
then you’ll love this.

The first graphic adventure
by Tim Schafer in sixteen
years, funded by a recordbreaking Kickstarter –
and well worth the wait.

Big Picture Mode makes launching games on a TV with a games controller quick and easy.

again. The process might create the rescue
partition now, so let it do its thing and select to
reboot. You'll then be presented with a Debian
login screen. Select SteamOS Desktop and
click Return to Steam.
If this doesn't work, open up the Terminal
and type steam. Accept the terms and click
OK. There may be some more downloading to
be done, but once that's done you'll be thrown

into Steam's Big Picture Mode where you'll be
able to log in to your existing Steam account,
or create a new one.
Alternatively, If you don't want to install a
new OS for Steam you could install the Steam
for Linux client instead on any Debian-based
distro by typing in apt-get install steam or
aptitude install steam. You’re now ready
enjoy over 1,000 (and counting) titles.

Ten best indie games

Hotline Miami 2:
Wrong Number

Supreme League
of Patriots

The sequel to the ultraviolent and maddeningly
addictive indie sensation
comes with the same thrills
and amazing soundtrack,
but it’s not for the faint
hearted or kids.

A classic point and click
adventure game with very
modern sense of humour
brings a cast of crazy
characters and fiendish
puzzles and combines it
with a great art style.

This War of Mine

Chivalry: Medieval
Warfare

A game like no other. You
don’t play as an all-powerful
soldier, but instead a group
of civilians just trying to
survive in a besieged city.

Besiege castles and raid
villages in this fast-paced
medieval first person
slasher with a focus on PvP.

The Fall

Dungeons 2

The first story in a trilogy,
this adventure game excels
at world building, story and
atmosphere. You play ARID,
an artificial intelligence
onboard a high-tech
combat suit occupied by an
unconscious pilot.

If you’re a fan of Bullfrog’s
classic game Dungeon
Keeper then you’ll love this
spiritual successor, which
not only allows you to build
devious dungeons to thwart
pesky heroes but sees you
go topside to attack cities.

The Binding of
Isaac: Rebirth
This is a randomly
generated action RPG
shooter with Rogue-like
elements. If you don’t
understand what we just
said, all you need to know
is that it’s a lot of fun.

Papers, Please

FTL: Faster Than Light

Goat Simulator

Play the role of immigration
inspector for a fictional
country. Bureaucracy might
not seem thrilling, but this
manages to make it so.

Take your ship and crew on
an adventure through a
randomly generated galaxy
filled with glory and bitter
defeat in this spaceship sim.

Ever wanted to play as a
goat? This offers you a
chance to live the dream
in this completely realistic
(not really) simulation.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 73

Software | Steam gaming

and specify the size. Ensure it’s Primary, then
click Continue, making sure in the Use as Area
it has Ext4 Journaling Filesystem, then select
Done setting up the partition.
Click on the free space to create another
partition. Give it a size of around 10GB –
this will be your swap partition. Make it logical,
and create it at the end of the available space
when the options appear. When you get to the
summary screen, double-click Use as and
select Swap Area. Double-click the remaining
space, leave the partition size as it is and make
sure where it says Mount Point you have it set
to /home. Select Finish Partitioning and Write
Changes to Disk, then select Yes. SteamOS
will begin configuring and installing itself.
Once done a window will appear called
Software Selection asking you if you want to
install the Debian desktop environment and
standard system utilities. Keep both of these
ticked and click Continue. Once done your PC
will reboot.
Once your system has rebooted, you'll be
given the choice to start SteamOS or start it in
Recovery Mode – leave it to start normally
and SteamOS will continue the installation.
Make sure your machine is connected to the
internet, as Steam will be installed. Once
that's done your machine will reboot once

What’s the best client for getting full desktop access from afar?

How we tested...
For testing we used a number of
machines: a high-end gaming PC,
a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B (where
software existed), and we dusted off
a slightly sluggish 2.33GHz dualcore machine for some perspective.
To see how the candidates fared in
low-bandwidth scenarios, we ran the
clients through the Trickle
bandwidth shaper. We simulated
slow (25kb/s) and very slow (6kb/s)
connection speeds this way. In order
to allow each client to reach its full
potential, we first paired each client
with its partner server to gauge
maximum performance. We even
used a Windows 7 PC to test the
mettle of the RDP clients against the
original protocol (the open source
xrdp server only implements the
protocol parts in the public domain).
In the compatibility category we
mixed this up to see how different
clients and servers interoperate.

hile everyone knows
the best way to do
remote access is SSH,
sometimes it’s nice
(and even necessary) to have access
to an entire desktop. Maybe you need
to show Auntie Ethel how to change
her desktop background, or how to
get nmap to make a diagram of a rival
knitting circle’s network.
This surfeit of graphics data
presents a problem, especially for the
bandwidth-challenged, which a number
of technologies aim to solve. Linux
favours the VNC protocol, while
Windows favours the largely-closed

“Maybe you need to show Auntie
Ethel how to make a diagram of
a rival knitting circle’s network.”
source Remote Desktop Protocol
(RDP). There’s nothing OS-specific
about either of these though. They both
work directly on the framebuffer, so the
underlying technology works equally
well on Windows or Linux. The NX
protocol used in NoMachine NX
challenges both of these with advanced
compression and latency reducing
tricks which in Linux work on the X

protocol directly (or the RDP protocol in
Windows). Since 2010 though, the
client has been closed source and while
once a number of projects aimed to
provide open source NX solutions,
development of these has largely fallen
by the wayside, with the exception
being X2Go. The Chrome Remote
Desktop app is still in beta, but will
already be of interest to some.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 75

Software | Remote desktops

Remote
desktops

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Is it easy to install and navigate?

inding a distribution for which a
Remmina package doesn’t exist
is unlikely as it’s rather popular.
To get VNC functionality in Remmina
requires libvncserver to be installed, but
most distros will sort this out for you.
On Arch Linux this package was listed
as an optional dependency and needed
to be installed manually. Despite the
plethora of options everything in
Remmina is laid out intuitively, so a
straightforward connection is
straightforward to set up.
TigerVNC, on the other hand, can be
rather tricky to locate packages for.
Many distros, including Debian and
Ubuntu, have opted for the older, and
differing by two letters, TightVNC.
Once you’ve managed to find some
packages though, it’s easy enough to
find your way around the client. It’s
modelled after the ‘original’ RealVNC
client and as such isn’t much to look at.
The default options will generally just
work so connecting is an easy matter of
typing a hostname into the address bar,

although you might need to add a :1 to
the end.
Packages for x2go are available for
most distros, including Raspbian.
After installing the server you may need
to run x2godbadmin --createdb before
you can connect. Some packagers
seem to have been lazy here. The Qt4
client is easy enough to navigate, but
could possibly be laid out in a tidier
fashion. It provides reasonable session
management through a list on the righthand side.
Installing the browser part of
Chrome Remote Desktop app is, as you
may imagine, very straightforward.
However, setting up a remote server
(on Linux) involves installing a Deb
package, which by all accounts doesn’t
work out of the box. On Mint/Ubuntu
files needed to be moved or symlinked
before Chrome would present the
option to enable remote connections.
This is a remote desktop clients
Roundup, but we’re going to go ahead
and penalise the app regardless,

This is the second of four wizard-style screens that
welcome you to NoMachine-ville.

because this kind of suffering is implicit
in its use. Once everything’s set up,
though, you do get an easy-tocomprehend list of computers and
remote assistance requests.
NoMachine will need to be installed
manually, but they do have Deb and
RPM packages for you, as well as an
installer bundle if these are unsuitable.
You will be greeted by a doublewhammy of welcome messages, which
may help you get your bearings, though
the interface is straightforward (if a
little garish). Servers can (optionally)
advertise themselves on the network so
that they are visible to all clients.

Verdict
Chrome Remote
Desktop

+++++
NoMachine NX

+++++
Remmina

+++++
TigerVNC

+++++
X2Go

+++++
Remmina and
NoMachine are
the friendliest of
the batch.

Documentation
Someone said to read the manual. Is there even a manual?

emmina is fairly self explanatory
to use and has been translated
into several languages. If you’re
feeling brave you can delve deeper into
the workings of the xfreerdp command
that it uses for RDP sessions. Despite
its appearance, TigerVNC has excellent
man pages. They will mostly be of

interest to anyone wishing to tweak the
server side of things, but the client has
command line options for everything in
the menus too.
The X2Go server comes with a
number of command line utilities which
could be useful for scripting purposes.
They are all thoroughly documented in

X2Go’s website will help you get started and their mascot will charm you.

the provided man pages. The website
has plenty of useful information too, not
just on how the program works, but
concerning future ideas for the project.
There’s also quite a handy guide on
which desktop environments may fail
together with an explanation of why
they do. Some remedies are offered for
simple cases, such as IceWM and
OpenBox, and the bad news is all laid
out clearly for anyone wanting to use a
modern desktop.
The Chrome Remote Desktop app
really needs to provide better
documentation for setting up the
service. Granted it’s still in beta but this
is a fundamental issue. Better yet, why
not just provide some working
packages? The app itself is
straightforward enough that Auntie
Ethel could use it. NoMachine’s
documentation is more than adequate,
but it loses points for giving you four
annoying instruction screens before
letting you initially connect.

Verdict
Chrome Remote
Desktop

+++++
NoMachine NX

+++++
Remmina

+++++
TigerVNC

+++++
X2Go

+++++
The outsider
of the pack,
X2Go scores a
surprise victory.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 77

Software | Remote desktops

Ease of use

Software | Remote desktops

Features
Who has the best bells and whom hath the finest whistles?

ll of the clients on test will, modulo the
appropriate configuration and let you
connect to your desktop from afar.
But they all cater to different needs, have
different emphases and do different tricks.
In this category we see what features each

candidate offers, whether those features are
useful or whether they even leave the user in a
state of confusion.
All of the clients on test support fullscreen
mode, so that (bandwidth permitting) you can
pretend you’re sitting in front of the remote

machine. Some things we mention are strictly
properties of the client, whereas some are
dependent on the client connecting to the
right kind of server. This is particularly true of
TigerVNC, so much of our praise and criticism
here is directed at the server side of things.

Remmina +++++
Remmina is an impressive client. Besides NX, VNC and RDP, it supports
the XDMCP protocol underlying communication between the display
server and the display manager. It even enables graphic free
connections via SSH and SFTP. If that isn’t enough for you, it can be
extended through a plugin system. It supports quality presets, which
you’ll want to modify depending on available bandwidth, as well as
scaling options (in case you’re viewing on a low powered device). The
VNC protocol is unencrypted so it’s common to tunnel your connection
through SSH. This is straightforward to set up using SSH’s -L option, but
Remmina enables you to do this via its options dialog. Further there’s a
shared clipboard that works across all protocols. You can even set up the
client to listen for an incoming connection to aid with firewall woes.

TigerVNC +++++
TigerVNC is a client/server package that has been around since 1999.
It supports multiple encodings and compression levels, so that the best
possible results can be eked from low-bandwidth connections. TigerVNC
began life as a fork of the largely-defunct TightVNC, and uses the same
strategy of dividing the screen into subrectangles (or even subhexagons)
and applying the most suitable compression (JPEG, zlib, all manner of
other arcane tricks) to each one. It remains compatible with other VNC
implementations, but these won’t see the advanced compression
benefits it offers. The client features a spartan FLTK interface comprising
some buttons and an address bar and has all manner of encoding and
compression methods, security options (including authentication by TLS
certificates) and more. An alternative server, x0vncserver, is bundled for
controlling an existing X session, rather than starting one anew.

Development status
Verdict

Do these projects have a future?

emmina continues to enjoy
fruitful development since its
inauguration in 2009. But it’s
merely a front-end to libvnc and
xfreerdp, neither of which receive much
attention beyond basic maintenance.
As a result, the modern GTK3 UX belies
a somewhat ageing interior. And it’s
what’s inside that counts.
The schismatic legacy behind the
original VNC (now RealVNC), TigerVNC,
TightVNC and even TurboVNC is
complicated, but it has been to the

78 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

detriment of open source VNC
implementations. TigerVNC is in
significantly better shape than the rest,
but still deserves more attention. In
contrast NoMachine seems to be
relentless in its progress. Shame it’s not
open source really.
X2Go was started as a project by
two high-school students in 2006.
Today they and a core team of four
others maintain the project. They have
noble goals which is good as at least
three other projects based on the NX

protocol are no longer maintained.
From our performance test it’s clear
that X2Go isn’t yet comparable to
NoMachine, but the latter shows the
protocol’s capabilities and gives the
team something to aim towards.
The Linux port of Chrome Remote
Desktop was announced last July, and
its lacklustre performance is forgiveable
since doing things the NativeClient way
is complicated, but the project could
provide packages that work for more
than Ubuntu 12.04.

Chrome Remote
Desktop

+++++
NoMachine NX

+++++
Remmina

+++++
TigerVNC

+++++
X2Go

+++++
NoMachine is
relentless and
wants to be on all
your machines.

X2go uses the NX protocol over SSH. It has many of the features of the
NoMachine client but without the proprietary chills. It also has a lovely
mascot called Phoca. As well as a huge number of compression
schemes, the client allows you to choose your connection speed.
Connections to sound systems, such as PulseAudio, and file systems
can be tunnelled through the SSH connection to get around firewalls.
As well as rendering the remote desktop on a dedicated display, there’s
a Xinerama extension which enables a desktop to be rendered across
multiple screens. Since the X2Go server is forked from an old version of
X.org, it doesn’t support many 3D-accelerated desktops. Gnome 3, Unity
and Cinnamon will work in fallback mode, but you’ll have better luck with
something simpler such as Xfce or Mate.

Chrome Remote Desktop +++++
Besides being a web-based remote desktop client Chrome Remote
Desktop doesn’t have much else to brag about. That said, being able to
access a machine from a mobile device could come in handy – for
instance that machine could be one that you don’t have the privileges or
inclination to install software. Once the required service package is
installed on the server machine(s) then you can access them from the
comfort of your browser. Provided your browser is Chrome or Chromium,
and you’re logged into the appropriate Google account, that is. To enable
remote connections to a machine you must first set up a PIN of at least
six digits. Once connected, you get only rudimentary controls for
resizing the desktop – the app will decide what sort of quality to provide.

NoMachine NX +++++
NoMachine NX wins the in-your-face interface award, with its large,
branded, black and orange windows. But if you can forgive this and its
proprietary nature, then it’s something of a powerhouse. Like
x0vncserver it gives access to the currently running desktop, and like
RDP the NX protocol supports audio/USB/drive redirection. It also
allows file transfers and remote desktop session recording. The justreleased Raspberry Pi package (which is still in alpha) also works fine.
NoMachine can use UDP to transfer multimedia data which it can
encode using H.264, VP8 or MJPEG compression. The latter uses less
CPU power so is useful for low-power devices. NoMachine 4 no longer
allows SSH connections, but you can still authenticate by public key.

Protocol & desktop support
Verdict

Can you use other protocols, or a fancy desktop?

hile Remmina offers the most
diverse selection of protocols,
the support it provides is
generally inferior to other clients. Most
people will use it via VNC, which will
support any desktop but lacks OpenGL
capabilities on proprietary drivers.
Our experience of using it with RDP
wasn’t particularly impressive, and the
NX plugin only works for long
deprecated NoMachine 3 servers.
TigerVNC doesn’t need to support
other protocols but you ought to get a

slightly more enjoyable desktop
experience compared to Remmina.
If you don’t then fiddle with the settings.
You might need to launch the server
with dbus-launch vncserver if the
server machine is logged into the same
desktop environment as your intended
VNC session.
X2Go and the rest of our species
don’t fare so well in this category as
they can only connect to their own kind.
Further, desktop support is poor: Qt5
doesn’t work (so no KDE 5 for you),

Gnome and Unity don’t work (there are
still problems even in fallback modes).
Before we installed KDE 4, we were
wondering if anything would work.
Hopefully the Chrome app people
can fix the Qt5 issues soon. When they
do though, the desktop experience
needs to be improved. It would be a
marvel if they could get OpenGL
working, but that’s a long way off. While
NoMachine can only connect to it’s own
kind, its ability to serve even the most
complicated desktops is outstanding.

Chrome Remote
Desktop

+++++
NoMachine NX

+++++
Remmina

+++++
TigerVNC

+++++
X2Go

+++++
NoMachine’s
ability to work
anywhere sets
it apart.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 79

Software | Remote desktops

X2Go +++++

Software | Remote desktops

Low-bandwidth survival
Is it useable as you approach dialup speeds?

sing Remmina to access the
Raspberry Pi with the
connection artificially limited to
56K dialup speeds was not fun.
However, with the colour depth and
quality settings appropriately throttled,
it was at least usable, provided you
were patient. Under such austere
compression, though, text can get hard
to read, and images hard to discern.

Although getting TigerVNC installed
on a Raspberry Pi requires using the
experimental Jessie edition of Raspbian,
the low-bandwidth situation in general
is somewhat improved with TigerVNC’s
advanced encoding. While we found it
impressive, it still won’t feel and
definitely won’t look like a local desktop
at dialup speeds, so don’t expect
miracles here.

If you want your desktop to be usable over slow internet connections you can
try getting by with 256 colours or get better internet access.

X2Go had difficulties initiating a
connection at dialup speed but it
eventually managed using Tight
compression and a 4K colour palette.
At this speed the desktop was barely
usable, window redrawing in particular
caused major delays. Fortunately most
people will have a little more bandwidth,
and at 25k/s things were much better.
Chromium doesn’t work with trickle,
but that didn’t stop us using the tc
command to limit bandwidth directly
on the interface. Initially, our KDE
desktop booted up fine, but it was nigh
on impossible to use, with long delays
between actions and responses.
Very often, the connection would be
dropped entirely. As before, allowing
speeds of 25k/s made things much
more palatable.
Once again NoMachine excels, well
maybe not excels, but certainly does
measurably better than everyone else.
Navigating the desktop seemed much
more fluid and dynamic, and though
text became unreadable immediately
after significant window movement,
it returned to legibility soon after things
had calmed down a bit.

Verdict
Chrome Remote
Desktop

+++++
NoMachine NX

+++++
Remmina

+++++
TigerVNC

+++++
X2Go

+++++
NoMachine
wins out –
its resilience
impressed us.

Performance
Who’s got the go faster stripes?

emmina uses libvncserver
which has some support for
Tight encoding over VNC.
But perhaps it was our hardware, as on
Maximum Quality settings connecting
over LAN caused some tearing and
stuttering on our KDE 4 desktop,
mostly when dragging transparent
windows around. Turning the quality
down a notch made things much
smoother, but the extra compression
artefacts (particularly on text) are hard
to miss. Using 16-bit colour also
remedied this, but again keen eyes will
spot the dithering.
TigerVNC performs slightly better
here, being perfectly capable of playing
a full screen YouTube video. Such feats
are only possible if reasonably
significant CPU power is available
otherwise many frames will be dropped.
With that caveat, 720p video streaming

80 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

rarely exceeded 5MB/s, so
you’d just about be able to
do that on a fast ADSL2+ or
cable connection
X2Go doesn’t support
GLX so our KDE desktop
had no transparency effects
to contend with. Even so, it
Going where NoMachine has gone before: It’s
was still noticeably less
Raspbian Inside KDE inside LXQt.
responsive than the others,
excluding the Chrome app. This is likely
This is a shame since this is exactly the
due to the server’s CPU being
kind of desktop for which it would work.
overburdened with having to softwareThe VP8 compression does an OK job
render everything. We wouldn’t
of keeping things presentable.
recommend this for doing anything
Nomachine’s client is the champion;
graphically-heavy.
It’s the only client that supports
The ‘Chromoting’ experience was
OpenGL and playing medium-weight
usable, though not very enjoyable. Even
games over LAN proved to be entirely
with a fast internet connection there’s
possible. Since NoMachine is available
significant lag. It also doesn’t work with
for Windows this provides an alternative
Qt5, although neither does X2Go, which
to Steam In-Home streaming or Wine
means you can’t use this with LXQt.
for playing non-Linux titles.

Verdict
Chrome Remote
Desktop

+++++
NoMachine NX

+++++
Remmina

+++++
TigerVNC

+++++
X2Go

+++++
NoMachine
knocks the
(virtual) socks
off of the rest.

The verdict
A

nd now the moment you’ve all
been waiting for, unless you
already looked at the ratings
box. Scandalously, we’ve awarded first
place to NoMachine and proprietary
software, but we had no choice as it
outperformed the competition.
Things could change of course –
apparently Google has some smart
people working for them who might
pimp the Chrome app a little. We’re
really keen to see how X2Go
progresses, but then maybe it will join
so many other clients in the NX
necropolis, an ignominious end for our
new friend Phoca.
Since NoMachine no longer
supports the old version of the NX
protocol, distros have started using
X2Go’s implementation of nxproxy, so
hopefully this will stimulate new interest
in the package. It’s already used by
Remmina in Arch Linux, and there’s an
improved Windows client called Pyhoca.

1st NoMachine NX

So the potential is there, one easy thing
that needs doing is tidying up the
interface, particularly pruning, or at
least putting under hierarchy, the
ludicrous number of compression
schemes it offers.
It’s interesting how the VNC clients
largely failed to compete with
NoMachine, even TigerVNC using the
highly-optimised libjpeg-turbo library.
Perhaps this speaks to a protocol in its
twilight years, or the rise of a new era of
NX domination. Then again perhaps
some exciting VNC development
happens that turns things around
shortly after this issue goes to press.
(Like the last Roundup where we said
there hadn’t been a major VirtualBox
release for years and v5
popped up).
Naturally, some readers
will want to stick with open
source and Remmina is a
perfectly good choice here –

+++++

A proprietary champion, whatever next?

4th X2Go

+++++

Web: http://wiki.x2go.org Licence: GPLv2 Version: 4.0.3.2
It shows promise, but it’s got a long way to go.

+++++

Web: http://bit.ly/Remmina Licence: GPL Version: 1.1.2
A great all-rounder, but can’t compete with the champion.

3rd TigerVNC

if you really need to work on a remote
desktop then you’re probably willing to
accept some small performance hit. It’s
only in comparatively rare situations
that you will see any benefit to using
TigerVNC and it’s hard to recommend
that one to the kids – who demand
svelte icons and layouts as opposed to
a glaring textbox that demands input.

“It’s interesting how the other
VNC clients largely failed to
compete with NoMachine.”

Web: http://nomachine.com Licence: Freeware Version: 4.5

2nd Remmina

The option to change the wave colour in the NoMachine
settings was what really swayed us.

+++++

Web: http://tigervnc.org Licence: GPL Version: 1.4.3
The eye of the tiger burns not so bright.

5th Chrome RD

+++++

Web: http://bit.ly/1GadugV Licence: Freeware Version: 42
A neat idea, but needs to mature before it catches on.

Over to you...
Are you satisfied with our verdict? Don’t you think that Phoca is the
cutest? Let Linux Format know: lxf.letters@futurenet.com

Also consider...
If you’re interested in game streaming, then
Steam’s In-Home Streaming is probably still
going to beat NoMachine. If you have an Nvidia
graphics card in your Windows machine, then
you can also try using the open source
gamestream Limelight (http://limelightstream.com) on the client machine, even if
that machine is a Raspberry Pi, to a similar end.

We didn’t really mention RealVNC, which is
where the original developers of the protocol
are, version 5 of its free client was released in
2012 and the latest update, 5.2, came out in
February of 2015.
The 5.0 series is a marked departure from
RealVNC’s open source licensing though, and
now you need to sign up for a free key (with an

optional 30-day trial of extra features).
But haven’t we all seen enough proprietary
software for one Roundup? Also don’t forget
the remote desktop clients that come bundled
with desktop environments like Gnome
(Vinagre) and KDE (KRDC). These are fine,
but we didn’t include them since we’re all
about trying new things.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 81

Software | Remote desktops

Remote desktop clients

Security
The internet’s naughty people
aren’t getting any less naughty.
84

Who protects your data?
The boffins from the EFF crunch the
numbers for a breakdown of the state of
information security in the modern age.

Linux malware
The threat is real, and it’s not just
something that affects Windows users.
But exactly what is there to worry about?

Privacy distros
Start as you mean to go on: in a locked
room speaking in indecipherable code.

Set up a Tor hotspot
For a quick and easy way of obfuscating
your traffic, set up a connection piped
through the Onion Router.

102 Drive encryption part 1
Create a stacked filesystem with ecryptfs
to keep your most precious files safe...
104 Drive encryption part 2
... or try block device encryption (or lock
down individual files) using zuluCrypt.
106 Penetration testing with Kali Linux
Hack your own network to find out ways
that intruders could get in.
109 Detect and record motion
Security from a different angle.
114

Securing Apache
If you’re running a web server with
Apache, you’ll want to make sure it’s not
open to attack.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 83

Security | EFF privacy report

Source
credits
Authors:
Nate Cardozo,
Kurt Opsahl,
Rainey Reitman
Editors:
Parker Higgins,
Dave Maass
Formatting:
Parker Higgins
A publication of the
Electronic Frontier
Foundation, 2015
Find the original at:
www.eff.org/whohas-your-backgovernment-datarequests-2015
This work, Who
Protects Your Data?,
is an abridged
derivative of Who
Has Your Back?
2015: Protecting
Your Data From
Government
Requests by the
Electronic Freedom
Foundation
Used under:
CC BY 3.0.

WHO PROTECTS
YOUR DATA?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released its fifth
annual report on online privacy and transparency and
explains the implications for all of our data.

e live digital lives: from the
videos shared on social
networks to location-aware
apps on mobile phones; from
log-in data for connecting to our emails to
our stored documents and, of course, our
search history. The personal, profound and
even absurd are all transcribed into data
packets and whizzed around the fiber-optic
arteries of the network.
While our daily lives have upgraded to the
21st century, the law hasn’t kept pace. To date,
the US Congress hasn’t managed to update
the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy
Act to acknowledge that email stored for
longer than six months
deserves identical protections
to email stored for less than six
months. Congress also dragged
its feet on halting the NSA’s
indiscriminate surveillance of

online communications and has yet to enact
the strong reforms we deserve. Congress is
even on the precipice of making things far
worse by considering proposals that would
mandate government backdoors (as is the UK
government, currently) into the technology we
rely on to digitally communicate.
In this climate, we’re increasingly looking to
technology companies themselves to have the
strongest possible policies to protect user
rights. But which companies will stand by
users, insisting on transparency and strong
legal standards around government access to
user data? And which companies make those
policies public, letting the world – and their

own users – judge their stances on standing
up for our privacy rights?
For four years, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation has documented the practices of
major internet companies and service
providers, judging each ones publicly available
policies and highlighting best practices. Over
the course of those first four reports, we
watched a transformation take place in the
practices of major technology companies.
Overwhelmingly, tech giants began
publishing annual reports about government
data requests, promising to provide users
notice when the government sought access to
their data, and requiring a search warrant
before handing over user
content. Those best practices
we identified in early EFF
reports became industry
standards in a few short years,
and we’re proud of the role our

“While our daily lives have
upgraded to the 21st century,
the law hasn’t kept paces.”

84 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Evaluation criteria
To that end, we went ahead and used the
following five criteria to assess
company practices and policies:
1 Industry Accepted Best
Practices This is a combined
category that measures companies

on three criteria, and which they must fulfill all
of in order to receive credit:
Does the company require that the
government obtain a warrant from a judge
before handing over the content of user
communications?
Does the company publish a transparency
report, ie regular, useful data about how
many times governments sought user data
and how often the company provided user
data to governments?
Does the company publish law enforcement
guides explaining how they respond to data
demands from the government?
2 Tell users about government data
requests To earn a star in this category,
internet companies must promise to tell users
when the US government seeks their data
unless prohibited by law, in very narrow and
defined emergency situations, or unless doing
so would be futile or ineffective.
A notice gives users a chance to defend
themselves against overreaching government
demands for their data. The best practice is to
give users prior notice of such demands, so
that they have an opportunity to challenge
them in court. We have thus adjusted our
criterion from prior years. We now require that
the company provide advance notice to users
except when prohibited by law or in an
emergency and that the company also
commit to providing delayed notice after

“We’ve also refined our
expectations around
providing users notice .”

The EFF raised the bar for the 2015 report.

the emergency has ended or when the gag
has been lifted. As we were drafting last
year’s report, we let the companies know
that we were going to make this adjustment
for 2015 to give them a full year to
implement procedures to give delayed notice
when appropriate.
3 Publicly disclose the company’s data
retention policies This category awards
companies that disclose how long they
maintain data about their users that isn’t
accessible to the user—specifically including
logs of users’ IP addresses and deleted
content—in a form accessible to law
enforcement. If the retention period may vary
for technical or other reasons, the company
must disclose that fact and should publish an
approximate average or typical range, along
with an upper bound, if any. We awarded this
star to any company that discloses its policy
to the public—even if that policy is one that
EFF strongly disagrees with, eg if
the company discloses that it
retains data about its users forever.

4 Disclose the number of times
governments seek the removal

Government removal requests
For more than a year, EFF’s lead
investigative researcher Dave
Maass has been reporting on how
Facebook cooperates with prison
systems across the United States
to block prisoner access to the
social network. Facebook had even
set up a dedicated ‘Inmate
Account Takedown Request’ form
to help prison officials quickly and
easily flag prisoner-run accounts
for suspension, even when the
accounts didn’t violate any of
Facebook’s terms of service.
This practice was the
inspiration for EFF’s newest
category: tracking how often
companies are removing content
or shutting down accounts at the
behest of the government. To earn
credit in this category, companies

need not refuse all or even any
government content removal
requests. Rather, they must simply
be transparent about how often
they are blocking or removing
content or accounts.
Though this is simple enough,
many companies are falling short
in this area including Facebook,
the company whose practices
inspired the category. We
evaluated 24 companies and 15
received credit in this category,
though several don’t host content.
A particularly strong example of
this practice is the data published
by Twitter, which includes an
interactive map that allows users
to mouse over countries and get
details about content removal
requests over a six-month period.

Twitter offers a comprehensive breakdown of all its take-down
requests and compliance.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 85

Security | EFF privacy report

annual report played in pushing companies to
institute these changes. But times have
changed, and now users expect more.
The criteria we used to judge companies in
2011 were ambitious for the time, but they’ve
been almost universally adopted in the years
since then. Now, users should expect
companies to far exceed the standards
articulated in the original Who Has Your Back?
report. Users should look to companies such
as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon to be
transparent about the types of content that is
blocked or censored in response to
government requests, as well as what deleted
data is kept around in case government
agents seek it in the future. We also look to
these companies to take a principled stance
against government-mandated backdoors.
In this, the fifth annual Who Has Your
Back? report, we took the main principles of
the prior reports and rolled them into a single
category: Industry Accepted Best Practices.
We’ve also refined our expectations around
providing users notice and added new
categories to highlight other important
transparency and user rights issues. We think
it’s time to expect more from Silicon Valley.
We designed this report to take the principles
of Who Has Your Back? up a notch and see
which companies were still leading the pack.

Security | EFF privacy report

of user content or accounts and how often
the company complies It’s now industry
standard practice to have transparency
reports. We believe that companies’
responsibility to be transparent includes not
only disclosing when governments demand
user data, but also how often governments
seek the removal of user content or the
suspension of user accounts and how often
the company complies with such demands.
We award a star in this category to companies
that regularly publish this information, either
in their transparency report or in another
similarly accessible form. Companies should
include formal legal process as well as
informal government requests in their
reporting, as government censorship takes
many forms.

The full results
of the EFF’s
annual report
highlight a very
poor result from the
popular messaging
service, WhatsApp.

Follows
Tells users
Pro-user public
Discloses
Publicly
industryabout
policy:
government
discloses
accepted
government
opposes
policies on content removal
best practices data demands data retention
backdoors
requests

N/A
N/A

5 Pro-user public policies: opposing
backdoors Every year, we dedicate one
category to a public policy position of a
company. For three years, we acknowledged

“The tech industry stands
united against governmentmandated backdoors.”
companies working publicly to update and
reform the Electronic Communications
Privacy Act. Last year, we noted companies
who publicly opposed mass surveillance.
This year, given the reinvigorated debate over
encryption, we are asking companies to take a
public position against the compelled
inclusion of deliberate security weaknesses or
other compelled backdoors. This could be in a
blog post, in a transparency report, by publicly
signing a coalition letter, or through another
public, official, written format. We expect this
category to continue to evolve, so that we can
track industry players across a range of
important privacy issues.

The Good, bad & ugly
We are pleased to announce that nine
companies earned stars in every category that
was available to them (see right). It should be
noted that some companies host little or no
content, and thus the transparency about
government data removal requests may not
apply to them. These companies show that it’s
practical for major technology companies to
adopt best practices around transparency and
stand by their users when the government
comes knocking. Unfortunately, not all
companies are embodying such forwardthinking practices. Two major telecoms –
Verizon and AT&T – received especially poor
results, thus continuing a trend we identified in
prior reports where large telecom providers fail
to keep pace with the rest of the tech sector.

86 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

N/A

N/A
N/A

Notably, some companies that act as
Internet service providers (ISPs) and general
telecommunications providers are leading the
way in adopting strong policies in defence of
user rights. In particular, Credo and Sonic
again received credit in every category.
Comcast is close behind, earning 3 out of 4
possible stars. We hope other telecoms can
rise to these standards in the coming years.
It’s also clear that the tech industry stands
united against government-mandated
backdoors. We found that of the 24
companies we evaluated 21 have public
statements opposing backdoors, which
weaken security and endanger user privacy.
ISPs, cloud storage providers, webmail
providers, and social networks are
overwhelmingly aligned in rejecting
government-mandated security weaknesses.

Best practices
These standards were developed over the
course of four years of EFF reports, and they
encompass three of the main issues at the

heart of Who Has Your Back?: requiring a
warrant before handing over user content,
publishing regular transparency reports, and
publishing law enforcement guides. The
transparency reports and the law
enforcement guides help users understand
how often and under what circumstances the
companies are responding to government
data requests, while the warrant for content
ensures a strong legal requirement be met
before data is handed to law enforcement.
In 2011, no company received credit in all
of these categories. This year, 23 of the 24
companies in our report have adopted these
principles. It’s clear that these best practices
truly are accepted by the technology industry,
but WhatsApp is notably lagging behind.

Notifying users
This year, we asked companies to do more
than simply promise to inform users about
government data requests. We also asked
them to provide advance notice to users
before handing the data to the government.

The EFF report is very US centric,
but as a good portion of the world
uses so many of these US-based
services, it’s a report that affects
the majority of us. As open source
aficionados, the average Linux
Format reader is far more aware of
the privacy implications and far
better set to do something about
the situation. The mag has
previously looked at OwnCloud
[see Tutorials, LXF190] to see
just how easy it is to create your
own cloud-based document
collaboration and sharing system.
This means it’s possible to put
into place your own means of
escaping corporate rules,

regulations and privacy issues.
The reality is that not everyone
is in such a position and it’s
in everyone’s interest that
companies offering online services
do so in ways that protect us all
without kowtowing to government
demands. Or at least make people
aware of how their data is store
and when – if ever – access is
given to government bodies.
Cloud services are only going
grow in number, and the amount
of data we’ll store on them will do
the same. LXF will be looking at
new open source cloud options in
the future as more services, such
as www.onlyoffice.com appear.

In cases where companies are prohibited from
doing so, we asked the companies to promise
to provide notice after an emergency has
ended or a gag was lifted. Because we knew it
would take significant engineering and
workflow changes for some of the larger
companies to implement these practices, we
gave them more than a year’s notice that this
criterion would be included in the 2015 report.
Two companies, Google and Twitter, who
had previously earned credit in our report
for telling users about government data
requests did not receive credit this year
because they didn’t have policies in place that
tell users after a gag has been lifted or an
emergency ended.
Out of the 24 companies, 15 companies we
evaluated did meet this stronger criterion, and
we’re pleased to see the industry is evolving
in this way. We were particularly impressed by
the strong policy adopted by Dropbox, which
states the following:
“Dropbox’s policy is to provide notice to
users about law enforcement requests for
their information prior to complying with
the request, unless prohibited by law. We
might delay notice in cases involving the
threat of death or bodily injury, or the
exploitation of children.”

Data retention policies
For the first time this year, we extended our
evaluated companies to cover whether they
were transparent about what deleted data
they continued to store. Often, users may not
realise that data they delete from an email
service provider or off a social network is still
stored and available to law enforcement
agencies upon request.
Transparency is the first step to educating
users about what happens to their deleted
data, so we are evaluating companies on their

Running your own cloud services, using OwnCloud, is one way
to secure your own privacy.

transparency practices in this category.
Note that we aren’t making specific
requirements about a company deleting data
after a certain time. Indeed, some companies
publicly state that they maintain deleted data
and server logs indefinitely – a practice we
think is terrible for users. However, for this
report, we’re just asking companies to be
clear about retention periods for data
collected that may not be easily viewable to
the user (including IP addresses and DHCP
data) as well as content that users deleted.
Again, we saw 15 companies out of the 24
that we evaluated receive credit in this
category. We were particularly impressed by
the clarity and detail of Comcast’s disclosures.
The company maintains historical call detail
records for Xfinity Voice telephone service for
two years. This includes local, local toll, and
long distance records. In limited instances,
older records may be available, but will require
additional time and resources to retrieve. For
more details about its data retention policy
see the Comcast Law Enforcement Handbook
at http://bit.ly/LXFitsthelaw.

Opposing backdoors
One of the big trends we’re seeing across the
technology industry is a emphatic rejection of
government-mandated security weaknesses.
In fact, 21 out of the 24 companies we
evaluated took a public position opposing the
use of backdoors. This is a powerful statement
from the technology community that
Congress and the White House should heed.
Many of the companies have signed onto
a letter organised by the Open Technology
Institute that opposed mandates to
intentionally weaken security, which stated
the following:
“We urge you to reject any proposal that
US companies deliberately weaken the

security of our products … Whether you call
them ‘front doors’ or ‘back doors’, introducing
intentional vulnerabilities into secure
products for the government’s use will make
those products less secure against other
attackers. Every computer security expert
that has spoken publicly on this issue agrees
on this point, including the government’s
own experts.”

The EFF’s conclusions
We are pleased to see major technology
companies competing on privacy and user
rights. Practices that encourage transparency
with users about government data requests
are becoming the default for companies
across the web. While we’re only able to judge
a small selection of the tech industry, we
believe this is emblematic of a broader shift.
Perhaps invigorated by the ongoing debates
around government surveillance and in
response to growing public attention around
these issues, more and more companies are
voluntarily speaking out about government
data requests and giving users the tools to
fight back.
We think that this type of transparency
can help prompt broader discussion and
systematic change about how and when
governments access user data and eventually
prompt Congress to clarify and improve the
privacy laws for digital data. We also recognise
that tech companies are in a position to know
about and resist overbroad government
requests, so we need to do everything within
our power to encourage them to speak out
and fight back. In handing our data to these
companies, we’ve handed them a huge
responsibility to do what they can to stand
up for privacy. We’re pleased that many of
the companies we evaluated are stepping up
to the task.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 87

Security | EFF privacy report

Linux escapees

Security | Linux malware

A song of threat
and mitigation
Scared? Perhaps you
should be. We dig deep
to shed some light
on the shady world
of Linux malware...

ometimes in the pub you might
overhear someone mansplaining
that Linux is ‘more secure’ than
Windows. On one level he’s right,
desktop Linux users have
nowhere near as much to
fear in terms of viruses and
malware than their Windows
counterparts. It’s not that
they don’t exist, but it
represents such a tiny
portion of the malware ecosystem that it’s
perfectly reasonable (modulo safe
browsing habits) to not worry about it.
This boils down to a simple numbers
game: Any survey will put Linux at less than
2% of total desktop market share. With that in

mind, it makes much more sense for malware
authors to target Windows and (increasingly)
Mac systems. Victims can be infected in a
number of ways: usually opening dodgy email

malware onto visiting machines using a variety
of techniques. But by far the most prevalent
attack vector is the Flash plugin. Malfeasant
applets can leverage weaknesses here which
execute arbitrary code on the
remote machine, entirely
unbeknownst to the user. It’s
easy (and in some cases
justified) to blame Adobe for
shipping dodgy code, but again
the real issue is that so many
people have Flash installed that it makes good
business sense to target them. This is also true
for Adobe’s PDF Reader and Oracle’s Java
plugin. Chrome 42 has disabled official
support for all NPAPI plugins, citing the large
attack surface they levy against the browser.

“Malfeasant applets can
leverage weaknesses in Flash
which execute arbitrary code.”

88 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

links and attachments or by visiting
compromised websites. Very occasionally an
OS vulnerability can be exploited that allows
an attacker to remotely execute code on the
victim’s machine. A compromised – or even a
downright malicious – website may try to foist

It’s a config thing
While a compromise could be the result of
some new vulnerability with a catchy name
and stylish logo, by far the most common
cause is good old-fashioned server
misconfiguration. A server that is overly
permissive about what it lets an outsider
access or modify is a server that’s asking for
trouble. Common mistakes include allowing
the web server to write to sensitive files, or
having an SQL server accessible to the public
(when it need only listen locally or for
connections from selected IPs). Alternatively
attackers might get lucky through
bruteforcing SSH (or other) logins. This
shouldn’t really be possible – password logins
should be disabled (at least for sensitive
accounts) in favour of public key auth, and
multiple failed login attempts (which are time
consuming anyway) should result in a
temporary ban.
Thus, check your permissions, have
servers only listen on the localhost address
where possible (and connect via an SSH
tunnel if you need to access them), and have
some effective firewall rules in place. In the
latter case, it’s prudent to lock down outgoing
traffic as well as incoming. This might just
stop a malevolently installed program from
phoning home (they often communicate over

Munin comes
from the Norse for
‘memory’. Once
you’ve gathered
some stats, sudden
increases in
resource demand
become much easier
to spot.

IRC) and wreaking havoc. Root logins should
be disabled, and authorised users should use
sudo or su to do administrative tasks, since it
leaves an audit trail by way of the system log.
Assuming then that our front door, as it were,
is secure, how else might ne’er-do-wells
access our box? Well, that depends on how
secure the rest of it is.
PHP scripts provide a common attack
surface against web servers, though ultimately
any server side language could fall prey to
similar attacks. Wherever your web application
accepts user input, beware. Since you have no
control of exactly what users might input, it’s
important to sanitise it. Otherwise a malicious
user can inject code which, depending on the
context, could prove harmful. For example a
simple PHP search form might look like:

” />

Input is passed unchecked to the search.
php script, which means a user could inject
some JavaScript, for example searching for
the string:
“>
Results in an alert box. The initial doublequote terminates the HTML attribute value,
then the right bracket escapes from the input
element. To guard against these shenanigans,

be sure to use the available functions to filter
the input. The following code will escape any
special characters so they won’t cause harm:
&
ampersands?”;
var_dump(filter_var($url,FILTER_SANITIZE_
SPECIAL_CHARS));
?>
While the output in the browser will look
the same, if you look at the HTML source
generated by the script, you will see that it in
fact outputted the string:
“pointy brackets <and> &
ampersands?”
The escaped characters are much less use
to an attacker. You can also use FILTER_
SANITIZE_STRING here, which removes
(rather than escapes) tags. You could equally
well have injected PHP here or, where the
input is passed to a database, SQL
commands. When using PHP to interface with
databases, it’s worth using the PDO (PHP
Data Objects) API as opposed to MySQLi.
This will ensure that data will never be
mistaken for instructions.
Once discovered and confirmed,
vulnerabilities are referenced through the
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)
system, although individual products and
companies may have their own internal
systems too. In the case where information

How to update when you can’t update
There are, regrettably, a surfeit of servers
running distributions (distros) long past their
support window. Admins of these boxes really
should get their act together, but if upgrading
the OS is out of the question then you should
attempt to backport important security fixes.
Sometimes people will generously provide
packages for your ageing distro, which is
convenient but raises a question of trust. In
general, you’ll have to roll your own packages,

incorporating any new security fixes. Source
packages for old distros are easy to find (for old
Ubuntu versions look on https://launchpad.
net and http://archive.debian.org for Debian).
It’s a very good idea to set up a virtual
machine that’s as close a copy of your aged
server as you can manage. You’ll also need a
working gcc toolchain, the set up of which may
involve some dependency hell, and you’ll also
require all the package’s build dependencies.

You won’t want to do any major version
upgrades of vulnerable software since this will
likely bork your system, instead patches will
need to be adjusted to fit the old version, which
will involve some trial and error. If you’re using a
Debian-based distro then add the patch to the
debian/patches/all directory, inside the
package source’s directory, and add the patch
name to the file debian/patches/series. Then
run debuild to make the package.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 89

Security | Linux malware

But the compromised web servers doing
the malware-foisting are, more often than not,
Linux boxes. And our man in the pub told us
these are secure. In fact, there are any number
of ways by which a Linux box could end up
‘owned’ by a villain. And if it’s hosting a
popular website or sensitive database then all
the more motivation for someone to attempt
to do so. We often get questions from readers
asking how to set up a secure LAMP stack or
suchlike, and unfortunately there isn’t really an
easy answer. There are a few things you
should (and plenty of things you shouldn’t) do,
but there’s no accounting for a talented
adversary, or some obscure 0-day bug in one
of the many components upon which a
modern LAMP server relies. That said, let’s
focus on what we can mitigate against.

Security | Linux malware

relating to a new vulnerability is embargoed,
due to it not being made public, a CVE
identifier can still be reserved until it is
deemed safe to publicize the details. These will
be first disclosed only to relevant people so
that patches, or at least suitable workarounds,
are available come their announcement.
Various distros provide their own security
advisories as well, eg https://security.
gentoo.org. CVE provides a central exchange
for rapidly disseminating information about
emergent and historic issues.
Failure to apply patches and security
updates is asking for trouble. Comparatively
few attacks are the result of 0-day exploits
and widely available tools enable attackers to
scan potential marks for known vulnerabilities.
Major distros are quick to patch against newly
discovered flaws, so it’s important to update
affected packages, even if it means minor
interruptions as services are restarted. Five
minutes of downtime and a few grumbling
users are vastly more preferable than having
data stolen or having to rebuild the whole
system because someone snuck in and
installed a rootkit. HP’s Cyber Risk report
(released earlier this year) claims that 44% of
breaches were the result of vulnerabilities that
have been public for two to four years, which
is a sad indictment against sysadmins.
An even worse statistic from Verizon’s Data
Breach Investigations report is that nearly

97% of successful exploits last year were the
result of 10 known issues, eight of which have
been patched for over 10 years. While it’s easy
to read too much into such figures, a fair
conclusion to draw is that hackers will go for
the low-hanging fruit.
There are some legitimate cases where
security updates cannot be applied in the
usual way. Embedded systems, for example,
don’t typically provide any kind of package
management. They also tend to run on nonx86 architectures which makes compiling
your own binaries something of a pain.
The box (see Open vs Closed, below) provides
some guidelines on how to proceed if you
can’t update packages by the standard
channels, but this is really last resort stuff.
Just upgrade your OS and keep it up to date
and life will be made a whole lot easier. Debian
Jessie will be released by the time your read
this, if you’re looking for a solid OS with longterm support. Once you’ve upgraded your
ageing scripts/databases/wotnot and got rid
of any legacy PHP on your website, you can
rest assured subsequent package upgrades
probably won’t break it for the next three
years, thanks to Debian freezing program
versions and only applying security fixes.

Crouching malware

Vulnerabilities can be chained together, eg
some dodgy PHP might enable an attacker to
upload their own scripts to your server, a
problem with Apache might enable
this script to get executed,
whereupon it exploits a privilege
escalation bug somewhere else
that enables it to run as root. At
this point your machine is
effectively under the control of the
attacker and all your data should
be considered compromised. Of
course, all of this could in theory
happen without you noticing:
Everything might look and feel
perfectly fine, but a tiny Flash
applet on your home page may
now be serving your visitors a
Metasploit Framework is a valuable resource for
delectable blend of the finest

penetration testers, even this ASCII cow agrees

malware. For this reason, it’s important not to
ignore a security update because the
vulnerability it addresses doesn’t immediately
grant root access. It’s beneficial to get into the
habit of regularly scrutinising your server logs.
These can be quite unwieldy, but there are
tools that can help you. Logwatch is a
particularly handy tool which can summarise
accesses to SSH, web, database and any
other services you’re running into an easilydigestable format. The popular Perl-based
Awstats provides an attractive web interface
for perusing web, FTP or mail server logs.
It’s also prudent to keep an eye on system
load. The uptime command gives you one
second, one minute and fifteen minute
averages of CPU load, but you can graph
historical data using a web-based tool such as
Munin. The vmstat program gives you
information about CPU wait times and swap
requests which, when found in abundance,
point to heavy disk I/O and memory hogging
operations. Be on the lookout for any rogue
processes. The command
ps awwlx --sort=vsz
will lists processes sorted by virtual size, which
includes shared library and swap usage. So
any heavy hitters will be displayed at the end.
But rogue programs need not be large, or (in
the case of a rootkit) visible at all.

Hidden rootkit
Rootkits are malfeasant programs that use a
variety of stealth techniques to evade
detection. They can hide inside other
programs, the kernel itself, or even your BIOS
or other device firmware. In the latter cases,
they can be entirely undetectable since any
system calls which would ordinarily detect
them can be subverted. There are programs,
such as chkrootkit and rkhunter, that can
check for some known Linux rootkits. You can
also install an intrusion detection program
such as AIDE which will spot changes to your
filesystem, but it can take some configuring.
Some rootkits and other malware may
depend on a rogue kernel module. You can
mitigate against this by enabling modulesigning in your kernel. The kernel can generate

Open vs closed
It’s a fairly widespread fallacy that since open
source code is public it is inherently more open
to attacks. 2014 alone saw an embarrassing
goto bug in GnuTLS library, the ShellShock bug
in Bash, and the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
While anyone with enough coding experience
can, after the fact, snort derisively at the code
that caused these vulnerabilities, it doesn’t
mean that the mistakes are so glaring that they
should have been spotted earlier. Reading other

90 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

people’s code is hard, and while projects like
OpenSSL review all contributions, they’re not
going to catch everything. Having their dirty
laundry aired in this way may be slightly
ignominious, but at least the process from
discovery to repair is carried out openly: You can
laugh at that unchecked bound, but you can
also nod approvingly at a well-executed fix.
Anyone that says proprietary code doesn’t
suffer this much, need only turn on a Windows

machine on the first Tuesday of a given month.
In April 2015 there were 11 patches (four of
which were critical), and while we’ll never know
the details, we see phrases like ‘privilege
escalation and ‘security bypass’ etc, none of
which are things people want in an OS. Such
vulnerabilities can also be found through
techniques like fuzzing. Once the software
patches are released, they can be reverseengineered and weaponised.

a private key and certificate (which contains
the public key) for you, or you can use your
own. Any further modules you compile will
need to be signed with this key before the
kernel will load them. A handy Perl script in the
form of scripts/sign-file inside the kernel
sources directory will do just this, provided
you are in possession of the private key. For
example, to sign the module acx100 (an out-

“In an ideal world anyone who
discovered a 0-day would
responsibly disclose the issue.”
of-tree driver for certain Texas Instruments
wireless chipsets):
$perl /usr/src/linux/scripts/sign-file sha512 /
mnt/sdcard/kernel-signkey.priv /mnt/sdcard/
kernel-signkey.x509 acx100.ko
Notice how our key and certificate are
stored on an SD card. The certificate is public,
so we can leave it anywhere, but under no
circumstances should you store private keys
on the same medium as the data they protect.
This is exactly like locking your front door and
leaving the key in the lock. Once the signed
kernel is compiled you should copy this key to
a safe place (ie not anywhere on that system)
and securely erase the original. Signing kernel
modules is good, but the kernel itself could be
poisoned so it allows rogue modules to be
loaded. This can be worked around by booting
a signed kernel from EFI, which, though beyond
the scope of this article, is worth investigating.
Hashed and salted passwords on Linux are
stored in the file /etc/shadow, which is only
readable by root. If an attacker had sufficient
resources then they could try and brute force
these passwords, so that the credentials could
be used to gain access to other systems.
Any databases on a compromised machine
are ripe for plundering – if the machine is
holding personal information then this too can
be used to gain access to other systems, or to
carry out social engineering attacks. The
attacker could move to lock you out of your

We’ve mentioned 0-day exploits before,
without really defining what they are. These
are weaknesses which have not been
disclosed either publicly or privately. By
definition then, no fixes are available and all
you can do is hope that you will never get
bitten. In an ideal world anyone who
discovered a 0-day would heed their moral
obligation to responsibly disclose the issue to
the appropriate project.

DayZ(ero)
Unfortunately, this won’t always happen –
cyber criminals from various underground
communities will pay top dollar for a handy
0-day, and it’s unlikely that they’ll use this
knowledge honourably. Perhaps more
disturbingly, documents leaked by Ed
Snowden show that governments (including
the USA) are involved in purchasing and
stockpiling these exploits. Facebook’s bug
bounty and Chrome’s pwn2own contest
provide good motivation for hackers to
disclose their vulnerabilities responsibly, but
many open source projects lack the resources
to offer such financial incentives. In fact, many
projects are barely able to support
themselves: Werner Koch, citing fiscal
pressures, came close to abandoning GPG,
the only truly open source public key
encryption client. Fortunately, he was bailed
out by a grant from the Linux Foundation and
also received, following a social media
campaign, a generous sum in public
donations. Thankfully, many developers
working on high-exposure Linux projects are
employed or sponsored by corporate entities.
This is merely a glance over the Linux
security landscape. There are all many other
checks you can do, many other defences you
can employ, and, regrettably, many more
ways your server can fall victim to an attack.
Be vigilant, heed the advisories, and stay safe
out there, friend.

If you don’t believe DdoS attacks are real www.digitalattackmap.com will prove you wrong.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 91

Security | Linux malware

Following the National Cyber Security
Survey, CERT-UK is tasked with handling the
cyber response to incidents in the UK.

machine, or just delete everything on it, but
that would give the game away.
There’s all manner of imaginative fun that
an attacker can have with your box. Security
researcher, Andrew Morris runs a honeypot (a
setup designed to bait and monitor attacks)
which recently saw an attacker try and co-opt
one of its machine’s resources so that they
could be provisioned and sold as VPSes (see
http://morris.guru/huthos-the-totally100-legit-vps-provider). A common trick
used to be to install a cryptocurrency mining
daemon, although the rewards nowadays are
negligible. However, a vulnerability in the
DiskStation Manager (DSM) software that
runs on Synology NAS devices led to
thousands of them being turned into
Dogecoin miners. It’s thought the attackers
netted over $600,000 this way. Synology did
issue a fix for DSM in February 2014, but the
mass attack continued to generate revenue as
many users didn’t apply it.
The Metasploit Framework provides an
array of modules which enable pen
(penetration)
testing using
already known
vulnerabilities.
For example, to
search for CVElisted
vulnerabilities from last year use:
msf > search cve:2014
We might be interested in the Heartbleed
bug (CVE-2014-0160):
msf > use auxiliary/scanner/ssl/openssl_
heartbleed
… > set RHOSTS targetmachine.com
… > set verbose true
… > exploit
If a Metasploit module exists for an exploit,
then there’s a fair chance that said exploit is
being used in the wild somewhere, so take the
time to test any modules that seem relevant.

Security | Privacy distros

Privacy
distros
Cover your tracks and keep your identity private – we compare specialpurpose Linux distros that’ll help you stay invisible on the web.

How we tested...
Nearly two years ago mainstream
media started discussing PRISM,
which raised a lot of concerns about
privacy and anonymous access to
the Internet. Shortly after that,
Linux Format magazine came out
with great Anonymous distros
round-up, which highlighted a
noticeable outburst of new releases
for Tails, Whonix and other Linux
distributions for the security
conscious user. This time we revisit
the topic with a different selection
of contenders and a changed
perspective, too. We'll cover: the
current state of actively maintained
distros; their availability; ease of use;
performance; feature set and
documentation, and last, but not
least; we'll cover the level of
compromise they require for regular,
general-purpose computing.

here are numerous use
cases where someone
security conscious may
want to use a specialised
and non-mainstream Linux distribution
instead of a regular one. So we selected
five diverse options, each with its own
traits and benefits.
Tails is perhaps the most wellestablished system we’re covering, and
claims to provide anonymous internet
access, circumventing any censorship.
Ubuntu Privacy Remix (UPR) provides
anonymity together with a strong
means of securing your data. It runs
only in live mode, encrypts your data
and protects it against unsolicited

92 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

“The winner should be not only
secure, but balanced and friendly
even to less tech-savvy users.”
access. Whonix boasts nearly the
same features as Tails but goes even
further by dividing your workflow into
two parts: server and workstation.
Qubes OS implements the 'security
by compartmentalisation' approach,
but this time will face off against
other alternatives. Finally, JonDo
Live-DVD is a very interesting
solution, which grew out of the
multiplatform JonDonym, an internet

surfing anonymiser with privacy and
security in mind.
Anonymity and security tend to go
hand in hand, so we expect an added
benefit to be being able to nail down
your system so it's secure from wouldbe hackers. We'll compare all these
options with each other in different
terms, and the winner should be not
only secure, but generally balanced and
friendly even to less tech-savvy users.

What does it take to get them running?

hen you decide to try out an
anonymous distro, you have
to be aware that there's cost
involved in using them, but it varies, so
lets see what it takes to get our
contenders up and running.
Tails is the most well-known distro,
and we expected to download its ISO
file and write it onto USB stick via some
convenient tool like dd or front-end like
ImageWriter. But the process with Tails

turns out to be less straightforward,
because the image has to be modified
with the isohybrid utility. So, it went:
isohybrid tails-i386-1.2.3.iso -h 255 -s
63
dd if=tails-i386-1.2.3.iso of=/dev/sdc
bs=16M
Where /dev/sdc is your flash drive.
After that it works like a charm.
The system boots into the live session
just like a regular Debian-based distro.
Whonix and
Qubes OS are
significantly harder
to launch, and here
is why: Whonix
comes in the form
of two Virtualbox
machines, one for
the Gateway and
another for the
Workstation. The
idea behind this
exquisite delivery is
to isolate the
environment you
No, it's not a blue SUSE lizard, it's Ubuntu Privacy
work in from the
Remix, which features this cool Protected Pangolin!
internet access

point. So, the first thing to do is launch
and configure the Whonix Gateway on
one VM and then accessing it from
another VM, where all work will be done.
We didn't find any issues with it, but we
have to admit that only advanced users
will be able to deploy their workflow
under Whonix.
After writing Qubes OS's ISO onto
USB stick and booting from it, we
discovered that there's no live session,
only an installation mode. Qubes OS is
based on a recent Fedora release and
shares the same installer with it.
But the system has some quite
surprising system requirements:
it wants you to provide it with 4GB of
RAM, 32GB for the root partition and
prefers built-in Intel video chip, as
Nvidia or AMD have some issues in
Qubes OS. The system needs such
overstated resources due to its
'Security via isolation' approach, which
we'll discuss later.
Finally, Ubuntu Privacy Remix and
JonDo Live-DVD were extremely easy to
launch. Their respective live sessions
were fast and easy to use.

Verdict
JonDo Live

+++++
Qubes OS

+++++
Ubuntu
Privacy Remix

+++++
Tails

+++++
Whonix

+++++
Easy access
to anonymous
live sessions
wins out.

Development state
Private and secure today, but how actively are they maintained?

Privatix) or left unmaintained for years
(like Liberté). Some may think that it's a
matter of new features and fixes, but
let's not forget that abandoned Linux
distros may have trouble running on
modern hardware that has things like
UEFI and Secure Boot.
Tails is one of the
best maintained security
distros, with a very fast
pace of development.
New releases are rolled
out every 2-4 months,
which means Tails has
had six releases during
2014 and went from
v0.23 to 1.2.3 rapidly.
The Ubuntu Privacy
Remix (UPR) developers,
in comparison, don't
seem to be in such a
hurry, but keep
JonDo Live-DVD has embarassingly frequent updates. development steady.

his aspect is often overlooked,
but it's vital as regular users will
want to have an up-to-date and
actively supported distro. The reality is
that some secretive distros are
abandoned by developers (such as

UPR emerged in December 2008 and
has been sticking with Ubuntu LTS
releases. The current version is 12.04r1
(Protected Pangolin) which supports
new hardware but is still a very
lightweight distro.
Whonix is a relatively new project,
which started in 2012 and has been
very actively developed since then.
Now at version 9.6, Whonix continues
to get updates every few months.
Qubes OS is similar in that its birth
also dates back to 2012, and the project
has reached R2 release. Qubes OS's
development is very active, with lots of
well-documented alpha, beta and
release candidate versions published
every few months.
But that leaves us with the insanely
speedy development record of JonDo
Live-DVD. Somewhat staggeringly,
JonDo boasts a changelog, which is
updated every 5-10 days!

Verdict
JonDo Live

+++++
Qubes OS

+++++
Ubuntu
Privacy Remix

+++++
Tails

+++++
Whonix

+++++
All our
participants are
in rude health &
updated often.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 93

Security | Privacy distros

Availability

Security | Privacy distros

Web surfing protection
How effectively do they shield you from web threats?

hen you're accessing the internet,
things become complicated and no
one can guarantee that everything
you access is 'absolutely' safe. But most of our
distros try their best to offer the maximum
possible protection.

We also assume that while security is a top
priority, users will still need to: access
webmail; download and upload files; store
passwords and sensitive data; and perform
other common activities on the internet.
Anonymity requires some compromises, such

as lower download speeds and a harder
password policy, but we also insist on a
comfortable web browsing experience. But
don't confuse greater security and hardened
internet policies with good user data safety.
This is different and something we’ll cover later.

JonDo Live-DVD +++++
JonDo provides network anonymity using the JonDo IP changerv (aka
JonDonym), which is a Java Anon Proxy, similar to Tor. JonDo enables
web browsing (via a Firefox-based JonDoBrowser) with revocable
pseudonymity and sends requests through a cascade and mixes the
data streams of multiple users to further hide the data to outsiders.
It's worth noting that while the whole thing is open source, there are
free and commercial plans. The free one can only use destination ports
80 and 443 that are used for the HTTP and HTTPS protocol (enough for
web browsing and FTP). The premium service provides additional
SOCKS proxies for extra anonymisation and a better connection speed.
Generally, we find JonDo safer than Tor, because JonDo is much more
centralised and can’t include malicious nodes (which is possible in Tor).

Qubes OS +++++
Qubes OS implements another concept of virtualisation-based isolation.
The system runs Xen hypervisor with multiple instances of an altered
Fedora 20 virtualised on top of it. Qubes OS is divided into several
'domains' and applications can be run as virtual machines (AppVMs).
The standard way of anonymising network traffic is using Qubes
TorVM, which connects to the internet and runs Tor. Other applications
can be assigned to use this 'Torified' connection. The positive side is that
an application doesn't need to be aware of Tor; it runs in regular mode
without needing add-ons, and all IPv4 TCP and DNS traffic is routed by
Tor. The downside is that you need to configure everything manually.
We also noticed that this concept tends to restrain attacks and malware
from spreading outside domain/AppVM, rather than prevent them.

Data safety
How safe is your sensitive data within each distro?

hough the most important
feature of Tails is its 'amnesia' in
live mode, you can install it to
your hard drive and use it just like a
regular Linux distro. Among all of the
benefits of doing that, you'll note that
your RAM will be wiped on reboot or
shutdown, which will protect against
forensic recovery techniques.
Ubuntu Privacy Remix shines when
it comes to securing your data. The
only way to store it is using the
extended TrueCrypt-Volumes, which

94 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

can be stored on removable USB media
only (which, in turn, is mounted with a
'noexec' option). There's no way for your
data to be left on drive partitions, not
even unnoticed or by accident.
Whonix is much less amnesic than
most of the others. On the Workstation
side all data can be stored persistently,
and its up to you how you keep it. You
may want to encrypt and protect it with
an extra password or store it on isolated
location. But generally Whonix doesn’t
have a strong focus on data security.

Qubes OS is much better for data
security, because it's possible to isolate
sensitive data in a separate domain/
AppVM without network access, but
again the security level is heavily
dependent on the skill of the user and
how disciplined they are. JonDo LiveDVD offers a way for using persistent
storage, and we found it to be quite
user-friendly. It's ready to use LUKS
encrypted USB sticks and drives and
provides a special assistant to prepare
your media.

Verdict
JonDo Live

+++++
Qubes OS

+++++
Ubuntu
Privacy Remix

+++++
Tails

+++++
Whonix

+++++
This time
UPR offers the
most security
for your data.

Sad but true, Ubuntu Privacy Remix (UPR) has no networking
functionality at all. The system kernel is modified so that it ignores any
network hardware, making UPR a perfectly isolated system, which can’t
be attacked via LAN, WLAN, Bluetooth and Infrared etc. So, there's no
web browsing, no cookies, no trojans nor any data downloaded from the
web, and no instant messaging or remote or cloud services. Almost all
traces of network connectivity are wiped off the UPR, though some are
still there. For example, ifconfig and ifup/ifdown commands are there,
but they are virtually helpless, as network hardware is violently disabled.
So in this test UPR fails to be any use for web surfing, even if it is part
of the design. If, however, you're paranoid and want a system that avoids
being online entirely then UPR will be the right solution.

Tails +++++
Tails includes top-notch networking features, and the most important
one is Tor, which is an open network of anonymous servers that
attempts to prevent your identification and traffic analysis.
This is accompanied by Vidalia, a front-end for easy set up, a
preconfigured Firefox ESR-based web browser, which is equipped with a
Tor Button, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript and AdBlock Plus extensions.
Tails many extras include I2P anonymising network, proxy and VPN
front-ends, the Florence virtual keyboard, application isolation via
AppArmor, PWGen for generating strong passwords and KeePassX for
managing them, and AirCrackNG for wireless networks auditing etc.
Tor and I2P traffic are also divided, thanks to the dedicated I2P
Browser, and Pidgin uses the more secure Off-the-Record (OTR) mode.

Whonix +++++
Whonix also relies on Tor for network anonymity and shares many thirdparty tools with Tails. So lets point out the differences. Here the Tor client
runs on Whonix-Gateway, which provides better protection against IP
and location discovery on the Workstation.
The level of IP and DNS protocol leak protection is sometimes the
same, but in Tails there's a possibility of misconfiguration, which can
lead to IP leak and in Whonix this doesn’t exist. Even if the workstation is
compromised (eg by someone getting root access), it would still be
impossible to find out the real IP. Isolating the proxy server within a
standalone VM (or maybe a physical PC) works great. Whonix also
makes use of 'entry guards' in Tor (randomising endpoints), which is
something that is missing in Tails out of the box.

Performance
Verdict

How snappily do they run?

ore recent Tails uses 3.16.7
kernel and loads into Gnome
Shell 3.4 in fallback mode by
default. The desktop is very lightweight;
nearly as fast as classic Gnome 2 in
previous Tails releases, but official
system requirements say it needs at
least 1GB of RAM to work smoothly,
which we think is a bit much.
Ubuntu Privacy Remix was updated
to use the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS package
base and thus has numerous backports
and modern features, yet it remains

very easy on resources. UPR uses a
classic Gnome 2 desktop, which loads
in a couple of seconds. We'd suggest
that 512MB of RAM is enough, though
UPR can make use of the larger RAM
volume as the system implements
'ramzswap' to store swap file in RAM.
JonDo Live-DVD can boot even on
very old CPUs, and its XFCE desktop is
very fast. However, you'll need 1GB RAM
to work smoothly with the Java-based
JonDo app and the web browsers.
Whonix is different, again, because

you need a host capable of running two
Virtualbox guest machines at a time.
Your host OS and configuration is down
to you, but you're going to need at least
4GB of RAM, a spare 12GB of hard drive
space. However, the SSD and CPU with
hardware virtualisation support are
both very welcome.
For Qubes OS you'll need an even
beefier machine: a 64-bit CPU, 4GB of
RAM and at least 32GB for root
partition. Qubes OS is, therefore, the
most demanding choice.

JonDo Live

+++++
Qubes OS

+++++
Ubuntu
Privacy Remix

+++++
Tails

+++++
Whonix

+++++
Both Tails
and JonDo
are modest
on resources.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 95

Security | Privacy distros

Ubuntu Privacy Remix +++++

Security | Privacy distros

Desktop usability
Can you be anonymous and still enjoy a feature-rich desktop?

hough Tails is 'amnesic',
it includes an installer, which can
create a persistent partition
either on the same USB stick you boot
from, or another USB storage device.
This makes Tails a pleasant experience
for permanent work in live mode. It also
includes a vast selection of software,
from LibreOffice and Gimp to Audacity
and Sound Juicer.

JonDo Live-DVD also has a very
usable Xfce live desktop, which is
packed with all the essential desktop
software, but its main advantage is that
you can install both the JonDo IP
changer and JonDoFox browser on any
Linux distro. This is a huge bonus,
because you can stay with your alreadyconfigured Linux box and seamlessly
turn anonymous.

The desktop in Tails will be familiar and easy to use for Gnome users.

Ubuntu Privacy Remix (UPR)
includes only basic Gnome 2
accessories and very few desktop apps
(Scribus and LibreOffice are the most
noticeable examples). The desktop
experience in UPR is poor, so much so
that even extracting screenshots
turned out to be a problem. Worst of all,
UPR is made deliberately nonmanipulative, so nothing can be fixed
from a desktop perspective.
Both Whonix guest machines use
the KDE desktop on top of Debian.
We really love KDE, but it seems to be
excessive on the Gateway side. But the
Workstation experience turned out to
be very comfortable. Aside from some
minor slowdowns and restrictions,
because of it being a virtualised and
firewalled system, Whonix Workstation
can be used as a fully featured desktop.
Qubes OS is an entirely different
experience: it’s easy to install but can
work very slowly later down the line.
Its KDE desktop is intuitive, but
interaction between domains requires
extra skill. For example, copying and
sharing files from one domain or
AppVM to another has its own logic and
clipboard usage is limited.

Verdict
JonDo Live

+++++
Qubes OS

+++++
Ubuntu
Privacy Remix

+++++
Tails

+++++
Whonix

+++++
The best
offer familiar
software and
anonymity tools.

Documentation and support
Is there any help and where do you get answers to questions?

ood wiki pages, FAQs and other
helpful documentation are
important for any software. This
is certainly the case with anonymous
distros that can be frustrating even for
people familiar with Linux.
Tails offers in-depth end-user
documentation with general
information, first steps, commonly
asked questions and detailed
explanations for almost all aspects,
even those not related to Tails directly,
but it’s all essential if you want to study
the basics of privacy and encryption.
There’s even a chat room and a 'request
a feature' form.
Ubuntu Privacy Remix has a neat
and compact website, yet there isn’t
that much materials, but the quantity of
UPR resources corresponds with its
feature set. You can find some helpful

96 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

how-to guides, such as
instructions for creating a
personal UPR build (with a
custom software set).
Nearly all Whonix
documentation resides in a
dedicated and detailed wiki
portal. We found it to be very
comprehensive and more
The Whonix help section is huge and scrollable.
in-depth than the resources
Even advanced and in-depth topics are covered.
Tails supplies – Whonix has
more articles, more support options
There’s also a helpful developer's corner,
and a very active forum.
which provides all you need to develop
The Qubes OS project also has a wiki custom solutions.
portal with essential and advanced
JonDo has help topics, an FAQ,
articles. The OS architecture is
tutorials, a wiki portal and a forum.
explained in detail and there's an FAQ,
Though it looks complete, a thorough
tutorial slides and user documentation.
review shows many weaknesses. The
Qubes OS has many extra features,
FAQ is brief, and the wiki is very small.
such as running non-Linux AppVMs,
Very few topics are actually covered,
and this is covered in a detailed manual.
which is disappointing.

Verdict
JonDo Live

+++++
Qubes OS

+++++
Ubuntu
Privacy Remix

+++++
Tails

+++++
Whonix

+++++
Whonix
sneaks in front
of Tails for it’s
level of support.

The verdict
J

ava Anon Proxy was a 2007
startup, backed by solid research
work of many years. Here, we
witness the fruit of that work as JonDo
Live-DVD clearly outperforms the
former king of anonymous web access:
Tails. Both projects are premiere quality,
however, with balanced features and
active development.
It's hard to say whether Tor provides
perfect anonymity or not, but it's
technically possible to single out a Tor
user either through a compromised
node or by matching traffic and user
behaviour with other details, or even by
correlation-timing attacks. On the other
hand, JonDo node selection is less
random than Tor, and we're not
completely sure to what extent you can
trust it. Both solutions slow the internet
speeds greatly, and the JonDo proxy
cascade seems to be even slower than
Tor node chain. But connection speed is
not top priority, because you’re getting
well-tested and supported anonymity.

1st JonDo Live-DVD

Other participants clearly defined
the cost they charge for advanced
privacy and security. Whonix forces you
to use virtual machine, which is always
slower than a host computer, has little
or no 3D support and takes extra time
and skills to install it for the first time.
But once you've done that Whonix can
be configured to your need just like any
other Debian-based distro.
It would also appear that Qubes OS
will only work on quite high specified
hardware, but even then it runs even
slower than virtualised Whonix. Qubes
OS does, however, deliver good
anonymity, but its main purpose is to
isolate different segments so that one
segment can’t bring down the others if
compromised. You will also have to
learn how different
software domains
communicate with
each other.
The approach of
Ubuntu Privacy

+++++

Fast, portable, effective and easy to use for anonymous web surfing.

4th Qubes OS

Web: https://tails.boum.org Licence: GNU GPLv3 Version: 1.2.3
Balanced for 'mostly' safe internet access. Also a friendly way to try Tor.

+++++

Web: https://qubes-os.org Licence: Mainly GNU GPL Version: R2
Very secure, but like riding a bumpy narrow road between concrete walls.

5th UPR

+++++

3rd Whonix

JonDoFox won't
let you surf the
internet unless
your start Java
Anon Proxy.

“JonDo Live-DVD clearly
outperforms the former king of
anonymous web access: Tails.”

Web: http://bit.ly/JonDoLive-DVD Licence: BSD Version: 0.9.71.2

2nd Tails

Remix is unconventional, but it's also
about anonymity although dealing with
it very differently to the others. The
project's website shows how you can
create your own UPR spin-off and use it
as a perfectly isolated system, which
leaves no traces on a computer. UPR
can also detect virtual environments
and eject its ISO from its settings, but
all this is solely local, without any
connectivity with the outside world.

+++++

Web: www.privacy-cd.org Licence: Mainly GNU GPL Version: 12.04r1
Consider it as a special-purpose distro for securing sensitive data.

Over to you...

Web: www.whonix.org Licence: Mainly GNU GPL Version: 9.6
Very usable and super-secure, but the hardware specs are quite high.

Tell Linux Format about your anonymous web surfing experiences at
lxf.letters@futurenet.com. What’s your favoured distro for privacy?

Also consider...
Many people share the illusion that they can be
invisible and unreachable under the Tor
network. In fact, this is only true until a user
breaks a law or somehow attracts attention
from intelligence services. Please use
anonymity only for peaceful purposes and at
your own risk. On the other hand, you have a

right to keep your data away from third-parties,
so why not take some measures?
The choice of anonymising distros is larger
than what we’ve covered. Privatix and Liberté
both haven’t received any updates for a long
time, but they are still usable and ready for web
surfing on most machines. There are other

projects too, such as IprediaOS, Polippix and
Mandragora that didn’t fit in this Roundup but
are worth considering. In fact, it’s not too hard
to turn your existing Linux install into a digital
fortress. Almost all tools for anonymity on
Linux are open source, including Tor front-ends,
extensions and encryption methods.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 97

Security | Privacy distros

Privacy distributions

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Worried about security? Configure a Raspberry Pi as an access
point that routes all traffic over the anonymous Tor network.

o you use Tor to prevent big brother from tracking you
online? Although it is pretty straightforward to use,
it can be quite a hassle to configure Tor on all your
Internet-enabled devices. You can save yourself a lot of hassle
by using a Raspberry Pi as an anonymised wireless access
point. The Pi will dole out an IP address and any device that’s
connected to it will be able to access the Internet via the Tor
network. To get this project up and running, you’ll need a
Raspberry Pi along with an SD card with the Raspbian distro.
If you haven’t done this before, follow the walkthrough to get
Raspbian up and running. You’ll also need an Ethernet cable.
Hook one end into the Pi’s Ethernet port and the other into
your wireless router. This is how the Pi will connect to the
Internet. You’ll also need a USB Wi-Fi adaptor that’s
compatible with the Raspberry Pi. If you haven’t got one yet,
check the list of compatible adapters that are known to work
on the Pi (http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Wi-Fi_Adapters).

Access Point Pi
Once you’ve setup the Pi, you can configure the Pi from a
remote machine via SSH. For the rest of the tutorial, we’ll
assume the IP address of your Pi is 192.168.2.100. Fire up a
terminal that’s connected to the same router as the Pi and
enter
ssh pi@192.168.2.100
to connect to it. After authenticating yourself into the Pi, use
iwconfig
to make sure the wireless adaptor is recognised by the device.
Now refresh its package list with
sudo apt-get update

and install the software that will make it act as an access
point with:
sudo apt-get install hostapd isc-dhcp-server
When it’s installed, it’s time to set it up. Begin by editing
the /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf file that controls the DHCP and
automatically assigns IP addresses to all connected devices.
Open it in the nano text editor with
sudo nano /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf
and comment out the following two lines by adding a # in
front of them, so that they read:
#option domain-name "example.org";
#option domain-name-servers ns1.example.org, ns2.example.
org;
In the same file, scroll down and uncomment the word
authoritative; by removing the # in front.
Then scroll down to the end of the file and add the
following lines:
subnet 192.168.12.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.12.5 192.168.12.50;
option broadcast-address 192.168.12.255;
option routers 192.168.12.1;
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;
option domain-name "local";
option domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4;
}
In these lines we define the IP address of our Pi access
point (192.168.12.1), the range of the IP addresses it’ll hand
out to connected devices (from 192.168.12.5 to
192.168.12.50) as well as the address of the domain name
servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). You can change any of these
values as per your preference. Save the file (Ctrl+X) once
you’re done.

Quick
tip
If you get Locale
errors when
connected to the
Pi remotely, make
sure you don’t
forward your locale
by editing /etc/
ssh/ssh_config
and commenting
out the SendEnv
LANG LC_* line.

Setting up a static IP

It takes more than Tor to stay anonymous. Make sure you
read the documentation on the Tor Project’s website.

We’ll now edit the /etc/default/isc-dhcp-server to specify
the interfaces that our new DHCP server should listen to.
Open the file and scroll down to the line that reads
INTERFACES="". Insert wlan0 between the quotes so that it
now reads INTERFACES="wlan0", and save the file.
Now we’ll setup the wireless adaptor (wlan0) and give it a
static IP address. First, deactivate the wireless adaptor with:
sudo ifdown wlan0
command and then open the /etc/network/interfaces file.
In the file, comment out every existing entry associated with
wlan0, such as:
# iface wlan0 inet manual

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 99

Security | Tor hotspot

Tor: Set up a
Wi-Fi hotspot

Security | Tor hotspot

Quick
tip
Use the tail -f /
var/log/syslog
command to
keep an eye on all
system messages.
This might come
in handy if you are
unable to connect
to the Pi hotspot.

# wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
# iface default inet dhcp
Then add the following lines below the line that reads
allow-hotplug wlan0 to set the static IP address for the new
access point:
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.12.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
Save the file and activate the interface with
sudo ifconfig wlan0 192.168.12.1

Make your point
Now that we’ve defined the wireless access point it’s time to
configure it. Create a new file called /etc/hostapd/hostapd.
conf with the following contents:
interface=wlan0
ssid=TorSpot
hw_mode=g
channel=6
macaddr_acl=0
auth_algs=1
ignore_broadcast_ssid=0
wpa=2
wpa_passphrase=$$Your_Passphrase$$
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK

Use the tail -f /var/log/syslog common to keep an eye on the devices
connected to your Tor hotspot.

wpa_pairwise=TKIP
rsn_pairwise=CCMP
We’ve setup a password-protected network called
TorSpot. You can specify a different name for the access point
by specifying it in the ssid= string. Also change the wpa_
passphrase= string to specify a custom password. You’ll
need to enter this password to authenticate yourself to the
Pi’s access point.
Next up, we’ll tell the Pi where to find this configuration
file by pointing to it in the /etc/default/hostapd file. Open
the file, find the commented out line that reads #DAEMON_
CONF="" and uncomment and edit it to read DAEMON_
CONF="/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf".

NAT setup
We now need to set up NAT to allow multiple clients to
connect to the Pi’s access point and route all their traffic
through the single Ethernet IP. Edit the /etc/sysctl.conf file
and at the bottom add the following line:
net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
Save the file and then enter
sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward"
to activate the forwarding. You’ll now have to specify the
routing rules that will connect the Ethernet port (eth0) that’s
connected to the internet and the Wi-Fi access point (wlan0)
which is exposed to the devices within your network:
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j
MASQUERADE
sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o wlan0 -m state --state
RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
By default, these rules will be flushed when you restart the
Pi. To make them permanent, first run:
sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables.ipv4.nat"
Then edit the /etc/network/interfaces file, scroll down
to the very end and add
up iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.ipv4.nat
what this does is loads the rules when the devices are
activated on boot.
Your Pi access point is now all set. To test it restart the
DHCP server with
sudo service isc-dhcp-server restart
and manually enable the access point with our configuration

Your own hostapd
Sometimes even though a wireless adaptor
works out of the box on the Raspberry Pi, it
might throw errors when it’s asked to serve as
an access point. This is especially true of cards
that use Realtek chipsets, like the one we’ve
used – MicroNext MN-WD152B – which uses the
RTL8192CU chipset. While it works right off the
bat for browsing the web, it doesn’t work with
the hostapd client in Raspbian’s repository.
It turns out Realtek has its own version of
hostapd client which you’ll have to use in case
you are in the same predicament as us.
To download the file, head to Realtek’s
download section (http://bit.ly/
RealtekWiFiDrivers) and select your chipset
from the ones listed. This takes you to a page
that lists the drivers for your chipsets. From this
page grab the driver for Linux, which will

100 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

download a compressed zip file with a longwindy name. In our case this was called
RTL8188C_8192C_USB_linux_
v4.0.2_9000.20130911.zip. We’ll just refer to it
as driver.zip.
Copy this file to the Raspberry Pi using scp
using something like:
scp driver.zip pi@192.168.2.100:/home/pi
This copies the file to the Pi’s home directory.
Now extract the file with
unzip driver.zip
and cd into the wpa_supplicant_hostapd
directory. It’ll list several compressed tarballs.
Use the tar zxvf command to extract the file
beginning with wpa_supplicant_hostapd.
Now cd into the hostapd directory under the
extract directory. This directory has a file named
Makefile. Open it in a text editor and replace the

CFLAGS = -MMD -O2 -Wall -g
line towards the top of the file with
CFLAGS=-MMD -Os -Wall -g
Save the file and enter make to compile the
hostapd client. It’ll take quite some time and
when it’s complete it’ll replace the hostapd
binary in this directory.
Before using this new version, move out the
old version with:
sudo mv /usr/sbin/hostapd /usr/sbin/hostapd.
orig
Then copy over the newly compiled version
with the following:
sudo cp hostapd /usr/sbin/
And give it the right permissions with:
sudo chmod 755 /usr/sbin/hostapd
You should now be able to get your access
point online without any issues.

Torify access
Your Raspberry Pi is now fully functional as a wireless
hotspot. However, the data is still not anonymised. So let’s
add Tor to the mix. SSH back into the Pi and install Tor with
sudo apt-get install tor
When it’s installed, edit Tor’s config file /etc/tor/torrc
and add the following at the top:
Log notice file /var/log/tor/notices.log
VirtualAddrNetwork 10.192.0.0/10
AutomapHostsSuffixes .onion,.exit
AutomapHostsOnResolve 1
TransPort 9040
TransListenAddress 192.168.12.1
DNSPort 53
DNSListenAddress 192.168.12.1
These settings inform Tor about the IP address of our
access point and asks that it anonymises any traffic that
flows over it. Next up, we’ll change the routing tables so that
connections via the Wi-Fi adaptor (wlan0) are routed through
Tor. First, flush the existing redirection and NAT rules with the
sudo iptables -F
command go on to
sudo iptables -t nat -F
command. Since, we’ll still want to be able to SSH into the Pi,
we’ll add an exception for SSH’s Port 22 with:

sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i wlan0 -p tcp --dport
22 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 22
We’ll now add two rules. The first is a passthrough rule for
DNS lookups and the second directs all TCP traffic to Tor’s
port 9040:
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i wlan0 -p udp --dport
53 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 53
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i wlan0 -p tcp --syn -j
REDIRECT --to-ports 9040
Like before, these rules won’t be carried on to the next
session. To load them on reboot, all you have to do is save
them to the NAT save file like before with
sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables.ipv4.nat"
In the previous section, we’ve already configured the /
etc/network/interfaces file to load the contents of this file
when the interfaces are activated.
You can now enable the Tor service with
sudo service tor start
and update the relevant boot scripts with
sudo update-rc.d tor enable.
That’s it. Now restart the Pi. When it’s back up again, you’ll
be able to connect to the Pi hotspot, TorSpot, as before.
However, unlike as before all your traffic will now be routed
through the Tor network.
You can verify that this is happening by heading to check
https://torproject.org from any device that’s connected to
TorSpot. The page will also list your IP address which will not
be that of your ISP. Visit this page from another device
connected to TorSpot and it’ll show a different address.
Congratulations, you can now anonymously browse the web
on all your devices!

Quick
tip
We’ve used Google’s
DNS service in this
tutorial, but you can
use another service
like OpenDNS or
your ISPs DNS
servers by pointing
to them in the
/etc/dhcp/dhcpd.
conf file.

Verify the traffic redirection rules with the sudo iptables -t nat -L command.

Tor-in-a-box options
If you find this tutorial too cumbersome, or want
to set up something for a non-technical friend or
relative, there are several ready-made hardware
solutions that can anonymise all their web traffic
in a similar fashion.
There’s the OnionPi Pack from AdaFruit
(http://bit.ly/AdaOnionPi) which includes a
Raspberry Pi B+ and a compatible USB Wi-Fi
adaptor along with a case for the Pi, cables, SD
card and everything else you need to setup your
Torrified Wi-Fi hitspot. The bundle costs $80.

However, you’ll still have to follow the instructions
and set it all up yourself.
If you’d rather have something more plug and
play, there’s the SafePlug from the guys who
bought us PogoPlug. It’s a $49 device that plugs
into your wireless router and once activated
routes all traffic over the Tor network. A neater
and smaller alternative is the Anonabox
(www.anonabox.com). It initially launched on
Kickstarter but after its funding was suspended it
relaunched on Indiegogo. Here it was listed at

$51 and surpassed its funding target in early
January 2015 and will begin shipping in February
2015. Anonabox is a router that you can directly
connect to via Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
Another router-based option is Portal which
stands for Personal Onion Router To Assure
Liberty. The project produces a pre-built software
image for several TP-Link routers. You can simply
flash the Portal firmware image onto these router
following the instructions on the project’s
website (https://github.com/grugq/portal).

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 101

Security | Tor hotspot

with the following command [Read the ‘Your Own Hostapd’
box, p72, if you get an unknown driver error]:
sudo /usr/sbin/hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
If everything goes well, the wireless access point (TorSpot)
is listed in the list of available Wi-Fi hotspots. You can connect
to it from another computer or a smartphone and
authenticate using the password you specified in the
hostapd.conf file. When connected, you should be able to
browse the Internet normally.
Once you have tested the new access point, let’s cement
the settings so that they are activated as soon as the Pi boots
up. Start the hostapd and DHCP services with the
sudo service hostapd start
and
sudo service isc-dhcp-server start
commands and then update the init scripts with
sudo update-rc.d hostapd enable
and
sudo update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server enable
Now restart the Pi with
sudo shutdown -r now
When the Pi is back up again, you’ll be able to connect to
the new access point and browse normally.

Security | Encrypt with Ecryptfs

Encryption: full
drive protection
Keep your files safe from prying eyes, even other users of your computer, by
creating a stacked filesystem with ecryptfs.

This is how your
files look after
encryption, and
their contents
are equally
unintelligible.

ast year, when everyone was interested in privacy
in the aftermath of Edward Snowden's revelations,
Linux Format magazine looked at using cryptsetup
to encrypt whole disk partitions with the Linux kernel's
dm-crypt facilities, but there are other encryption systems
available. There are several ways of encrypting data on
your computer.
The method we looked at before encrypted a whole block
device, usually a disk partition. This is good for whole system
encryption, but makes everything available once the system
is booted. There was also TrueCrypt, which works with either
whole devices or virtual disks (a large file that acts like a disk).
Sadly the project was abandoned in 2014, and although there
have been a couple of forks many people are still using the
7.1a version (the final, neutered 7.2 version only allows
viewing of TrueCrypt volumes). Another alternative is for the
filesystem to handle the encryption, as ZFS does on Sun
systems, but none of the main Linux filesystems provide
encryption themselves.

Introducing ecryptfs
The next option, and the one we are concerned with today,
is what is called a stacked filesystem, where you mount one
filesystem on top of another, and this is what ecryptfs uses
(cryptsetup, which we’ve covered before, uses stacked block
devices, below the filesystem).
Because ecryptfs works on top of the normal filesystem,
it's not restricted to entire disk partitions, it can be used to
encrypt individual directories. This is the method Ubuntu
uses to provide encrypted home directories if you choose
that option during installation. It is easiest to explain with an
example. The ecryptfs filesystem itself is contained in the
Linux kernel, but you will need to install the ecryptfs-utils
package for the tools to work with it. Create two directories
called crypt and plain, then you can create an encrypted
directory with this command:
sudo mount.ecryptfs crypt plain
You will be asked a number of questions, obviously you
should choose a password that is both secure and
memorable (or store it somewhere safe). Most of the rest can
be left as the defaults with the possible exception of Enable
Filename Encryption that you may want to set to yes.
Now copy some files to plain then look in crypt. You will see
the same filenames if you didn’t enable filename encryption,
otherwise you will see encrypted names. Either way, the
contents will be encrypted; try viewing one of the files. Now
unmount it with:
sudo umount plain
The readable versions of the files have disappeared,
leaving only the encrypted versions. Run the above mount
command and the contents of plain will reappear. This
method of mounting is cumbersome but it illustrates how
ecryptfs functions. The filesystem you mounted on plain is
virtual, it exists only in memory, the only data written to disk
are the encrypted files in crypt. Once you unmount the plain
version your data is protected, and cannot be read again until
you mount it, which requires your password.

Convenient encryption
There is, of course, a more convenient way of setting up an
encrypted directory for a user that doesn't require sudo or
answering questions - run this as your normal user:
ecryptfs-setup-private
The command will ask for your login password and then a
passphrase for the encrypted directory. The former is used to
lock the latter, which you can leave that blank and have
ecryptfs generate a secure passphrase automatically. This

102 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Ecryptfs has a number of advantages over
LUKS/dm-crypt:
Back up to cloud As the encryption is at file
level, you can backup your .Private directory to a
cloud service or external drive without worrying
about your data being accessible to others.
Just make sure you backup .cryptfs and your
passphrase some separate and secure.
Multi-user security Ecryptfs can encrypt
directories separately for each user.

Directory Ecryptfs can also be used on
system directories and swap, with a suitable
fstab entry, but it will prompt for a passphrase.
Login to read A user's data is only available
when the user is logged in, and even then
ecryptfs defaults to making it only readable by
that user (and root, of course).
There are, however, some disadvantages too:
Many files It is slower dealing with directories
containing many files, although this can be

creates three directories: .Private contains your encrypted
data, Private is the mountpoint for the decrypted contents
and .ecryptfs contains files that are used to mount your
directory. As the passphrase itself is encrypted, you should
make a copy and store it somewhere secure, such as a USB
key nowhere near your computer:
ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase ~/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase
>/somewhere/safe/ecryptfs_passphrase
Now you can mount and unmount your private data with
these commands, or use the desktop icon it provides.
ecryptfs-mount-private
ecryptfs-umount-private
This creates a single, encrypted directory in your home,
but what if you want more? Let's say you want your
Documents and Accounts directories encrypted but see no
point in encrypting Photos or Music (why waste time
decrypting large files that hold nothing private). The easy
answer is to move the directories into Private and create
symbolic links back to their original locations, like this:
mv Documents Private
ln -s Private/Documents Documents
Make sure Private is mounted when you do this, then your
files will only be available when the ecryptfs filesystem is
mounted, otherwise it will just show up as a broken link.

Automatic mounting
You give your login password to unlock the ecryptfs
passphrase to mount the filesystem (you can use the -w
option to ecryptfs-setup-private if you want to use an
independent password) so you may be asking why when
you've already just given a password to login, you need to give
it again to mount your private files? This is a valid question,
if you know it once, I'm sure you can remember it again a few
seconds later. If you prefer, you can have your Private
directory automatically mounted when you login (and
unmounted when you logout), thanks to the magic of PAM.
As root, insert this line into /etc/pam.d/common-auth:
auth required pam_ecryptfs.so unwrap
and this one into /etc/pam.d/common-session:
session optional pam_ecryptfs.so unwrap
Now PAM will mount your ecryptfs home directory when
you login. This will not happen if you have auto-login enabled,
otherwise you would have no security at all.

Encrypted $HOME
If all of this looks a little familiar, that is probably because you
have used the encrypted home directory feature in Ubuntu,
which also uses ecryptfs. But this a standard kernel feature
not restricted to one distro (ChromeOS also uses ecryptfs
behind the scenes). Ubuntu doesn't just set up a Private

mitigated (at the expense of security) by having
ecryptfs not encrypt filenames.
Large files Because each file is encrypted
separately, the files all increase in size, which can
be significant with a large number of small files,
like an email or browser cache.
Not cross-platform Ecryptfs is Linux only,
using features of the kernel, which won’t be a
problem for everyone. As far as we are aware,
there’s no reliable way to read Windows files.

directory when you install it, but it encrypts your entire home
directory. So the simplest way to get a fully encrypted home
directory may seem to be to install Ubuntu and choose that
option. There are a couple of reasons you may not want to do
this: you may use a different distro or you may already use
Ubuntu but don't want to start again with a new installation.
There’s a single command that will convert your entire
home directory to ecryptfs, but there are a couple of caveats.
You must have no files in use in the home directory, which
means that the user mustn’t be logged in, and you need free
space of up to 2.5 times the current size of your home
directory for the conversion process (mainly because
encrypted and unencrypted copies of your files are stored
until the job is done). So log out and log in as another user
with admin rights then run:
sudo ecryptfs-migrate-home --user
After the process completes, you must log in as that user
before rebooting, to complete the setup and make sure
everything is working. Once that is done and you have verified
that your files are there and readable, you can delete the
original unencrypted files that are still in /home/user.some_
random_string. Be aware that deleting that directory does
not remove all of your unencrypted data from your hard drive,
only the directory table. To be fully secure, you should
overwrite all unused space with random data.
dd if=/dev/urandom of=somefile bs=4k
rm somefile
This creates a file of random data that fills the drive and
then deletes it to return the space to you.
Whether you use ecryptfs-setup-private or ecryptfsmigrate-home, you should use ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase
to save the passphrase to a safe place. If you don’t keep a copy
of your passphrase, you won’t be able to access your data if
the .ecryptfs directory is lost or damaged.

If your distro
does not permit
root login, like
Ubuntu, create
a spare user with
admin rights
when encrypting
your home
directory.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 103

Security | Encrypt with Ecryptfs

Pros and cons of ecryptfs

Security | Encrypt with zuluCrypt

Encrypt drives
with zuluCrypt
Insulate your data another way

zuluCrypt also
supports cascade
encryption which
is the process
of encrypting
an already
encrypted
message, either
using the same
or a different
algorithm.

hile you can control access to the data on
your computer using user accounts and file
permissions, they aren’t enough to prevent a
determined intruder from gaining access to your private files.
The only reliable way to keep your personal data to yourself is
to encrypt it. Sure, working with encrypted data is an involved
process, but it’ll go a long way in reinforcing your security and
insulating your data. zuluCrypt is a graphical encryption app
that has an intuitive easy to follow interface. Using the app
you can create an encrypted disk within a file, a partition and
even USB disks. It can also encrypt individual files with GPG.
To install zuluCrypt head to http://mhogomchungu.
github.io/zuluCrypt/ and scroll down the page to the binary
packages section. The app is available as installable .deb
package files for Debian and Ubuntu. Download the package
for your distro and extract it with tar xf zuluCrypt*.tar.xz .
Inside the extracted folder, switch to the folder corresponding
to your architecture (i386 for older 32-Bit machines and
amd64 for new 64-Bit ones). Both folders contain four binary
packages that you can install in one go with the sudo dpkg
-i *deb command. On other distros you’ll have to install
zuluCrypt manually. Download the app’s tarball and follow
the detailed steps in the included BUILD-INSTRUCTIONS file
to fetch the dependencies from your distro’s repos.
One of the first things you should do after installing is to
create encrypted versions of all files that you consider
sensitive. Fire up the app and head to zC > Encrypt A File. In
the dialog box that comes up press on the button adjacent to
the Source field and navigate to the file you wish to encrypt.
zuluCrypt will use this information to create a file with the
same name and append the .zC extension at the end – or
save it elsewhere by clicking on the folder icon adjacent to the

104 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Destination field and navigating to a new location.
Next enter the password for encrypting the file in the key
field. Make sure the password is a mix of characters and
numbers to make it difficult to guess. Also remember that
there’s no means of recovering the password if you ever
forget it, and no possibility of decrypting the file – that’s sort
of the point! Once you’ve confirmed the password press the
Create button to encrypt the file. This process might take
some time depending on the type and size of the file you are
encrypting. Once it’s done you’ll have the encrypted version
with the .zC extension in the destination location you
specified earlier. Once a file has been encrypted, make sure
you delete its original version.
You’ll now have to decrypt the file before you can read and
make changes.For this, launch zuluCrypt and head to zC >
Decrypt A File. Point to the encrypted file in the Source field
and alter the location of the unlocked file in the Destination
field. Now enter the password with which you encrypted the
file and click the Create button. When it’s done, the decrypted
file will be created in the specified destination. To lock the file
again, encrypt it by following the previously outlined procedure.

Encrypted data silos
Individually encrypting files works well if you only need to
protect a couple of files. Also, it’s a cumbersome process and
is only suitable for files you don’t need to read or modify
regularly. If you need to protect a number of files that you
access frequently, a better approach is to file them inside
encrypted storage areas.
zuluCrypt can perform block device encryption, which
means that it can encrypt everything written to a certain block
device. The block device can be a whole disk, a partition or
even a file mounted as a loopback device. With block device
encryption, the user creates the file system on the block
device, and the encryption layer transparently encrypts the
data before writing it to the actual lower block device. While
encrypted the storage areas just appears like a large blob of
random data and doesn’t even reveal its directory structure.
To create an encrypted storage device within a file, fire up
zuluCrypt and head to Create > Encrypted Container In A File.
In the window that pops up you’ll have to enter the name and
complete path of the directory under which you’ll house
your sensitive data. It’s called a file, because it’ll appear as
a singular file when it’s encrypted. You’ll also have to specify
the size of the directory depending on the size of the files it’ll
house and the space available of your disk.
When you press the Create button, zuluCrypt pops up
another window. First up you’ll have to specify a password for
encrypting the file. Next, you’ll have to select a Volume Type.

The default option is LUKS or Linux Unified Key Setup, which
is a disk-encryption specification designed specifically for
Linux. In addition to LUKS, zuluCrypt can also create and
open TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt and Plain volumes. Plain volumes
are headerless encrypted volumes and the encryption
information is provided by zuluCrypt. Because of this, Plain
volumes are application-dependant and not very portable.
TrueCrypt or VeraCrypt volumes are better alternatives if the
encrypted volume is to be shared between Linux, Windows
and OS X computers.
Once you’ve decided on the type of Volume, you’ll have to
pick a cipher, an algorithm that does the actual encryption
and decryption. An associated attribute of the cipher is the
associated size of the key. As the key size increases, so does
the complexity of exhaustive search to the point where it
becomes impracticable to crack the encryption directly.
The most popular encryption cipher is the Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES) which is based on the Rijndael
cipher. AES with a key size of 256 bits is widely used as it
offers the right balance of speed and security. This is the
default cipher in zuluCrypt. However the app supports a large
number ciphers including the Twofish algorithm, and Serpent.
These two are considered by the US National Institute of
Standards and Technology to have a higher security tolerance
than AES, but are also slower.
You can safely select the default values for each field,
including the default filesystem for the volume (EXT4) and
press the Create button. When the process completes, you’ll
notice a file with the name you specified for the encrypted
container with illegible content and size equivalent to what
you specified earlier.

Making sense

Scramble partitions and disks
If you want to encrypt large amounts of data, it’s best to place
the encrypted container inside a partition of its own or even
on a removable USB drive. Note that when you create such
a container zuluCrypt takes over the entire partition or disk,
so make sure you’ve backed up any existing data.
Also, make sure that the destination partition or drive
isn’t mounted. Use the mount command to list all mounted
partitions. If the partition you wish to use, say /dev/sdb1, is
mounted, you’ll first have to unmount it with sudo umount /
dev/sdb1 .
Now launch zuluCrupt and head to Create > Encrypted
Container In A Hard Drive. In the window that pops up,
zuluCrypt will list all the available partitions that it can use to
house the encrypted volume. Note that the devices are listed
both by device name and by the associated UUID. If you are
creating a container on a removable disk, make sure you
toggle the Use UUID option. This will ensure that zuluCrypt
always correctly identifies the device. Now double-click on
the drive/partition you wish to create the volume on. You can
now create an encrypted volume on it using the same exact
procedure we used earlier to create an encrypted volume
inside a file.
Although at first it might sound cumbersome to use, but
over time zuluCrypt will grow on you as you get familiar with
the app. There is no easier way for the privacy conscious to
keep their data secure.

ZuluCrypt
includes the
zuluMount tool
that can mount
all encrypted
volumes
supported by
zuluCrypt and
also doubles up
as a generalpurpose
mounting tool.

Before you can store files inside this encrypted volume you’ll
first have to decrypt and mount it. Head to Open >
PLAIN,LUKS,TrueCrypt Container In A File. Use the file button
in the pop up window to navigate to the encrypted container
file that you’ve just created. If you wish you can alter the
mount name for the file, else just enter the password and
press Open. Toggle the checkbox if you only want to read the
contents of encrypted volume.
Once your volume is mounted it’ll appear in your file
system like any other mounted file system. The main
zuluCrypt window will also list the volume along with the
complete mount path. You can now create directories within
this mounted location and create files just like you would on
any regular mounted device. When you’re done, right-click on
the mounted volume in the zuluCrypt interface and select the

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 105

Security | Encrypt with zuluCrypt

You can’t unlock a volume without a header. In case the
original gets corrupted, create a backup by right-clicking
on a mounted volume and selecting the appropriate option.

‘Close’ option. This will unmount and encrypt the volume and
all you’ll have once again is the single encrypted file with
illegible content. Mount the file again following the procedure
mentioned above to reveal its contents.
If you have issues managing multiple passwords,
zuluCrypt gives you the option to create random keyfiles
which you can then use to encrypt files and volumes. To
generate a keyfile head to Create > Keyfile. Now enter the
name for the keyfile and its storage path. From a security
point of view, you should make sure the keyfiles are not
stored on the same hard disk as the files or volumes it
encrypts. In fact it’s best to keep these on an external drive
which ensures that your encrypted data remains secure even
if someone grabs hold of your drive containing the encrypted
files and volumes.
To use a keyfile instead of a password, select the keyfile
option using the drop-down menu when creating an
encrypted volume or encrypting a file. After selecting this
option you’ll also have to point the app to the keyfile, which
will then be used to lock your data.

Security | Protect your network

Beef up security
with Kali Linux
Plug the holes in your network defenses with this pentesting distro.

The Kali Linux
menu is arranged
in the order in
which a network
is usually
infiltrated. It
begins with tools
for infiltration
testing and
moves on to
vulnerability
analysis, wireless
attacks and
exploitation.

ali Linux is the swiss army knife for ethical hackers.
The distro is loaded with tools for penetration testing
that you can use to compromise your own network in
order to identify the weak points of entry that can be exploited
by crackers. The Debian-based distro has more than 300
tools and utilities that are arranged neatly in a categorised
and structured menu. Kali Linux is available in multiple
flavours and can be used as a Live distro or inside a virtual
environment. In this tutorial we’ll use some of the common
tools in Kali Linux to expose the weak points in our network.
First let’s find out what devices are logged on to the
network using netdiscover, which can be used for
reconnaissance on those WiFi networks that aren’t using
DHCP. Fire up a terminal inside Kali and type
netdiscover -i wlan0
which sends out ARP requests over the network and then
displays the results on the screen. The process is live, and as
soon as new machines come on the network they’ll pop up on
the screen. Once you have a list of hosts, press [Ctrl] + [C] to
stop the scan. With a list of hosts and their MAC addresses
you can begin the process of exploiting them.
You will probably need to see what ports are open on
these hosts, and the OS they are running. One of the best
apps for the job is nmap, which can be easily used via its
graphical interface, Zenmap, which lets you run various types
of scans on any host within your network. Zenmap ships with
10 common scanning profiles and you can define your own
using its extensive options.

Break into WiFi
WiFi Protected Access (WPA) and WiFi Protected Access 2
(WPA2) are wireless security protocols that were intended to
address the security shortcomings of WEP. Because the
WPA protocols dynamically generate a new key for each

106 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

packet, they prevent the statistical analysis that caused WEP
to fail. Nevertheless, they are vulnerable to some attack
techniques. WPA and WPA2 are frequently deployed with a
pre-shared key (PSK) to secure communications between
the access point and the wireless clients. The PSK should be
a random passphrase of at least 13 characters in length; if
not, it is possible to determine the PSK using a brute-force
attack by comparing the PSK to a known dictionary. This is
the most common attack.
The best way to check whether your wireless network is
impervious to attacks or not is to break into it. However, be
advised – breaking into a wireless network that isn’t under
your charge is illegal and shouldn’t be attempted.
We’ll use the airmon-ng set of tools to crack open the
faults in our network. To start, we need to be able to intercept
or monitor wireless transmissions; therefore, we need to set
the Kali communication interface with wireless capabilities
to monitor mode with
airmon-ng start wlan0
If the command tells you that there might be some processes
that could cause trouble, use
airmon-ng check kill
to kill those processes before reissuing the
airmon-ng start wlan0
command. The command creates a monitoring interface
such as wlan0mon.
When the monitoring interface is up, use
airodump-ng wlan0mon
to view the local wireless environment. This command lists all
networks that it can find within range of the wireless adaptor
at that particular point of time. The output includes several
key details including the BSSID of each network along with its
MAC address, bandwidth information including the channel
used, information on the encryption used, and the ESSID
which provides the name of the wireless network.
Now locate your network from the list, and make a note of
its BSSID and the channel it’s on. Then use the information
you get to fire up airodump, for example:
airodump-ng -c 11 --bssid 28:03:7C:51:10:31 -w /root/
Documents/my-network wlan0mon .
The command will create a bunch of files under the /root/
Documents directory.
We’ll now force one of the devices to reconnect with the
router and capture the handshake between them. Make a
note of the BSSID of any station and launch a new terminal
while leaving Airodump running. In the new terminal window
we’ll launch what’s known as a deauthentication attack where
a device is forced to reauthenticate to the access point and
re-exchange the secure encrypted WPA2 keys. In the new

Security | Protect your network

Passwords, passwords, passwords.
The biggest threat to security is weak
passwords. If you think you have good
strong passwords, there are some tools
that you can test them with. Hydra is a
free brute force password cracking tool
which can attack single or multiple user
accounts. Primarily a command-line tool,

the password cracker also has a
graphical user interface that can be used
to create complex attacking patterns.
Hydra can interact with a huge range of
services including HTTP, IMAP, LDAP,
POP3, RDP, SMB, VNC and more.
Another popular password cracker

You can use the Fern app to graphically crack your
Wireless networks.

terminal window enter
aireplay-ng -0 2 –a 28:03:7C:51:10:31 -c 00:1C:50:7D:44:5C
wlan0mon
Here the -a switch points to the BSSID of the network and the
-c switch points to the MAC address of a station. You might
have to repeat this command several times with different
stations until you see a bunch of ACKs in the terminal window
which indicate that the access point has acknowledged the
deauthentication command that was just sent.
Now switch to the original terminal window, still running
the Airodump command. If the handshake has been captured
you’ll notice a number next to the WPA Handshake in the top
right-corner of the window. You now have the router’s
password in encrypted form. We’ll now use aircrack to brute
force our way through this encrypted password using a
wordlist. Kali Linux ships with several wordlists and we’ll cycle
through all until we find a match. The handshake is captured
inside a file under the /root/Documents directory with the
-01.cap extension. To start cracking the password type,
aircrack-ng /root/Documents/*-01.cap -w /usr/share/
wordlists/fern-wifi/common.txt
This is a time consuming process and you might have to use
the other wordlists until one finds your password.

included in Kali is John the Ripper. This is
used primarily for exposing weak Unix
passwords. Like Hydra, John the Ripper
is a command-line tool but also has a
graphical interface (called Johnny) which
does a nice job of exposing its various
command line options.

connect to your Wi-Fi network. But know that MAC addresses
can be easily spoofed.
You should also disable unnecessary services and
protocols, particularly those that are notoriously used for
gaining unauthorised access such as SNMP, SSDP and uPnP.
If they do gain access to your network, you can limit the
damage they can do by disabling administration over WiFi
and instead forcing it over a wired connection only.
It’s also pretty easy to spoof a network address and trick
people into signing into the wrong network. This is easily done
with a tool called Airbase which essentially turn your Wi-Fi
adapter on Kali Linux into an access point with the same
name as another network. Once signed in, the attackers can
capture all traffic over the spoofed network including
usernames, passwords and all sorts of transactional
information. To avoid falling prey to spoofed networks,
never log into a network that doesn’t require a password
and also turn off your distro’s ability to automatically
connect to Wi-Fi.
Lastly, you might also want to disable WPS. Kali Linux
includes the reaver tool which can exploit a vulnerability in
the WPS implementation on many routers and brute force
its way to the wireless password. Using the tool is fairly
simple. Use airodump and make note of your router’s BSSID
and channel. Then use
reaver -i wlan0mon -b 8D:AE:9D:65:1F:B2 -c 9 -vv
to figure out the WPS PIN of your router.
One possible option to circumvent this type of attack is to
turn off the WPS function, though it’s been reported that this
isn’t always effective. A better option is to switch to an open
source firmware like DD-WRT that doesn’t have the WPS
functionality in the first place. Also, many new routers can
resist brute force attacks by limiting the number of times you
can access it. However this too can be circumvented.
All said and done, the best solution to securing a wireless
network is to deploy a RADIUS authentication server that’s
used in conjunction with the WPA2 protocol.

The Social
Engineering
Toolkit is a
collection of
scripts to help
you cook up
various make
believe attacks
to exploit the
human element.

Strengthen your network
As you can see, breaking through a wireless network’s
security key doesn’t take much effort. Depending on the
complexity of your password, the process can take anywhere
from ten minutes to ten hours. Your only defence against such
attacks is a complicated password with various special
characters, numbers and mixed cases.
Furthermore, there are a few more things you can do to
make the attackers work to gain access to your network.
While these won’t stand against a determined attacker, they
are enough to dissuade the average wardriver looking for free
WiFi. You should enable MAC address filtering and if possible
add the MAC addresses of all your devices to your wireless
router’s settings so that only the specified devices can

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 107

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Learn how to build a livestreaming system, using a Raspberry Pi
and a webcam, and how to save your motion-detected video.

e'll assume you have none of the required
packages to follow this tutorial on video
surveillance and video recording. You will use
Motion which is the heart of this article. Aside from that, you
will require Apache (or Nginx) and PHP. Although this tutorial
is geared towards using a Raspberry Pi, you can use another
PC setup if you prefer. Do note, that if you go the Apache and
PHP route, everything will work very easily without having to
make extra changes to the server and PHP.
If you do decide to go with Nginx instead of Apache you
will need to make some extra changes: such as installing
PHP-FPM; changing the root folder path for web page files;
and editing the following files: /etc/nginx/sites-available/

Use simple password protected authentication to keep files secret.

default, /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default and /etc/
php5/fpm/php.ini.
Now, for the synopsis of each package. Motion will be used
to record video after movement is triggered. The video clips
will be written to a folder as Flash SWF files. However, Motion
still allows you to see the location even without movement,
much like a regular security camera.
Once you have those files, you may want to be able to sort
through them effectively. Here is where the web server and
PHP play their role. With the Apache or Nginx server, you can
serve these files over the web.
Realistically, many files will be accumulated and you may
want to create a loop with PHP in order to output each file
into a link that can display the video in a popup. In which case
a free video popup application, such as Shadowbox can be
used. Lucky for you, the code (which can be found on the
Linux Format website) contains the files that do all that stuff.
With all that covered, you'll have a setup that can deliver
your videos. This tutorial will show you various options and
their how-to counterparts. Since a camera like this could be
used in your home as a security camera, you may want to
password protect any web pages or the folder where you
keep the videos. Now, if someone did happen to break into
your premises and decide to steal or wreck your Raspberry
Pi, we'll also guide you through a backup plan that can be
used to move your video files to a foreign web server that the
robber won't have a clue exists.

Getting things to work
Since this article is about Motion, let's install this first:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install motion
Now that one installation is out of the way, let's add the
rest, which includes Apache
sudo apt-get install apache2
and PHP:
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt
Let's move on and make some basic procedures and tests
to see everything is working as it should. The main files which
you will customise are /etc/motion/motion.conf and /etc/
default/motion. Open up motion.conf with your favourite
editor. By default, you'll note that the parameters shown
below are the opposite of the default values. For example,
daemon off becomes daemon on:
daemon on
webcam_localhost off
control_localhost off

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 109

Security | Motion detection system

Motion: Detect
and record

Security | Motion detection system

Save the changes and open up the /etc/default/motion
file and make the following changes:
start_motion_daemon=yes
Now, let's fine tune some options. Three changes that are
needed are: the frame rate, quality and minimum amount of
frames to trigger the motion to record:
framerate 30
quality 90
minimum_motion_frames 5
Without changing this setting, two frames per second
looks way too jerky and will miss out a lot of action, so we
change the frame rate from 2 to 30 frames per second.
The second change is obvious since it's a quality upgrade.
The third change sets the minimum amount of frames of
motion that need to be detected. By default, the value is 1.
The problem with a number this low is that you can end up
with unwanted recordings from things such as lights flicking.
Keep in mind that you have many options and can look
deeper into the features. A good place to start is on the offical
website (http://bit.ly/MotionConfigFileOptions).
Some of the other features you might want to consider
are: taking a picture at a desired interval, such as every
second, every minute or every hour. This feature makes it
easy to host a live weather cam, for instance, or to determine
if someone is sitting on your couch.

Configuring Motion
Changing all parameters to suit your specific needs is very
easy and the motion.conf file will often have nice, selfexplanatory comments while the website and man page have
more information to offer. Obviously, this service doesn't do
much without a working, compatible webcam and a list of
webcams worth trying with the Raspberry Pi can be found at
http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Webcams.
Using a plug and play webcam makes life easy for this
task, and one cheap, readily available webcam that works is
the Logitech C170. Note: If you are using the Raspberry Pi, the
Raspberry Pi cam won't work with Motion. To tell if the USB
webcam connects OK, run the command lsusb.
At this point, you will likely have a working webcam,
a working web server and an adequate Motion configuration.
This is good, but you'll also need to create a folder for the
images and set ownership for Motion. By default, Motion
drops the images and SWF files into the /tmp/motion
folder. It won't create the folder, therefore, you will need to:
cd /tmp
mkdir motion

Alert! Man on
sofa. Capturing
live video feed.

chown motion:motion motion
Now, let's see how everything works. To start with, you can
get Motion up and running with the command
service motion start
and you can always restart it with the command
service motion restart
The first thing you'll need to do to test that everything
works fine is to see if you can view the default web page.
Since your Pi will have a unique network address, you can just
type it in the browser. For example, if the Pi is connected to a
router with the IP of 192.168.0.1, your device could have an IP
like 192.168.0.106. Thus, the URL would also be
http://192.168.0.106. If you have success returning the
default web page, you will see a message stating that
everything is working properly. If not, you will get a typical
browser error which makes it obvious that something is not
quite right.
Now with a working server, let's move on and get down to
viewing and recording video. You can test the video in your
browser by typing your network IP and port. By default, the
Motion webcam port will be 8081. Therefore, if you type
http://192.168.0.106:8081 in the browser, you should see
your video stream.
A simple setup like this can be beneficial and have many
uses aside from security: such as keeping an eye on a newborn while you’re working in another room. Since all should
be well at this point with the Motion service running, you can
now go in front of your webcam and jump around a bit.
Actually, hand waving will suffice but a few jumping jacks
aren't going to hurt. After that, you should be able to browse
the new motion folder and see a bunch of JPEG files and at
least one SWF file.

Quick
tip
When you're logged
in via SSH and need
to edit files, using
vim to find a string
is easy. To do this,
all you need is a
/ followed by the
string name. Just
type n to move on
to the next one.

Using multiple webcams
Need more than one webcam? No problem.
Motion enables you to add more easily. You need
to open up /etc/motion/motion.conf and set
up the threads. If you go to the bottom of the file,
you see various lines that are commented out
followed by the word thread. As you can see, the
default location for these new files are in /usr/
local/etc folder.
To keep it simple, you can change the thread
folder to the /etc/motion folder. This way, you
keep all the editing in one simple location. Now,

110 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

the first thread would resemble the line below:
thread /etc/motion/thread1.conf
Once you’ve set up your threads since you are
using multiple webcams, you can create the
thread files. Thus, your first thread would be
called thread1.conf, followed by thread2.conf,
and so on. The code that you add to these
threads just needs to be a few lines. The code
samples below display two threads. As you can
see, each thread has its own videodevice
parameter, custom text that appears on the left-

hand side of the video stream and image folder
and port number. Here' s thread1.conf
videodevice /dev/video0
text_left Camera #1
target_dir /var/www/images
webcam_port 8081
followed by thread2.conf:
videodevice /dev/video1
text_left camera #2
target_dir /var/www/images_cam2
webcam_port 8082

With that said, we will move on and create a simple way to
organise the saved files that recorded the movement. The
first detail that will need to be changed is to save the images
and SWF files into a folder within the web directory. The root
web folder is located at /var/www/html or /var/www.
At this point, a light should go off since you have already
made several changes to the Motion setup. Reopen the
/etc/motion/motion.conf file and change the target
directory. By default, the target directory is located at /tmp/
motion. The new target is /var/www/images:
target_dir /var/www/images

Making it web friendly

Viewing recorded video and images

The whole idea here is to record, store and manage video
from a website or by using your IP address that was given to
you from your ISP. To find out your IP head to http://
whatismyipaddress.com. In order to broadcast video out,
you'll need to set up port forwarding on your router to enable
your network IP to use port 8081.
While you are at it, you may as well do the same for port
80 since this same network IP will be used to display web
pages from computers outside your local network; such as
your friend across town or a loved one overseas.
After you have made the previous changes to your router's
settings, try typing http://my_ipaddress_from_isp and
http://my_ipaddress_from_isp:8081. You should get the
same results as you did when you were checking your local IP.
The next step is to clean this up and view organised data
view web URLs; such as http://my_ipaddress_from_isp/
video.php or to view it from another website using an iframe.
In order to show the webcam from the page video.php,
you just need to use an img tag with the network IP and port.
Have a look at the code below, which shows this in complete
detail and displays it with the default width and height as
specified in the motion.conf file:

Now, let's imagine a scenario where you want to stream
this livecam from another website using an iframe. Well, all
you have to do is make an iframe from another page on the
different server. The simple one-liner is shown below.

The next set of code will explain how to display the files
that have been saved after motion is detected and recorded.

After making changes to motion.conf, type the command:
sudo service motion reload
so that it will now attempt to write any new files to the
/var/www/images folder. Now, you can easily access the
files created by the Motion service and display them on the
web just like any other typical web page. Although the path
has been changed in motion.conf, the images folder hasn't
been created yet. So, make it now.
The folder will be located within the www or html folder. If
it sounds like we’re repeating ourselves here, because it
means you have been paying attention and are aware that the
Apache root web folder can be in one of two paths:
cd /var/www
mkdir images
By default, the www directory will be owned by the root
user and root group. You will want to make some changes;
such as all files will be owned by pi and the group will be
www-data. To change this use:
cd /var
chown -R pi:www-data www
So, what we are up against now is to make this images
folder writable by the Motion service. As of right now, the
other files have adequate ownership and permissions, but,
the images folder does not. Well, let's change that right now.
The code snippet below has three commands. The first
command will add the user motion to the www-data group.
In case you are wondering, www-data is an existing user and
group for the Apache server. The second command gives the
images folder permissions to the Motion user and www-data
group, and the final command makes the folder writable so
that the images and SWF files can magically appear in the
images folder:
usermod -a -G www-data motion
chown motion:www-data images
chmod 777 images
It's within the www folder where you can create a file
called shadowbox.php that will be used to display content on
the web. This file has all the code you need to display a
thumbnail from each recorded SWF video, the video itself and
the first JPEG image of motion.
The coding process to display the content goes like this:
The images directory gets scanned and an array of files is
created and sorted in descending order. These files are
multiple JPEG files and a single SWF file for each event.
All files have a name that starts with the event, followed by
the date and finally followed by the sequence.
The date sequence is year, month, day, hour, minutes and
seconds. After that, Motion just adds the sequence starting
from 01 only for the JPEG files.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 111

Security | Motion detection system

Displaying
stored images
and Flash video.

Now, that you have a motion-detecting device that you
can view from your local network, you can move on and make
adjustments so that you can see and view your webcam from
outside your local network. For some of you, this may be the
setup you desire; especially if your webcam and Raspberry Pi
are well hidden and unlikely to be tampered with.
However, in addition to storing data in your own home, we
will explain how to back up the files to another server for safe
keeping, just in case your SD card or hard drive fails, or
someone decides to steal, break or ruin your webcam (or
webcams) in your home.

Security | Motion detection system

In order to keeps things simple and uncluttered, the
coding for the shadowbox.php file will only display a single
image and a single SWF file for each event. This simple script
also uses shadowbox to create popups of the first JPEG
image and flash SWF file for each event. Now, you can see all
the latest detected motion, down to the first recorded by
Motion. This file gives all of the results and here is where you
may want to customise the output.
If you want to keep these web pages password protected
with Apache, you can open up the file /etc/apache2/sitesavailable/default and make some minor changes.
If you look for the line , you can
add three simple lines to it. The code sample is shown below:
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Private Documentation Repository"
AuthUserFile /var/www/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
After that, you navigate to the /var/www folder and create
a blank file called .htpasswd, and create the username and
password with the simple command displayed below. You will
be prompted for a password twice. You simply add it followed
by Enter:
sudo htpasswd /var/www/.htpasswd add_username_here
Since the files can pile up pretty quickly and your disk
space can readily disappear, you may want to create a
purging system or back them up to another drive. Some
backup plans are discussed next.

Backup plans
One tip for determining your backup plan is to watch how
much space you routinely tend to use and develop a plan
based on those conditions. Simple. For example, if you go
through 1GB a week and you have a 8GB card you may want
to TAR the images folders, SCP the file to a remote server and
remove all files that are more than one-week old. Since the
files contain the year, month and date, it's a rather easy
process to delete the ones that have expired. The file called
purge.php is a cleanup file that you’ll be able to find on the
Linux Format websitef.
This file removes every file that's more than a couple of
days old. I will explain the code in a little more detail in a
moment. First off, the images folder is scanned and all of the
files become an array. That array of files then iterates through
a foreach loop. A few built-in PHP functions, such as strstr(),
preg_replace(), substr_replace(), substr(), date() and
unlink() are used to translate all the file names into actual
date timestamps that can be used for comparison.

Once a timestamp is made from the filename, it goes
through a simple if() statement and is compared against a
time that is set to two days ago from the current time. This
part is really easy to change since you just need to change the
number 2 to your desired amount of days in the past.
Once this criteria is met, the file is deleted with the unlink()
function. Since this system is only using files without a
database, it's rather elementary to move all of these files to
your backup location, and since this is copying and moving
files, two methods come to mind. One is using a package
such as rsync and the other is a simple method of
compressing the desired files and folders with ZIP or TAR and
shipping them to their new destination with SCP. An simple
example of SCP is shown below:
scp -P 22 /var/www/images.tar pi@example.com:/home/pi/
images.tar
So there we have it. You've just created your own video
surveillance and motion recording system that has several
options to suit your needs or that you can customise.
Although we've made a rough skeleton and files for you to
monitor your video, record files and make backups, you can
take this farther if you want. Some simple suggestions would
be are to add a responsive template to both the video.php
and shadowbox.php files, and polish up the content with a
little CSS magic.
On top of that, you could set up webcams at other sources
and have them viewable by the public or friends, depending
upon what you want to achieve. Have fun!

All the files
in the images
folder are named
with an event,
followed by date
and sequence.

Quick
tip
You may want to
include the time
in the file name so
backups will not
be overwritten.
In addition to that,
you may want to
run a cron job that
does this procedure
on a regular basis.

Nginx and Motion
Nginx doesn't ship ready to go out-of-the-box for
Motion as Apache does. In fact, after you install
Nginx there's a series of required steps that you
must do before you have a smooth operation.
In the case of Raspberry Pi, you can adjust
the worker_processes value from 4 to 1. You
can change this in the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
file. This is recommended since the Pi only has a
single CPU core.
After that, you will want to change the default
web folder since the default points to /usr/
share/nginx/www. To change this, you open
the file called /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/sitesenabled/default. The change is shown below so
the web folder is /var/www:

112 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

#root /usr/share/nginx/www;
root /var/www;
After the previous step, you can quickly install
fastcgi. The command is below:
apt-get install php5-fpm
After that, you’ll need to open the file /etc/
nginx/sites-available/default and change a
few lines of code so it resembles the content
below. Basically, you’ll just need to remove a
few comments:
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
# NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo
= 0;" in php.ini
# With php5-cgi alone:

# fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
# With php5-fpm:
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
}
We’re almost there. Now you’ll have to open
the file /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini and remove
another comment so that it looks like the line of
code below:
cgi.fix_pathinfo=1
Finally, make sure to restart Nginx after
making all of the changes. The command
/etc/init.d/nginx restart
will do the trick.

The home of technology
techradar.com

Security | Secure Apache

Apache: Ensure
a secure start
Apache may be old, but it’s tough and it can be used to serve web pages with
the strategy and valour worthy of the Apachean people.

he venerable Apache HTTP server is considered the
granddaddy of web servers, although it's only just
celebrated its 20th birthday. Recently we’ve extolled
the virtues of younger, spryer web servers, (in particular
Nginx, but also LiteSpeed and Lighttpd), but Apache has,
since 1996, been the most widely used in the world (by any
reasonable metric). Sure, if you're just running a simple
website then maybe Nginx can serve your pages a few
nanoseconds faster, but unless it's a terribly popular website
then this is unlikely to trouble you. Indeed compared to Nginx,
Apache might look clunky, or even intimidating, with its
diverse configuration files and myriad mysteriously
monikered modules. But in this tutorial, we'll try to demystify
things: Once we've covered the basics, we'll focus on some
security and privacy aspects. It may not be as exciting as an
all-singing, all-dancing HTML5 web application, but it might
be more helpful.
Once you're all set up and everything seems to be
working, let's pause for an over-simplified helicopter view of
what it is that Apache, or any web server for that matter,
really does. Being a server, it will listen for requests, and being
a web server, the requests that it will be interested in are
HTTP or HTTPS. These may be associated with the server's
IP address or a domain name which resolves to this address.
A single server can happily serve multiple domains (so-called
virtual hosts which we'll study soon), so the first task is to sort
out which virtual host the domain part of the URL refers. Then
the server studies the remainder of the HTTP request so it
can be mapped to the appropriate local resources. These

Quick
tip
The Apache camp
have a few things
to say about the
changes Debian
ship in their default
config. Read all
about it here:
http://bit.ly/
DebianDiffs.

This is what you see on Ubuntu when everything works.
Reassuring, but you should disable the default website.

114 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

might be static files, eg HTML or images, but could equally be
dynamic responses generated on the server-side, eg from
PHP or Perl scripts. In the simplest case the part of the URL
following the first / can be translated to an actual location on
the server's filesystem by prefixing with the location of the
virtual host's document root, eg example.com/index.html
might resolve to /var/www/example/index.html . This need
not always be the case, we can define arbitrarily complicated
rewriting rules so that the physical location bears no
resemblance to this. For CGI programs the situation is more
complicated, but the idea is the same – data from the HTTP
request is somehow fed to a script or program that, hopefully
without getting exploited, constructs the appropriate HTML.
This is then returned to the web server, and in turn the client.

Harden up, bru
If you peruse the (heavily-commented) main configuration
file, two things you might notice are the User and Group
directives. When Apache daemon is started it initially runs as
root, but once it read its configuration files and got its
bearings then subprocesses are spawned which run with the
credentials specified by User and Group. It is with these
subprocesses that clients have any interaction, so that if
anything does go wrong then any attempts at malfeasance
won't have root privileges off the bat, which is A Good Thing.
Many Linux daemons start this way, since there are certain
initial tasks which need root – in the case of Apache one such
task is binding to port 80 (ports lower than 1024 aren't
generally available to mere mortals). The Debian/Mint/
Ubuntu convention is to run as the user www-data (specified
in the file /etc/apache2/envvars which is referenced by the
main config file), other layouts will use the http user. Best
practice dictates the Apache-running user shouldn’t have a
login shell and should not be used for any doing anything
other than running Apache.
As a result of these dropped privileges, any file which you
want Apache to deal with will have to be readable by wwwdata. Likewise, any directory housing content you wish to be
accessible will need to be both readable and executable by
this user (the execute bit behaves slightly intuitively for
directories on Linux) . Once you start running web
applications, then certain files or folders will need to be
writable by www-data too, but it's best to be as conservative
as possible here, eg start with the root being the owner of
everything in /var/www and give all its subdirectories 755
permissions and files 644. If a program or script fails due to
needing to write something, then grant the permissions one

Just to confuse you, different distros have
chosen to name their Apache packages
differently. Arch Linux seems to lack imagination,
going with apache, OpenSUSE and the Debianbased ones have gone with apache2 and Red
Hat's progeny go with the traditional httpd.
Once you've appropriately delegated the task
to your package manager, it's worth having a look
at the main configuration file (possibly to instil a
sense of fear, but it also contains some good
guidance about how things are arranged).
The traditional location here is the rather long-

winded /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf which
(again confusingly) is respected by Arch, Fedora
etc, the Debian-based distros have opted for
/etc/apache2/apache2.conf and OpenSUSE
has opted for /etc/apache2/httpd.conf.
Unless otherwise stated, we'll assume a Mint/
Ubuntu setup for this article – there’s a helpful
summary of various distro's Apache layouts at
https://wiki.apache.org/httpd/
DistrosDefaultLayout to aid with path and
filename translations if you're using something
else. The structure (though neither the location

file and one error message at a time. One thing you should
definitely not do is make any file which is read by root
during the initial startup (eg anything in /etc/apache2)
writable by www-data.
With the Apache daemon running, browse to
http://localhost/server-status . You might see a ‘Not
Found’ error, or (if you're running Ubuntu or Mint) you might
see all kinds of information about your web server and ask
yourself how the page got there as there’s no server-status
file in the website’s root directory (wwwroot). The answer is it
came from the mod_status module. This status information
may look pretty harmless, and can be very useful when
diagnosing Apache, but it can also prove useful to cyber
criminals (as our government seems to prefer to call them
instead of ‘hackers’). If we weren't using a Debian-derived
distro, then disabling mod_status would involve removing/
commenting out the line:
LoadModule status_module modules/mod_status.so
from the main config file. However, the Debian family have
generously provided some nice scripts for enabling and
disabling modules. Inside the /etc/apache2 directory you'll
see, amongst others, directories entitled mods-enabled/ and
mods-available/. The former contains symlinks into the
latter for each module that is enabled. There are links to
status.load and status.conf, the former contains the above
line, and the latter contains various configuration data for the
module. The mods-* folders enable us to keep the main
config file clean. This is A Good Thing, as is the nice suite of
scripts the Debian guys provided for managing the symlinks.
For example, we can easily disable mod-status with:
$ sudo a2dismod status
You'll need to reload the Apache daemon before this
change is noted. If you decide you want the status
information back again, then it is a simple matter of:
$ sudo a2enmod status
The a2ensite and a2dissite commands provide the same
convenience for virtual hosts, and a2enconf and a2disconf
do so for modular configuration options. As well as disabling
mod_status, we can also add the following two lines to /etc/
apache2/apache2.conf so that we don't betray the Apache
version number in error pages or HTTP requests:
ServerTokens Prod
ServerSignature Off
By default, if you browse to a directory that doesn't
contain an index.html file, or other acceptable file specified

nor the content) of Apache's config files is
consistent across distros, and while initial configs
will vary, most generally ship in a ready for action
state. Once you've started the service with
$ sudo service apache2 start
you can navigate to http://localhost and (all
going well) you'll see a reassuring 'It works' page.
Other distributions may give an empty directory
listing, which should also reassure you. You can
place your own index.html file in the directory
/var/www/html/ (or /srv/http on Arch Linux)
if you want to display something else.

by the DirectoryIndex directive, then you'll get a nice
directory listing telling all and sundry the files and directories
that reside therein. This is generally not desirable, so we'll turn
that off globally by disabling the Indexes option for /var/
www/. Find the appropriate section in apache2.conf and add
the desired minus sign so that it looks like:

Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks

Quick
tip
For a great primer
on HTTPS read
Robert Heaton’s
blog: http://bit.ly/
HTTPSGuide.

Virtual reality
Even if you're only going to be running one website, it's still
nice to set it up as a virtual host, if nothing else it keeps the
main apache2.conf file free of pollution. The default
installation on Debian and friends uses a virtual host set up in
the file 000-default.conf, which you should have a look at.
We'll use this to set up two domains on our web server. If you
don't have access to registered domain names with A records
you can still use a bogus .local suffix to illustrate the point (or
just use hostnames if that's how you roll). Suppose your
webserver's local IP is 10.0.1.1 and we wish to set up the two
domains below. Then you'll need to add entries in the /etc/

According to
this w3techs.com
survey, Apache
is way ahead of
the competition.
Nginx beats it
for high-traffic
websites, but
many people use
it as a reverse
proxy for Apache.

Discover how to customise a wireless router turn to page 146
The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 115

Security | Secure Apache

Install and test

Security | Secure Apache

Quick
tip
It's worth keeping
an eye on the
access and error
logs at /var/log/
apache2, where
you can see who's
accessing what
and diagnose
what's breaking.

Firefox won’t
trust a certificate
you generate.
Hardly surprising,
we wouldn’t trust
you either.

hosts file of any machine on your network (including the web
server itself) that you want to be able to view this:
lxfweb1.local 10.0.1.1
lxfweb2.local 10.0.1.1
Alternatively, you can use a dynamic DNS provider to
point diverse novelty domain names at your IP. Either way, the
next step is to add entries for your website(s) in the /etc/
apache2/sites-available/ directory. We'll copy the default
template and tweak it for our two websites above:
$ cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
$ sudo cp 000-default.conf lxfweb1.conf
$ sudo cp 000-default.conf lxfweb2.conf
We'll store the websites in /var/www/lxfweb1 and /var/
www/lxfweb2, so create these directories and add the
following lines inside the section of
/etc/apache2/sites-available/lxfweb1.conf:
ServerName lxfweb1.local
ServerAlias www.lxfweb1.local
DocumentRoot /var/www/lxfweb1
Do the same for the lxfweb2.conf file, put placeholder
content in each DocumentRoot, and enable the two websites:
$ sudo a2ensite lxfweb1.conf
$ sudo a2ensite lxfweb2.conf
Shazam! Two websites, ready for action. Actually three: if
you access the web server by its IP address, or a different
domain name that resolves there, you'll get the default site as
defined in 000-default.conf, which you are free to modify.
Or indeed disable entirely, should your web server feel that it
ought only to be accessed by name and not number.
One can control Apache's behaviour on a per-directory as
well as a per-site basis. For the former we can strategically
place .htaccess files. In the appropriate directories, but since
these are prone to getting forgotten about we can also use
the directive in the site's configuration file. We're
going to add a secure area to our lxfweb1.local site, which
can only be accessed with a password. First, we'll make the
area's directory and put some placeholder content there:
$ sudo mkdir /var/www/lxfweb1/secure
$ cd /var/www/lxfweb1/secure
$ echo Classified Facility - no cameras | sudo tee index.html
Now edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/lxfweb1 and add
the following near the end of the section:

116 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

AuthName "Secure Area"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /var/www/.htpasswd
require valid-user

Used like this, the Basic authentication mechanism just
checks a file for a matching username and password
combination. These files are maintained by the htpasswd
program which is part of the apache2-utils package, which
we now install and utilise.
$ sudo apt-get install apache2-utils
$ sudo htpasswd -c /var/www/.htpasswd lxfuser
You will be prompted for a password for lxfuser. The -c
switch creates a new file, but if you want to add further users
then just use the command without it. Now reload Apache:
$ sudo service apache2 reload
When you browse to http://lxfweb1.local/secure you will
be prompted for a username or password. If you enter
incorrect details, then you will continue to be prompted. There
are more advanced authentication methods such as verifying
users by database or LDAP, or having supplementary
admission criteria such as a specific IP address. Have a look at
the docs for details: http://bit.ly/ApacheAuthDocs. It's
important to put the .htpasswd file outside of any defined
website's DocumentRoot. This is in case any
misconfiguration (the default config won't let this happen)
which could accidentally result in the .htpasswd file being
served, for example at the URL http://lxfweb1.local/.
htpasswd. In our case we've got websites defined in
subdirectories below /var/www, but that directory itself is OK.

HTTP-yeS
Any data sent via an HTTP request or received in the
response is done so in the clear. Anyone with access to a
machine in between you and the web server can access it,
or even alter it. This is hardly satisfactory, especially given
that we are wont to transmit personal and financial data.
To work around this, we use SSL/TLS technology via the
HTTPS protocol. Properly implemented SSL provides two
things: Encryption – the data passing between you and the
client is obfuscated by high-powered mathematics and
Authentication – you can be confident that the website you
are fraternising with is indeed what it says it is.
While the mathematics behind encryption has been
thoroughly researched (albeit oftentimes poorly
implemented), the authentication issue is something of a
thorny one. The solution at present is to rely on (ie trust
implicitly) a collection of Certificate Authorities (CAs) which
provide (at cost to commercial operations, although personal
ones are available for free) their sanctioning of a given
website in the form of a digital signature on said website's
certificate. Your distro maintains a list of those CAs it
considers trustworthy in the ca-certificates package. From
time to time some of these will be revoked due to a scandal,
and browsers frequently check in with a Certificate
Revocation List so as to minimise potential malfeasance.
First, read and obey the box about generating and signing
a certificate (see Generating a Self-Signed Certificate).
We need to tell your web server to use these credentials for
handling HTTPS connections, which usually take place on
port 443. You can either offer HTTP in parallel with HTTPS, or
you can make your website (or portions thereof) accessible
only by HTTPS. A standard Apache installation comes with a
file /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf, which
we can modify slightly to suit our purposes, eg, lets enable an

We have
entered a
secure area,
apparently.
Newer cipher
modes that
provide perfect
forward
secrecy have
been properly
implemented
by TLS 1.2.

Now enable the SSL module and your freshly detailed site
and restart Apache:
$ sudo a2enmod ssl
$ sudo a2ensite lxfweb-ssl
$ sudo service apache2 restart
When you browse to your website your browser will (if you
didn't pay for a signed cert) give you a big ol' warning about
an untrusted CA, which is not surprising. But just this once
you can make an exception and continue to the secure site.
In Firefox you can store this exception, though it will still
persecute you about the dodgy certificate.
If you want to redirect all traffic from the HTTP site as well,
then add the following line after ServerName lxfweb1.local
in /etc/apache2/sites-available/lxfweb1.conf:
Redirect permanent / https://lxfweb1.local/
Alternatively, use this second line if you want to force HTTPS
for the secure directory from the beginning of the tutorial:
Redirect permanent /secure https://lxfweb1.local/secure
If you're using Chrome or Chromium then you can
forcefully add your certificate to your own keystore using the
certutil program. Click on the broken HTTPS icon and find
the ‘Export certificate’ option, saving it as, say lxfweb.crt.
Then import this into your local NSS database with:
$ certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -A -t P -n lxfweb -i
lxfweb.crt
While it's nice to get the reassuring padlock icon next to
the URL, adding security exceptions like this is potentially
dangerous – you might forget that you've done so and, if
you're unlucky, your server keys may be stolen. With this an
attacker could, at some point in the future, potentially set up
a malicious site which your browser would trust implicitly.
And so concludes our introduction and begins your
journey into things Apachean. Be careful what (if anything)
you make available to the outside world and definitely don't
break any laws (or hearts).

Generating a self-signed certificate
A (reputable) CA will only sign a certificate if it
pertains to a domain name which you have
control over, so if you haven't invested in such a
thing (subdomains, eg from dynamic DNS
services, don't count) then you can't get your
certificate signed officially. But you trust
yourself, right? So you can generate and sign
your own certificate which will allow visitors to
your web server, and if they trust you enough to
ignore the warning about an invalid signing
authority, then they can confidently connect to
your website using SSL, safe in the knowledge

that any information passing between it and
them is safe from prying eyes. So long as you set
it up correctly, that is:
$ sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/ssl
$ sudo openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365
-newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /etc/apache2/ssl/
server.key -out /etc/apache2/ssl/server.crt
You will be asked for some address and
company details, as well as a Common Name
(which you should set to your domain name if
you have one) and a contact email address.
This will generate a self-signed X.509 certificate,

which will be valid for one year and will include a
2048-bit RSA key, (use openssl --list-publickey-algorithms to see others available). It's also
worth imposing some permissions on the key
file and certificate, since if it fell into the wrong
hands then you would be susceptible to a
textbook Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack.
$ sudo chmod 600 /etc/apache2/ssl/*
Reading certificates and keys is one of the
things the root portion of Apache does on
startup, so these files need not (and should not)
be readable by www-data.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 117

Security | Secure Apache

SSL site, as well as the HTTP one, on lxfweb1.local from
before. As before, copy the default site file
$ cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
$ sudo cp default-ssl.conf lxfweb-ssl.conf
and change the following lines in lxfweb-ssl.conf:

ServerName lxfweb1.local
DocumentRoot /var/www/lxfweb1
…
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.key
We should also preclude old cipher suites to prevent any
kind of downgrading-attacks. The old and weak ‘export’
ciphers which gave rise to the recent FREAK attack, along
with many other low-grade ciphers, ought to be disabled by
default on most distros' Apache/OpenSSL packages. That
notwithstanding, said defaults are still often not perfect.
We can improve things a little by changing the following lines
in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ssl.conf:
SSLHonorCipherOrder on
SSLCipherSuite HIGH:!MEDIUM:!LOW:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EX
PORT:!MD5:!RC4:!3DES:!PSK:!SRP:!DSS
SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLInsecureRenegotiation off
SSLCompression off
Disabling the deprecated SSLv3 protocols precludes the
POODLE attack (and also visitors using IE6), disabling
compression does so against CRIME. (You may wish to omit
this if you’re more bandwidth-challenged than paranoid.)
It's worth considering perfect forward secrecy too:
The goal of the SSL negotiation process is to come up with a
session key known only to the server and the client, and
thrown away after use. Newer forms of key exchange do so in
a way that generates this key ephemerally: in such a way that
a subsequent compromise of the server key alone is
insufficient to recover any captured data from the session.
Unfortunately the default (either RSA or fixed Diffie-Hellman)
key exchanges don’t do this, so we should tell Apache to use
the newer methods by modifying the SSLCipherSuite line
from above. It's worth giving a few alternatives here since, eg
not all browsers support TLS 1.2 which is required for Elliptic
Curve crypto. All this makes for a very long line, so just
replace HIGH above with the following cipher combinations.
EECDH+ECDSA+AESGCM:EECDH+aRSA+AESGCM:EECD
H+ECDSA+SHA256:EECDH+aRSA+SHA256:EECDH+aRSA
+RC4:EECDH:EDH+aRSA
This favours the newer, faster Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman
mode, but also allows for the slower but widely-supported
Ephemeral DH, all with a variety of ciphers and hashes.

Do more
Take your Linux skills to
the next level and beyond
121

Build a Linux PC
Hardware that works first time without all
the mucking about? Well, that’s the dream.

130 200 Linux tips
Even the most hardened Linux veteran
doesn’t know absolutely everything. Make
sure you’re ahead of the curve.
138

Turbocharge your network
Build your own router to ensure that your
traffic is properly managed at all times.

140 Clone your website
Use HTTrack to create an exact copy of
your website for safe keeping.
144 Deploy multiple machines
Looking after a network? Put your feet up,
because this is the secret to an easy life.
146 Hack your wireless router
Don’t put up with rubbish default firmware
any more. Gain full control of your network
by running DD-WRT instead.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 119

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Do more | Build a PC

BUILD A

LINUX PC
Assembling a PC is
straightforward,
but choosing the
components is less
so. We look at the
options available.

here is a document that has been
floating around the internet for at
least fifteen years, called ‘What if
operating systems were airlines’.
The entry for Linux Airlines states: “When
you board the plane, you are given a seat,
four bolts, a wrench and a
copy of the seat-HOWTO.
html”. It’s an old joke but as
Linux users we are still more
accustomed to sometimes
having to do things for
ourselves than users of other
operating systems.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as it
means we understand our computers better.
Still, at least when you want a new PC you can

just go out (or online) and buy one. So why do
people build their own? Over the next few
pages we will try to answer this question, as
well as the more complex questions that arise
when you try to do it, such as: how hard is it to
do? What are the risks? What about

the satisfaction of understanding your
computer that little bit more, but this
information is not only useful if you want to
build a new system from scratch. Much of
what we cover here will also be of benefit if you
are looking to upgrade an existing computer.
We will been concentrating on
desktop systems, which are
generally very easy to work on
– we find LEGO more taxing.
Laptops are another matter,
but many of the points about
choosing suitable Linuxcompatible components still apply and we will
end with a look at picking a laptop, or any other
type of sealed box, such as one of the popular
nettop systems.

“Desktop systems are generally
very easy to work on – we find
LEGO far more taxing.”
warranties? Will it save me money? Can I build
a computer with no Windows? And many
more. There are several reasons why you may
want to build your own, not least of which is

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Moore’s Law predicts a doubling of computer
capacity every two years. Unless you plan to
build a new computer every year, you should
allow for your needs increasing during its
lifetime. Always allow for spare capacity, if you
want 16GB of RAM, buy a motherboard that
takes 32GB and half-fill it. Your storage use will

What do you need?

You can buy one of these and get whatever
the maker puts inside, or you can assemble
it yourself and get exactly what you want.

Why build your own computer? You may be able
to save money by sourcing the components
yourself, but don’t bank on this. What you do get
to do is pick the exact specification you want – no
throwingawaypartstoupgradetowhatyoureally
wanted. You also get to choose the quality of
components you use. A pre-built PC may say

There are several standard building blocks
needed to build a computer. As a minimum,
you will need: processor, motherboard,
memory, storage drive, graphics card, case
and power supply. You may also need a
monitor, keyboard and mouse; but you could
be building a media centre that uses a remote
control and plugs into a TV, or a headless
server such as a NAS box.
Over the next few pages we will look more
closely at each of these, explaining the choices
to be made. The idea is not to tell you which
components to choose but to give you the
information to make that decision for yourself
based on your particular
needs. When you have
built your computer, you
will then need to install
an operating system
and software. Naturally,
we assume you will
install Linux but you
may also need to install Windows for gaming
or some other particular software needs, so
we will look at how to install the two OSes in
perfect (well, almost) harmony.

“There are still components
that are better supported
than others.”
it has a 2TB hard drive, but that tells you very
little. Most hard drive manufacturers produce
several drives of that size, with varying speeds,
power consumption and intended usage. You
will learn a lot more about components doing
it yourself, and while putting together a
desktop PC is not difficult, doing so will give
you the confidence to dive back inside it when
you want to upgrade. You can also upgrade
incrementally – once you have a computer
you understand, you can increase its hard disk
or memory capacity now, then add a faster
processor and motherboard next year.

tend to increase too. 4K video is on the way, so
build a system with more drive bays and SATA
connectors than you need now. Storage and
memory are easy to increase, provided you
have left yourself the option. Hopefully your
processor and motherboard will last you
several years.

so an SSD is ideal. A NAS is the opposite, lots
of space needed but speed is not critical, so a
slower spinning hard drive would be better.
Linux users have another aspect to
consider: compatibility. While the situation
is far better than at any time in the past,
there are still components that are better
supported than others. Let’s work through
the main components you will need and look
at your options.

Processor
The first decision to be made is which
processor to use, as this affects your choice of
motherboard and then just about everything
else. The choice may seem obvious: get the
fastest you can afford, but things are never
that simple. The fastest processors are also
the most expensive, often by a substantial

Choosing the components
When it comes to choosing your components,
you need to take into account what you will
use the computer for now and what other
uses are likely. The usage can dramatically
alter the choices you make, eg a gaming
system needs fast storage but not a lot of it
for the OS and current games you are playing,

Find the price-performance sweet spot
for your preferred processor manufacturer.

Linux compatiblity
Hardware support in Linux is very good nowadays. Most devices are
supported directly in the kernel. There is no need to go trawling
manufacturers’ websites for drivers. When you are buying components
for your own computer, you need to know whether there’s support for the
hardware before you buy a component. The first step is to determine the
exact component in use, which is not as easy as it sounds. The
motherboard maker’s website may state it has a Gigabit Ethernet port,
but not tell you which chipset, so you will have to do some research.
Typing the full product code and the word Linux into your favourite
search engine will normally give plenty of hits. It’s worth restricting your
search to recent posts, there is no point reading complaints about your
choice not being supported a year ago when it is now. Look for posts that
give details, such as chipset codes and module names and avoid the

rants. Asking in web forums, like our own (www.linuxformat.com/
forums) or at www.linuxquestions.org, about the support for a
particular device should get you some first-hand experiences, but search
the forums yourself first. Your question may have already been answered
and no one like questions from people too lazy to do their own research.
Compatibility problems usually arise because the manufacturer gives
no help to the kernel driver developers so everything has to be reverse
engineered – this commonly applies to wireless adaptors but some
sound cards are also affected. Another reason may be that the hardware
you are looking at is so new that support has not yet been added to the
kernel of your current favourite distro. You may need to look at a newer,
more bleeding edge release to get support. This seems to affect things
like network adaptors, wired and wireless, the most.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 123

Do more | Build a PC

Remember Moore’s Law

Do more | Build a PC

margin. There’s a value for money sweet spot
that’s usually a couple of steps down from the
ultimate. Processor speed is not everything,
as memory can have a greater effect on your
computer’s performance. Going down a step
in processor speed and spending the savings
on more memory, or an SSD, will usually result
in a faster computer. Try leaving a system
monitor like top running while you use your
computer and see how often you use all of
your current processor’s performance. Unless
you are a gamer, or spend your spare time
compiling custom kernels, you will be
surprised at how rarely your processor usage
becomes a limitation.
The other choice to be made is between
Intel or AMD hardware. You could try a web
search on which is best but be prepared to
spend some time searching for real facts
among the religious fervour. The truth is that
processors are so fast nowadays that for a
home system, you would be happy with either.
Processor choice affects the choice of
motherboard, so it may be that, depending on
your needs and budget, you end up choosing
a CPU to go with the motherboard you want.

Motherboard
If the processor is the heart of your computer,
the motherboard is the central nervous

system. Everything plugs into this board.
In the past, that was all a
motherboard did: connected
everything together. Now
they contain a lot of
previously separate
components built in, such as
network interfaces and sound cards. As
Intel and AMD use different CPU sockets,
choosing your processor immediately reduces
the number of motherboards you have to
choose from. Now there are some questions
you need to ask, such as do I need more than
one network interface? How much memory
will I want to fit – now and in the future?
How many SATA connectors will I need –
don’t forget to allow for one for your optical
drive and possibly an external eSATA
connector too. Also, how fast are the SATA
interfaces? This is especially import if you are
using an SSD. How many USB ports do I need,
and what type? While USB 2.0 is fine for a
keyboard and mouse, you will want USB 3.0
connectors for storage devices, and possibly
a USB-C connector.
Consider the built-in devices of a
motherboard you are interested in, such as
network interfaces and sound ‘cards’. While
the motherboards themselves will work with
Linux, will the peripheral devices? Sound
cards aren’t much of an issue these days as
most support the Intel HD Audio standard but
check anyway as the codecs in use can
vary. Wired network devices are also
generally well supported, but you may
have problems with a very new
motherboard that uses a device
not yet supported by the
current kernel of your
chosen distro. As usual, a
quick search of your
favourite search
engine, using the
name of the

Memory may seem unassuming, but it has
a greater effect on the performance of your
computer than many other components.

board and the Linux distribution should turn
up and potential problems and solutions.
Support for onboard devices may not be a
critical issue if you have enough PCI slots you
can install alternatives and then disable the
built in hardware.
Size can be important. If you are building a
system in a large tower case, a full-sized ATX
motherboard is easier to work with, but for a
media centre you may want a smaller form
factor that will fit in an attractive case that can
go under your TV.

Memory
Memory is one of the simplest ways to boost
the performance of a modern computer.
It enables more tasks and data to be handled
at once and any memory that’s left over is
used by the Linux kernel to cache disk data
which, incidentally, is why your computer
shows almost no memory free after it has
been running for a while. There are three
things to consider when buying memory, the
physical layout, the size and the speed. The
current memory standard is DDR3 and DDR4.
Don’t try to fit the older DDR or DDR2 sticks
into these slots, they are incompatible. Size is
obvious, and it is worth getting the most your
budget allows. Check your motherboard’s
manual for the maximum size for each slot
because, although the spec allows for up to
16GB per DIMM, most Intel systems are
limited to 8GB per unit. Motherboards usually
use a dual-channel architecture for memory,

When it comes to assembling a PC,
the motherboard is just the thing
that everything else plugs into.

Terminology
You will encounter plenty of abbreviations and
jargon when looking at hardware, here are
some of the common terms used:
DDR 2/3/4 Double Data Rate, a technology
using in memory chips.
DIMM Dual Inline Memory Module, this is
plug-in memory module.
WAF Wife Acceptance Factor, seen on maledominated forums and considered important
for hardware that will be in the home.

124 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Northbridge/Southbridge Chips on the
motherboard that handle core logic and
communication between the CPU and
other components.
SATA Serial ATA, the current standard for
connecting storage devices to computers.
ATX A motherboard configuration
specification, meaning most boards are
interchangeable in physical format and
standard connectors.

Some memory vendors provide databases
that are very handy for seeing which
memory is best for your motherboard.

Storage drives
It used to be that the only question to ask
about a hard drive was: How big? Now we
have to add: How many? And what type?
The choice of type is mainly between
traditional hard drives with spinning platters
and solid state drives (SSDs). (Although there
are also hybrid drives that use a spinning disk
with an SSD as a cache.) SSDs are much
faster than hard drives but cost a lot more per
gigabyte, a 256GB SSD costs about the same
as a 3TB drive. So an SSD gives much faster
booting and program loading but a hard drive
holds much more. An SSD also uses less
power and is more robust, making it the
obvious choice for a laptop. With a desktop,
you have the luxury of being
able to use more
than one

SSDs are the obvious choice for a laptop
but are idea on a desktop system for
installing an OS and the programs you use.

drive, so the optimum is an SSD for the
operating system and programs and a hard
drive for your data. You could put the
operating system on the SSD and /home on
the HD, or you could leave /home on the
SSD, which means you’ll get the
benefit of the
extra speed for
things like your
web browser and
mail caches. Then you
can mount the storage hogs,
such as your media collections,
on the hard drive. Either way, you will
not need a particularly large SSD, 128GB
should be more than enough, which should
mean you can make sure you get a good one.
There is quite a variance in the performance
of SSDs, so make sure you get one with
decent read and write speeds, in the region
of 500Mb/s is good. Apart from that, setting
up an SSD is pretty much the same as
a hard disk.
Another option to consider is using
multiple drives in a RAID array. This gives you
redundancy, if one drive in the array fails your
data is still on the other. This isn’t a
replacement for taking regular backups but it
does protect you against a drive failure.
With RAID 1, the simplest configuration, two
drives are mirrored. All data is written to both
drives but read from one (which can give
improved read performance as the data
comes from whichever drive seeks to it first).
Most distro installers will handle installing to a
RAID array, but with RAID 1 you can also
install to a single drive and add the second to
create the array. RAID is handled by the Linux
kernel, do not enable any RAID settings on
your motherboard. These are so-called

Graphics cards are
computers in their own
right, but you may be able
to use the onboard graphics
for many systems.

fakeRAID and require Windows drivers to
work. Just let the installer see that you have
two drives and the kernel take care of them.

Graphics card
Most motherboards have reasonable onboard
graphics these days, so you may not need a
separate card. If you want one, the choice is
between Nvidia and AMD, and this is another
topic likely to provoke religious flamewars.
Nvidia graphics cards will work as far as
booting the computer into a graphical display,
but the in-kernel nv drivers are limited.
You have a couple of options. The newer
open source nouveau drivers work well now –
we use them ourselves – and give reasonable
performance. If you want the best
performance from your graphics card though
you will need to install Nvidia’s own drivers.
As these are closed source they are often not
enabled by default so you need to enable the
option for restricted or third-party drivers in
your distro. You can also download and

Putting it all together

Motherboard layout

Find the diagram of the motherboard’s layout and connectors in its
manual and keep it open at the section. You should refer to it before
making each connection to the board. Many of the connectors are
simply header pins on the board, making it easy to put something in
the wrong way. Murphy’s Law is definitely lurking here. RTFM aplies
to hardware as much as software.

Zero Insertion Force

Lift the release lever on the CPU socket, insert the CPU aligning the
corner dot on the chip with the mark on the socket. It should drop in
with no pressure, then lock it with the lever. Remove the tape from
the conductive pad on the heatsink and fit it over the CPU, following
the instructions that came with the CPU and motherboard. Connect
the fan cable to the motherboard.

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so fit sticks in pairs and check the manual to
see which slots go together. This is
unnecessary if you are filling all four slots, but
unless you are using the maximum size stick,
it is better to use two larger sticks. If you want
to fit 16GB of RAM, two 8GB sticks give you
the option of adding more later, four 4GB
sticks does not.

Do more | Build a PC

install the drivers directly from www.nvidia.
com, but this is not recommended as then
your distro’s package manager cannot track
and update them. The situation with AMD
graphic cards is similar, the potential hassles
of running a binary driver versus the lower
performance of the open source drivers. The
choice between AMD and Nvidia is almost as
religious as the Intel vs AMD CPU choice.
Unless you need top notch 3D performance,
either will work well for you, and if you need
that performance you will have to use the
binary drivers whichever way you choose.
Currently, Nvidia’s proprietary drivers are
considered better more reliable, but that
could easily change.

Case

worse when it is on show.

Power supply
One of the most overlooked components is
the power supply (PSU). Avoid the cheap
PSUs that are included with cases (in fact,
avoid cases that are cheap enough to include
a PSU). A PSU must be reliable and good
quality. That may seem an obvious statement
that applies to all components, but when a
PSU fails it can do so in a way that takes out
other components. Having a £100
motherboard or hard drive, or both
components, wrecked by a £15 PSU is not a
good way of saving money.
Other aspects to consider when choosing
a PSU are: that it must supply sufficient power
for your needs, now and in the future, that it is

The computer’s case is often left as an
afterthought, but a larger, well made case
makes life so much easier. A Cheap case will
make cable routing harder and will often have
sharp edges that will mean bleeding knuckles
and blood stains on your nice new
motherboard (you can probably
sense the first-hand experience in
that statement).
A larger case also provides
better airflow for improved cooling. If
you are building a media centre that
goes in the living room, a high WAF
(See Terminology, p34) is a major
consideration, but pay attention to
noise levels. What initially seemed like
a whisper can become annoying while
watching TV. If you choose to go for a
case with a window in the side, bear in
mind that you will have to be extra
careful when routing cables. A rat’s nest
of cables is never a good idea, but it’s even

Memory slots

Insert the memory DIMMS into the sockets on the motherboard.
Make sure they are the right way round; slots in the DIMMS should
line up with protrusions in the socket and they only go in one way.
If you are not using all the slots, consult your motherboard manual
for the optimum slots to use and to ensure you take advantage of
any dual-channel abilities.

126 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

efficient (any PSU worth its salt is rated 80
Plus, but look for Gold, Platinum and Titanium
models) and that it’s quiet (particularly for a
living room computer). There are several
websites where you can list the components
you are using and get a recommendation of
the power supply you need, for example
http://support.asus.com/PowerSupply.
aspx?SLanguage=en. Check that the PSU
you choose has connectors you need, most
motherboards take a 24+4-pin ATX connector
and a separate CPU power lead. Also ensure
you have enough drive power connectors of
the right type, some PSUs still come with
more of the old Molex connectors than the
useful SATA power plugs. If you are using a
large case with a bottom mounted PSU, check
that the leads are long enough to reach the
drives at the top, although you can buy SATA
power extender leads cheaply enough that
deal with the last two points. You’ll be pleased
to know there are no special considerations to
be taken regarding Linux compatibility!

Specialised systems
So far we have looked mainly at a general
purpose desktop system, but there are some
specialist users to consider, such as a home
server or a high-performance gaming
systems. If you want to build a home server,
your requirements will be very different from a
desktop or gaming system.
As all data is transferred over the network,
a fast SSD is pointless. You could use one for
the operating system, but servers are rarely
rebooted, so you wouldn’t even benefit from
the fast boot speed they offer, and they only
run a limited number of programs, so loading
time is not that important either. Servers
generally run headless, so a fancy graphics

Motherboard backplate

Fit the motherboard’s I/O plate to the opening in the back of the
case and then place the motherboard in the case. There are small
posts that it should stand on, you may need to screw them into the
case before going ahead and fitting the motherboard. Then secure
the motherboard to the posts with the supplied screws – do not
overtighten them.

card isn’t needed either, you only need a
monitor for the installation process and the
onboard graphics of most motherboards are
more than suitable for that job. What you do
need is a decent amount of memory and
plenty of storage space. If you are building a
file or media server, pick a motherboard with
plenty of SATA ports and a case with a similar
number of drive bays. However, much storage
you add, at some time you will want more.
If you are building a web or mail server,
storage space is not such an issue, unless you
want to serve media files over an internet
connection, but plenty of memory helps,
especially with Apache.
Another type of home server is a media
server. This could simply be a repository for
your video files or you could be doing the
recording on the server too, using MythTV’s

If you are building
a server, like this
media server, your
needs are different.
You need plenty
of disk space and
a fast network
connection (or
two). You may also
need some CPU
horsepower for
media transcoding.

make sure it has a gigabit interface, or budget
for a decent PCI-e network card.

High-performance gaming
Gaming, and we mean the graphically
intense kind and not gambling, places
specific
requirements
on a computer.
Performance is
the obvious factor,
but not
just
the
performance of the CPU.
The GPU on the graphics card
plays a more important role than
the CPU with some games.
Clearly you want a fast CPU and
graphics card. Many of the
higher performance graphics
cards take up the space of two
PCI-e slots so you need to make
sure both your computer’s case
and motherboard have room for
it and that your PSU is capable
of powering it in terms of raw

“Many of the higher
performance graphics cards
take up two PCI-e slots.”
backend server software or something like
Tvheadend. Either way, you will need plenty of
space. If you have a server that transcodes
video too, maybe something like Plex that
reformats video to suit the device playing it
and the speed of its connection to the server,
you will need a decent amount of RAM and a
reasonably fast CPU – not a gaming monster
but something that’s not budget.
As everything works over the network,
it goes without saying that it should have a
fast network interface, especially if more than
one client will be using it at the same time, so

Connectors

Fit the power supply and connect the power and CPU cables to the
motherboard. This is a good time to connect all fan cables. Add your
hard drives or SSDs and your optical drive. They may either screw to
the case or in some cases they have screwless fittings. Connect the
SATA cables from the drives to the motherboard. Connect their
power cables for the PSU.

power and physical connectors it can offer.
Memory is also important, you want plenty of
it and the fastest available. Disk storage space
is less important than speed, so an SSD is the
preferred choice for storage. Gamers always
want more performance and one of the ways
of getting it is by overclocking their systems.
This is where you run your processor and
memory at higher than its rated speed. For
general purpose use, opinions on overclocking
are divided; it does give better

Case LEDs

Connect the cables from the case switches and LEDs to the
motherboard. These are fiddly connectors but make sure you get
them right, the motherboard manual will tell you what goes where.
Some of the cables come with a block connector to make the job
easier. This is also the time to connect the case’s USB ports to the
relevant points on the motherboard.

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performance but at the cost of possibly
shortened component life and unreliability if
you push it too far, plus more heat to get rid of.
Some CPUs are locked at a particular speed,
so you need to make sure the processor you
choose is able to be overclocked. You also
need a suitable motherboard. They all offer
some control over frequencies and voltages,
but some motherboards are intended for
overclockers and offer far more control –
you’ll need to do your research carefully.
To deal with the extra heat, you need a
good sized case to maintain plenty of airflow,
combined with a decent CPU cooler (the
stock cooler supplied with the CPU isn’t
intended for overclocking) and plenty of fans.
A motherboard intended for overclocking may
have more fan connectors and some speed

Even with this four-year-old system, the
CPU spends a lot time of doing nothing,
but it’s nice to have the capacity.

Building your own laptop is not a
reasonable proposition, but you can
still research the components to
make sure you get what you need.

control for them. When choosing cooling
fans, go for the largest you can fit. A
larger fan shifts more air; fast
spinning fans create more
noise.
If noise is an issue,
consider water cooling.
Overclocking used to be a
specialist field that required you to buy and
assemble various components then spend
ages bleeding the system and performing leak
tests (it may surprise you, but water and
electronic do not mix well). Nowadays prebuilt units are available where you bolt the
radiator assembly to a suitable point on the
case and clip the heat sink in place of the CPU
fan. Some kits also include GPU coolers; as
mentioned, gaming works them hard too.
Water cooling is not only for gamers and
overclockers, it can be use on a standard
desktop system to reduce the noise. The
loudest noise from such a setup comes from

the hard drive stepper motors.

Sealed systems
Assembling a desktop or server computer is a
fairly straightforward task, creating your own
laptop isn’t. While it’s possible to buy laptops
piecemeal, it’s not the usual way of doing
things. Still, much of what we have covered in
this feature still applies. It is just as important
to choose suitable components for a laptop;
even more so really because you cannot
simply swap them out if you don’t like them.

Installing an operating system
Once you have built your computer, you will
need to install an operating system. We will not
look at that here, the distro installers are well
enough documented, but there are a couple of
points to consider. New motherboards will use
UEFI rather than the older BIOS. They may also
have Secure Boot enabled. You will almost
certainly need to turn this off in the firmware.
Press the relevant key at boot to configure the
firmware, the motherboard’s manual will tell you

which it is (one of the joys of building your own
computer is that you get a manual for your
motherboard).
You should be able to use UEFI to boot the
computer, most distros now work with it, and it’s
nicer to work with than the old MBR system. If
you need to use MBR booting, there will be an
option for this in the firmware menu. Some have
a UEFI boot option that you can turn off, others
have the cryptically named CSM (Compatibility

Graphic card

Fit your graphics card into the PCI-16 slot. Check its documentation
to see if it needs an external power feed or whether it gets all the
power it needs from the PCI slot. Fit any other PCI cards you may be
using at the same time. Many new power supplys (PSU) offer
modular cable systems, else adaptors are available if your PSU is
missing suitable connectors, but ensure it’s powerful enough.

128 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Support Module) that has to be enabled for
MBR booting. If you are building a Linux-only
system, you can just boot from your favourite
DVD and install. If you want to dual boot with
Windows, you should install Windows first and
then Linux. The Linux installer will pick up the
Windows installation and set up a dual-boot
menu, whereas the Windows installer would just
trample over the Linux bootloader if you did
things the other way round.

Tidy cables, tidy mind

Keep your cables tidy, even if you don’t have a window in the case.
Untidy cables will disrupt airflow and make life harder the next time
you try to add or replace a component. If your case doesn’t have
clips to hold cables out of the way, small cable ties do a very good
job of it. You can also often feed cables behind the motherboard tray
or inside the hard drive fixtures.

Do more | Build a PC

So it is a matter of finding a pre-built laptop
within your budget that meets your
requirements and then checking that
everything will do what you want it to.
The same applies if you are looking for a
nettop to act as a media player.
The same rules apply for choosing a
suitable processor, graphic card, sound card
and so on (although the use of the word ‘card’
here is not strictly correct, almost everything
is on the motherboard). There are a couple of
important differences: laptop hard drives tend
to be slower than their desktop counterparts,
making the speed advantage of an SSD even
greater. Memory upgrade options are limited,
so choose a device with plenty to start with
and make sure that it has at least one free slot
for expansion. Some laptops have only one
slot so upgrading memory means throwing
away what you have rather than adding to it.
If you have the option, try booting the
laptop from a recent live CD, or a live distro on
USB. System Rescue CD with the Alt kernel

option gives a very recent kernel with
the most up to date hardware support.
Run $ ifconfig -a to see that both wired
and wireless interfaces show up and use
$ aplay to make sure the sound system
works all the way from the given file to
the speakers. Wireless interfaces can
still be a problem with some laptops,
but most have a mini-PCI slot these
days, in which case you can try
another card.
While the Intel vs AMD CPU war
and the Nvidia vs AMD graphics war
will continue to rage on, Intel
provides excellent support for its
components. If your laptop has both
Intel graphics and wireless cards, it
won’t go far wrong and everything
should just work with no need to
install extra drivers. Now grab
your favourite distro and
enjoy the speed and
freedom of Linux!

Careful now
Building a PC isn’t difficult, but
some care is needed when
working with electronic
components. Prepare a large
working area, clear of any clutter
and with a non-conductive
surface. Static electricity can kill
electronic components, and it can
build up on your body without you
noticing, until you pick up a
component and zap it. You can
avoid this by earthing yourself to
discharge and static build up. The
simplest way to do this is to touch

a grounded object, such as a
central heating radiator or the
kitchen sink before touching a
component. You can also buy
anti-static wrist straps that
connect to a grounded point by
flexible cable to keep you static
free during your build.
The computer you build will not
have a warranty, but the individual
components will. As long as the
fault wasn’t caused by damage
while fitting them, any reputable
vendor will replace them.

Testing, testing

Connect a monitor and keyboard and power up the computer. Hold
down the relevant key that loads the BIOS/firmware menu and go
straight to the system health page to make sure your CPU is running
cool enough. Only then should you check that all of your memory
and drives are recognised. Some motherboards may need a setting
changed to make all memory visible, but your new PC is now built!

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 129

Do more | 200 tips

BEST-EVER

LINUX

TIPS

There’s always something you don’t know. Here are
200 amazing ways to get more from Linux, gleaned
from years of navigating its nooks and crannies.

Getting started
Testing and installing Linux distros like a pro.
Create a Live distribution with
persistent storage
The most popular distros, such as Fedora and
Ubuntu, ship with tools that earmark storage
space on the live USB disk for saving data that
will be available on subsequent reboots.

Put multiple live distros on one disk
If you want to test several live
distributions you can put them all onto one

130 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

USB flash drive using either the MultiCD script
(which you can find here: http://multicd.us)
or by using the French MultiBoot LiveUSB tool
(http://liveusb.info/dotclear).
Use an external partitioning tool
3 While the partitioning tools within the
distributions have improved considerably in
terms of achieving better control over your
disk, it’s best to prepare partitions for a Linux

installation using third-party tools, such as
Gparted, which is also installed in the live
versions of several distros.
Use LVM partitions
One of their biggest advantages to using
LVM (Local Volume Manager) is that unlike
standard partitions you don’t have to estimate
partitions at install as you can grow (or shrink)
an LVM volume without losing any data.

Be more productive on your favourite desktop.
Middle-click to paste
When you highlight some text with your mouse, the
text is copied to a special buffer. When you middle-click
in a text entry area, a copy of the text that you originally
highlighted is pasted into the text entry field.

Define keyboard shortcuts
Almost every mainstream desktop allows you to define
custom keyboard shortcuts. You’ll find the option under the
keyboard setting in their respective configuration panels.

Touchpad tricks
Move your finger up and down the right side of the
touchpad to scroll vertically and tap in the lower-right corner
of the touchpad to perform a right-click.

Enable workspaces
To enable workspaces in Ubuntu, head to System
Settings > Appearance > Behavior and toggle the Enable
workspaces option.

Install a Dock
On desktops, such as Gnome, cut down the time
that it takes to launch your favourite apps by placing them
on a Dock, for example the lightweight Cairo-Dock which is
available in the official repos of most distros.

File manager context-menu
10 The right-click context-menu that is found inside the
file manager on most desktop distros are full of useful
options that you might have missed, such as the ability to
email, compress or restore them to an earlier version.
Create Favourites
11 Place your favourite apps in Ubuntu’s Launcher and
Gnome’s Dash by dragging them from the desktop’s
respective applications view.
Put icons on the desktop
12 To alter Gnome install the handy Gnome Tweak Tool
from your distro’s repos. Launch the app, head to the
Desktop tab and toggle the Icons on Desktop option.

Management and use the power button pull-down to select
how it responds.
Change Panel Layout
To change Cinnamon’s default panel layout head to
Settings > Panel and use the Panel Layout pull-down menu
to select a different style.

Add Applets to Panel
17 Cinnamon ships with several interesting applets that
you can add to any panel by right-clicking the panel and
selecting ‘Add Applets’ to the Panel option.
Enable compositing
For some bling, enable compositing on Mate by
toggling the ‘Enable software compositing window manager’
option from under Control Center > Windows.

Get different widgets on each desktop
To customise the virtual desktops in KDE, right-click
the Pager, switch to the Virtual Desktops tab and toggle the
option. Now each desktop can have different widgets etc.

Run applications as another user
20 To get an application running as another user (like
root) in KDE, right-click the menu icon and select ‘Edit
Applications’, select an existing entry and click ‘Copy’.
Then navigate to where you want the new entry, click ‘New
Item’, give it any name and click ‘Paste’. Switch to the
Advanced tab and toggle the ‘Run as a different user’ option
and enter the username of any user.
Slideshow wallpaper
Right-click the KDE desktop and click ‘Default Desktop
Settings’. Use the Wallpaper pull-down menu to select the
Slideshow option and point it to a set of images.

Useful
keyboard
shortcuts
Alt+F2
Bring up the
Run dialog box.

Alt
Search through
an app’s menu via
Ubuntu’s HUD.

Alt+~
Switch
between windows on
the same app.

Alt+Ctrl+
Up/Down/
Right/Left
Switch between
workspaces.

Alt+PrntSc
Take a
screenshot of the
current window.

Shift+Ctrl+
Alt+r
Record a screencast
in Gnome.

Super+Up
Maximise
windows in Gnome.

Super+Down
Minimise
windows in Gnome.

Super+
Left/Right
Snap windows
in Gnome.

Super+m
View any
missed notifications
in Gnome.

Enlarge windows horizontally
Xfce users can right-click the Maximise window button
to horizontally stretch it across the screen.

Quick Launch menus
Right-click the icons in Ubuntu’s Launcher or an app’s
name in top bar in Gnome to reveal application specific
options and actions.

Launch commands from the Mint menu
Right-click the Menu applet, choose Configure > Open
the menu editor. Then select a sub-menu or create a new
one and select ‘New Item’. Enter the command in the space
that is provided and toggle the launch in the terminal
checkbox for CLI apps.

Alter power button behaviour
To tweak the setting of the Power button in the GTKbased Cinnamon, head to System Settings > Power

Customise and use keyboard shortcuts to save the time navigating menus.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 131

Do more | 200 tips

Get more from the desktop

Do more | 200 tips

Tips for your favourite apps
Save time and be more productive with these hidden gems.
LibreOffice
Quick change case
33 Select the words, right-click and head

Evince
Autoscroll PDFs
42 Right-click inside a document and select

down to Change case menu and select the
required option.

the ‘Autoscroll‘ option and use the mouse to
control the speed.

Enable word completion
Go to Tools > AutoCorrect Options >
Word Completion and toggle the ‘Enable word
completion’ and ‘Collect words’ options.

Make text easier to read
Head to View > Inverted Colors to
display white text on a black background.

Add Annotations

Define Keyboard control
35 Go to Tools > Customise and click the
Keyboard tab to modify any of the shortcuts.
Play media files
Head to Insert > Media > Audio or Video
and select a media file. Select the media icon
in the document to enable media controls.

Use the Navigator
To swiftly navigate any documents or
spreadsheet with the navigator window under
View > Navigator.

Auto format tables
To auto format them, select some cells
and head to Format > Autoformat to choose a
different formatting for them.

Conditional formatting
Format the cells based on conditions
specified under Format > Conditional
Formatting > Condition.

Protect Sheet
40 Go to Tools > Protect Document > Sheet
to lock access to the sheet with a password.
Status bar values
By default the status bar shows the sum
of the values in the selected cells. Change the
behaviour by right-clicking on the status bar.

44 Select the Annotations option from the
drop-down menu in the side pane and switch
to the Add tab to add annotations.

Internet apps
Speed up the browser (Firefox)
45 Type about:config in the address bar.
Then type network.http in the filter field and
set the network.http.pipelining and network.
http.proxy.pipelining parameters to True.
Limit RAM usage (Firefox)
about:config , filter browser.cache
and set the browser.cache.disk.capacity
parameter to 30000 if you have 2GB of RAM.

46 Go to

Repair folders (Thunderbird)
Right-click the damaged folder, head to
Properties and click the ‘Repair Folder’ button.

Create a mailing list (Thunderbird)
Head to Tools > Address Book > New
List and specify which address book list to
add addresses to and start adding addresses.

Store less mail locally (Thunderbird)
Head to Edit > Account Settings >
Synchronisation & Storage for the desired
account. Toggle the Synchronise the most
recent option and choose the period.

Search all messages (Thunderbird)
50 To search through all mail, including mail
only available in full on the server, head to Edit
> Find > Search Messages and toggle the ‘Run
search on server’ option.
Insert a background image (Evolution)
Toggle the Format > HTML option, head
to Format > Page and click ‘Browse’ under
Background image section and pick an image.

Advanced search (Evolution)
Head to Search > Advanced Search to
create complex search rules. Use the ‘Add
Condition’ button to define parameters.

Pop up the hood and take a look inside any
Mozilla app with the about:config feature.

132 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Use Pidgin’s Autoaccept files plugin to
drop files in a folder that you can use with
Tip No. 54 to add torrents remotely.

Optimise Torrent speed (Transmission)
Use http://bit.ly/AzureuaUploadCalc
to determine the recommended settings that
you can then enter in the Edit > Preferences >
Speed and the Network tabs.

Monitor directory (Transmission)
Head to Edit > Preferences >
Downloading and toggle the ‘Automatically add
.torrent files from’ option and pick a directory.

Remote control torrents (Transmission)
Transmission ships with a browserbased interface that can be enabled from Edit
> Preferences > Remote.

Use a privacy-centric profile (Firefox)
JonDoFox is a Firefox profile that
automatically integrates with the installed
browser and allows you to browse the internet
anonymously using a proxy server.

Media players
Auto-fetch subtitles (Gnome Videos)
57 Press Ctrl+Shift+s to open the Movie
Subtitles dialog. Now select the language and
click ‘Find’ to look for subtitles on the
www.opensubtitles.org website.
Covert media files (VLC)
Head to Media > Convert/Save, add a
file and click ‘Convert/Save’ button and select
the desired codec to convert to.

Download online videos (VLC)
Go to Media > Open Network Stream
and enter the URL of the video and use the
Play pull-down menu and choose ‘Convert’.
Then select a preset Profile, enter the filename
to save and click ‘Start’.

Record desktop (VLC)

60 To enable desktop recording, go to
Media > Convert / Save > Capture Device.
In the Capture mode drop down menu, select

Remote control VLC from a browser (VLC)
Go to Tools > Preference and toggle the ‘All’ button
under Show settings. Now go to Interface > Main Interfaces
and toggle the ‘Web’ option. Then under Main Interface >
Lua, set the Lua HTTP Password.

Identify a song (Amarok)
62 Right-click the song you can’t recognise, head to Edit
Track Details > Tags and click ‘Get Tags from MusicBrainz’.

Image editors
Move the selection mask (Gimp)
63 Make a selection, then click the Move tool. Make sure
that the Move option is set to ‘Selection’ in the panel and you
can now drag the selection into a new position.
Rounded corners (Gimp)

64 Go to Filters > Decor > Rounded Corners. Then select
the ‘Edge Radius’, which is the amount of curve and
optionally customise the other options.
Batch process images (Gimp)
Grab and install David’s Batch Processor plugin
(http://bit.ly/DavidsBP) to enable all kinds of tweaks.

Automatically write metadata to images (Shotwell)
Head to Edit > Preferences and toggle the Write tags,
titles and other metadata to photo files checkbox.

Organise photos by events (Shotwell)
By default, Shotwell clubs all photos uploaded in one
go in a single event. For better organisation you can create
new events from a selected group of photos from under
Events > New Event.

Render RAW files correctly (Shotwell)
68 To ask Shotwell to use the camera’s RAW developer,
just open an image and toggle the Photo > Developer >
Camera option.

KDE apps
Bookmarks locations (Konsole)
69 Use the Bookmarks menu to bookmark any directory.
The ‘Bookmark Tabs as Folder’ option lets you bookmark all
open tabs in a single folder.

the Start in the same directory as current tab option and
then enter the location of the custom start directory in the
field above it.
Create custom profiles (Konsole)
You can create new profiles with custom fonts and
permissions by heading to Settings > Manage Profiles >
New Profile. Then customise it by switching to the other tabs
such as Appearance.

Read-only editor (Kate/Kwrite)
Toggle the Tools > Read Only Mode option to prevent
accidentally making changes to an important document.

File
manager
shortcuts
F4 (KDE
Dolphin)
Displays the in-line
command line.

F3 (KDE
Dolphin)
Splits a single
window into two
different views.

Ctrl+l (KDE
Dolphin/
Gnome Nautilus)
View the location
bar if hidden (Note:
lowercase L).

VirtualBox
Create VM snapshots
77 To save the current state of a VM, switch to the

Shift+Enter
(Gnome
Nautilus) Open the
selected folder in a
new tab.

Change highlighting (Kate/Kwrite)
Choose the appropriate highlighting mode for the
currently open document by heading to Tools > Highlighting.

Snapshot tab in the main interface and click the ‘Take
Snapshot’ button. You can restore snapshots from this
interface later.
Use USB devices
Head to the Devices > USB Devices and select the
USB devices you want to connect which will then be
disconnected from the host and made available to the VM.

Forward virtual ports
Setup Port Forwarding to ensure any server software
inside the VM is accessible from the Internet by heading to
Settings > Network > Advanced > Port Forwarding.

Ctrl+Shift+
drag the file
(Gnome Nautilus)
Creates a soft link to
the file.

Spacebar
(Gnome
Nautilus) Preview
the selected file if the
Sushi previewer is
currently installed.

Enable remote display

80 If you run VirtualBox on a headless server, you can
enable the remote display by heading to Settings > Display >
Remote Display and toggling the Enable Server checkbox.
Manage VirtualBox from a browser
Another useful application for managing VirtualBox
from a remote computer is phpVirtualBox, which recreates
the interface inside a web browser.

Share clipboard
If you’ve installed the Guest Editions enable the
appropriate option under Devices > Shared Clipboard to
copy/paste text between the guest and host.

Label tabs (Konsole)
If you’ve bookmarked a bunch of tabs that you use
regularly, you can name them by double-clicking on the tab.

Run command on multiple sessions (Konsole)
Use Edit > Copy Input To All Tabs in the Current
Window, or Select Tabs if you wish to run the same
command, eg on multiple SSH’d hosts.

Monitor activity (Konsole)
Enable the View > Monitor for Activity option and KDE
will notify you with a popup in the taskbar whenever there’s
any activity in that Konsole tab.

New tab in custom directory (Konsole)
Head to Settings > Edit Current profile and first disable

Once activated, the VLC web interface is available at localhost:8080.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 133

Do more | 200 tips

Desktop, then select your frame rate. Finally, click ‘Convert/
Save’, give it a name and click ‘Start’.

Do more | 200 tips

Better manage software
Use the command line to get more from your distro’s package manager.
Tips for RPM/Yum/Fedora
Install RPMs with Yum
89 To resolve and fetch dependencies
install RPM packages with yum install
.
Update a particular package
yum check-update to
check for updates for the package which you
can install with yum update .

90 Use

Search for packages
Use yum whatprovides to
fetch the name of the package that provides
the mentioned file.

Install package groups
List all available groups with yum
grouplist and install any with yum
groupinstall .

Rollback updates
Get a list of actions along with their
update IDs with yum history and undo one
with yum history undo [update-id] .

Speed up Yum

94 Install the fastestmirror plugin with

yum
install yum-plugin-fastestmirror and always
use the closest mirror to install a package.

Tips for Apt/DPKG/
Ubuntu/Mint
Backup package list
95 To install the same packages on another
machine, create a list of installed packages
with dpkg --get-selections > pkgs.list .
Replicate on another system
On a fresh installation, first import the
list of packages with dpkg --set-selections <
pkgs.list and then install them with apt-get
dselect-upgrade .

Use Ubuntu’s Additional Drivers tool to
install proprietary drivers for your graphics
card and other hardware.

134 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Uninstall apps
To completely uninstall
apps along with their
configuration files, use aptget remove --purge .

Downgrade packages
installed from PPAs
Install the PPA purge tool with
apt-get install ppa-purge and
revert upgraded packages
with ppa-purge .

Install dev libraries
To compile a newer
Linux Mint has great custom software management tools
version of an app fetch the
for easy management of mirrors and PPAs.
dev libs of the version in your
repos with apt-get build-dep .
Install from a URL
108 Instead of first downloading packages
you can install them directly from the web
Remove archives
100 Use apt-get autoclean to remove
with urpmi .
downloaded archives of packages that have
since been upgraded to newer versions. You
can also get rid of them all with apt-get clean .
Tips for ZYpp/OpenSUSE
List installed packages
109 The rpmqpack command displays a
Remove unnecessary packages
101 The apt-get autoremove command
list of all installed packages.
zaps all dependencies no longer in use.
Update a package
110 Use zypper in to update
Fix broken dependencies
102 Use apt-get -f install if you get an
a package. The command will also install the
package if it isn’t yet installed.
error while trying to install a Deb package
without installing its dependencies first.
Faster zypper
111 Use zypper sh to enter the Zypper
Use fastest mirror
103 In Ubuntu’s Software & Updates,
shell which installs packages faster as it keeps
all relevant data in memory.
select ‘Other’ from the Download from the
menu and click the ‘Select best server’ button.
Simulate an upgrade
112 Before you upgrade your installation
Tips for URPMI/Mageia
do a dry run with zypper -v dup -D .
Fetch a list of dependencies
104 The command urpmq -d
will get a list of required package dependencies.
Backup repos
113 Save all the configured repos with
zypper lr --export ~/backup-repos.repo .
Update all media
105 Use urpmi --auto-update to update
the list of available packages.
Restore repos
114 Use zypper ar ~/backup-repos.repo to
restore repos from the backed up file.
Saves the RPMs
106 Append the --noclean option to
prevent urpmi from automatically deleting the
View required patches
115 Fetch a list of required update patches
downloaded rpms after installing an app.
with zypper lp .
Install from a local directory
107 Drop RPMs inside a directory and then
Install patches
116 Upgrade apps by applying all available
add it as an installation medium with urpmi.
addmedia backup .
patches with zypper patch .

Become a master of your domain.
System administration
Monitor remote systems
117 Launch KDE’s KSysGuard and go to File > New Tab.

multiple file in the following way, eg multitail /var/log/syslog
/var/log/boot.log .

Then switch to the new tab and head to File > Monitor
Remote Machine and enter the target machine’s IP address
and connection details.

Bash tips
View commands matching a pattern
126 Search through previously executed commands that

Mount ISO files
118 Use mount -o loop /tmp/iso-file to
explore the contents of an ISO image.
Create virtual consoles
With tmux you can create multiple sessions, run
different tasks in each, and then switch from one session to
another without interrupting the task running inside them.

119

Use tar efficiently
120 The tar archiver can detect compression formats
and tar xf is all you need to unpack a file.
Set one-off reminders
You can use at with notify-send to set short time
reminders, such as echo notify-send “Check on the tea” | at
now +4 min .

121

Schedule a job for multiple times
122 Use a comma in the crontab file specify multiple
times. For example 00 11,16 * * * executes the task
everyday at 11am and again at 4pm (11,16).
Run a job within a specific duration
Similarly use a hyphen to specify a range. eg, 00
10-17 * * 1-5 performs the task from Monday-Friday
(1-5) between 10am and 5pm (10-17).

123

Execute a command after every reboot
Use the @reboot keyword to run a job whenever the
computer starts up.

124

125

View multiple log files simultaneously
You can install multitail from the repos to view

match a pattern using history | grep -i .
Reuse arguments from an earlier command
You can use the colon (:) key to reuse the options
from the previous command, such as !!:2 points to the
second argument in the previous command.

127

Preview a command before executing
Test your complex Bash statements by appending
:p at the end, such as ls -l !tar:3:p .

128

Create shortcuts for commands
You can roll often repeated complex commands into
custom ones with alias , such as alias sshbox1=’sudo ssh
bodhi@192.168.3.111’ . To make aliases permanent add
them to the ~/.bashrc file.

129

Autocorrect CLI typos
You can use shopt to autocorrect any common
Bash typos you tend to create. First, enter shopt to display
all the available patterns and enable any with shopt -s .
For example, using shopt -s cdspell will find nearest match
to misspelt directory names.

130

Create files that are tough to delete
131 A file with a leading or trailing space in it’s name or a
hypen (-) cannot easily be zapped from the CLI.
Delete tough to delete files
Once you’ve create a tough file to delete, here are
several ways to get rid of files with peculiar names. You can
wrap the filename in quotes or use double hyphens, such as
rm “ example” or rm -- -example .

132

CLI
shortcuts
Ctrl+a
Send the
cursor to the start of
the command.

136

Ctrl+e
Send the
cursor to the end of
the command.

137

Ctrl+l
(lowercase L)
Clear the screen but
retain what’s on the
current prompt.

138

Ctrl+k
Cut text
starting from the
command prompt.

139

Ctrl+y
Short for
‘yank’. Paste the text
in the buffer.

140

Ctrl+Shift+
c/v
Copy and Paste text
to the CLI.

141

Bash
shortcuts
Shift+PgUp/
PgDown
Scroll the console.

142

Ctrl+r
Search
command history.

143

!
Repeat a command
from history.

144

!!
Repeat the
last command.

145

Delete all files except some
Use the ! operator to remove all files except those
that match the specified pattern. For example. rm ~(*.txt) will
remove all files in the directory that don’t end with .txt.

133

Performance
Get details about the hardware
134 The dmidecode command will spit out detailed

Alt+. (dot)
Prints the
last argument of the
previous command.

146

Empties specified file.

147

information about your computer’s hardware. For example,
using dmidecode -t 16 will list details about the physical
memory. Browse the dmidecode man page for a list of
supported DMI types.

OpenSUSE’s Snapper tool helps you manage snapshots
of the distro’s btrfs filesystem.

List process in a hierarchy
You can use ps --forest to represent the process tree
in ASCII art and clearly identify parent and child processes.

135

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 135

Do more | 200 tips

Power user tips

Do more | 200 tips

Find memory leaks
To figure out which processes are
hogging up the RAM, use ps --sort mem
which arranges processes in ascending order
of memory consumption with the heavy
consumers at the bottom.

Use rsync over ssh
To transfer rsync data over SSH use
the -e ssh option, such as rsync -avhze ssh
[source] [destination] .

148

Memory of a particular process
View a detailed memory consumption
report of a particular process with pmap -x
which displays the amount of resident,
non-shared anonymous, and locked memory
for each mapping.

160

Exclude files
Rsync also lets you skip over certain
files that you can specify with the --exclude
option, like rsync -avhz --exclude ‘*.tmp*’ will
ignore files with the .tmp extension.

161

149

Trace the execution of a binary
If you have an unknown binary, trace
its execution with stace to view all
the system calls and signals it makes.

150

Track logged in users
Use the w command to get a list of
logged in users and their processes. Add the
-f option to include the hostname of remote
users in the output.

151

Kill a graphical app
Type xkill in the terminal or the run
dialog box which changes the pointer into a
cross-hair cursor. Now click on any nonresponsive window to kill it. Right-click to
dismiss xkill without killing a process.

152

Decrease use of swap
153 If you’ve got ample RAM, optimise
swap usage by editing the /etc/sysctl.conf
file and changing the value of the vm.
swappiness parameter to 10.

Backup
Backup the boot sector
154 A boot sector backup comes in handy
when you accidentally wipe out your MBR.
Make a backup of a healthy boot sector with
dd if=/dev/sda of=disk.mbr count=1 bs=512
and restore it with dd if=disk.mbr of=/dev/sda .

Mageia also includes a Parental Controls
for time-based and app-based restrictions.

Backup partition table
You should also keep a backup of your
partition table in the event when a mishap or
other zaps this crucial bit of information. Use
sfdisk -d /dev/sda > disk.sf to backup the
table and sfdisk /dev/sda < disk.sf to restore
the partition table.

155

Monitor the progress of dd
Install the Pipe Viewer (pv) tool from
your distro’s repos and use it to monitor dd .
For example, pv -tpreb some-distro.iso | sudo
dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 .

156

Speed up backups on
slower machines
If bandwidth isn’t a problem, use rsync -W
to transfer whole files and save time spent
computing the changed blocks and bytes.

157

Track rsync progress
158 Append the --progress option to the
rysnc command to keep an eye on the
data transfer.
View changes between source and
destination
Use the -i option to view the list of items
modified by an rsync operation, such as
rsync -avzi [source] [destination] .

159

Test rsync
First time users should append a
--dry-run option to all rsync operations and
scan the output for any unexpected outcomes
before running it for real.

162

Limit bandwidth
To make sure the rsync operation
doesn’t hog all the bandwidth restrict its
usage with the --bwlimit option, such as rsync
-avhz --bwlimit=50 .

163

Don’t backup files on
external filesystems
Tar is a popular choice for creating an archive
of the disk. Use the --one-file-system option
with tar to make sure it doesn’t backup any
mounted partitions (/media) or virtual
partitions (/proc, /sys).

164

Security & Firewall
Find which port a program is
165 running on
Use netstat -ap | grep [app-name] to see a list
of ports that a particular application is
communicating from.
Disable ping reply
Pings can be used to flood the network
and cause network congestion. Disable it
temporarily with echo “1” > /proc/sys/net/
ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all or permanently by
editing the /etc/sysctl.conf file to add net.
ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_all = 1 .

166

Backup iptables
If you’ve spent customising the
kernel’s iptables firewall, make sure you back
it up with iptables-save > ~/iptables.backup

167

Block a particular domain
First, you need to figure out the
domain’s IP address with host -t a www.
example.com . Then use the IP address to get
its CIDR with whois [IP Address] | grep CIDR .
Then use the CIDR to block access to the
domain, such as iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp
-d [CIDR] -j DROP .

168

Change password for any user
If you’ve forgotten a password for a
user, you can set a new one with sudo passwd
[username] without being prompted for the
current password.

169

Use Nethogs to get a real-time view of the bandwidth being consumed by an application.

136 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Securely delete files
Install and use the shred utility to delete files so that
they cannot be recovered. For example, shred [file] will
overwrite the file’s block with random data several times.

171

Enable built-in Firewall
Some distros such as Ubuntu ship with a simpler
front-end to iptables firewall, called UFW. It’s disabled by
default but you can enable it with ufw enable .

172

Allow incoming connection
UFW denies all incoming connections by default.
To tweak this policy and allow connections for common
servers do ufw allow ssh, sudo ufw allow www, ftp .

173

Network & Internet
Run commands remotely
174 You can also use SSH to execute commands on a
remote machine, such as ssh [hostname] [command] .
Copy SSH keys to another machine
Use ssh-copy-id [remote-host] to securely copy the
public key of your default identity to the remote host.

175

Keep connection open
176 If you frequently get disconnected from remote SSH
sessions due to lack of activity, you can enable the KeepAlive
option by adding the ServerAliveInterval 60 line in the /etc/
ssh/ssh-config file.
Browse via SSH tunnel
First create an SSH tunnel to a remote host with
ssh -f -N -D 1080 user@remotehost . Then change your web
browser’s Proxy settings and set the SOCKS host to
127.0.0.1 and the port to 1080.

177

Play music over SSH
The command ssh user@remotehost cat ~/Music/
audio.ogg | mplayer will redirect the output of the remote
media file to mplayer on the local machine.

178

Mount partitions over SSH
Use sshfs to mount remote partitions such as sshfs
user@remotehost:/home/bodhi /media/remotefs to mount
the remote home directory under the local filesystem.

179

Ntop is a versatile tool that can be extended with plugins.

183

Save multiple files
If you have saved links to multiple downloads in a file,
use cat isos.txt | xargs wget -c to download them all.

Top
command
shortcuts

Limit data transfer rate
Prevent wget from hogging all the bandwidth by
imposing limitations, such as wget --limit-rate=2m will limit
the transfer rate to two megabytes per second.

Shift+m
Sort by
RAM utilisation.

184

Download files based on modification date
Use curl with the -z option to only download files
that have been modified after a particular time. For example,
curl -z 29-May-2015 [download-location] .

185

Upload files
You can use curl to connect to a FTP server and
upload files, such as curl -u [user:pass] -T upload.txt ftp://
ftp.example.com .

186

Get definitions
Curl can fetch the definition of a word from a
directory server. List them all with curl dict://dict.org/
show:db and then query one with curl dict://dict.
org/d:shell:foldoc which fetches the definition of the word
‘shell’ from the Foldoc dictionary.
Simple web filtering
188 To prevent your computer from accessing a website
enter its URL in /etc/hosts, such as 127.0.0.1 www.
addictivewebsite.com.

180

View network statistics
181 Use netstat -s to view statistics for all protocols or
netstat -st for only the TCP protocol.

Regulate bandwidth
You can use Trickle, lightweight userspace bandwidth
shaper, to control both upload and download speeds. It can
also regulate speeds for package managers such as trickle
-d200 apt-get install .

Save a webpage
Use wget to properly download a webpage. eg,
wget -r -np -k http://www.tuxradar.com/content/dearedward-snowden will download all images and change the
links in the HTMl and CSS files to point to local files.

Monitor bandwidth
To monitor bandwidth used by individual network
applications use the nethogs, a small net top tool that’s
available in the repos of most distros. Instead of breaking
traffic down by protocol it groups bandwith by process.

182

k
Kill a task
from within top.

193

1
Track all
cores individually
within top.

194

Shift+w
Save
the modified
configuration
permanently.

195

187

Mirror entire websites
189 Use the graphical WebHTTrack tool available in the
official repos of most distros to mirror entire websites and
automatically modify links.

Better monitor network traffic
Ntop is available in the official repos of most distros
and gives you detailed analysis of the network traffic via its
web-based interface running on port 3000.

192

190

less
command
shortcuts
/
Search
forward for a pattern.

196

197

n
Next match.

Shift+f
Displays
new content as it’s
appended to the file.

198

v
Edit the file
with your system’s
configured editor.

199

h
View the
complete list of
shortcuts.

200

191

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 137

Do more | 200 tips

Replicate permissions
Use the --reference option to copy the permissions
of one file to another, such as chmod --reference=[copypermission-from-this-file] [apply-on-this-file] .

170

Do more | Zeroshell

Turbocharge
your network
Convert an old PC into a state-of-the-art router with Zeroshell.

You can
extend Zeroshell
with several
interesting
add-ons by
supporting the
project with
your wallets or
by promoting it
and sending a
link to its sole
developer.

f you are responsible for a bunch of networked
computers on a small LAN, you can use the Zeroshell
distro to rollout various useful network-related services.
The Zeroshell distro will transform any computer into a multipurpose server that offers a lot more services and flexibility
than you can wring out of most off-the-shelf routers.
Zeroshell is a small Linux distro that provides various
essential network services from DHCP and firewall to VPN
and load-balancing. The distro includes a RADIUS server
for WPA2 authentication, a Captive Portal instance to create
public hotspots and can also be used to shape network traffic
and QoS.
The distro has modest hardware requirements and chugs
along quite nicely even on an antiquated Celeron box with
1GB of RAM. You can download Zeroshell as an ISO image
that you can transfer onto to a CD and install onto the
machine’s hard disk. Or, you can grab a USB image which will
save its configuration locally.
Once you’ve figured out the hardware you’ll use to run
Zeroshell, you’ll need to decide whether you wish to use
Zeroshell to replace your existing router or to supplement
it. In case of the former, you’ll need to equip the Zeroshell
machine with two network cards – one that’ll plug into the
Internet modem, and the other into a network switch that
connects to the other computers on the network. If the
Zeroshell server only needs to serve a small number of
computers, you can replace the switch with a wireless
adapter and turn the Zeroshell machine into a wireless
access point.
This is how we’ll configure Zeroshell in his tutorial.
We’ll also keep the router in the equation and connect our

138 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Zeroshell server with the router via an Ethernet cable.
We can defer the task of doling out IP addresses to the
router, which saves us the effort of configuring the routing
and DHCP features of Zeroshell and instead allows us to
focus on more interesting tasks.
To get started, boot Zeroshell either from the CD or the
USB image. The distro boots up to a customised text-based
interface. Before going any further, press [P] to change the
default password (zeroshell) for the admin user.
Next up we need to make sure Zeroshell is on the same
subnet as the rest of the network. By default Zeroshell
assigns itself to the 192.168.0.x subnet. If your existing router
is on the same subnet you’re in luck. Press [I] and note the
IP address shown at the top of the page. That’s the address
of Zeroshell’s web-based interface.

Break the shell
If however you are on a different subnet – let’s say your router
is located at 192.168.3.1 – then you’ll need to change
Zeroshell’s default address and bring it on the same subnet
as the rest of the network.
For this, press [I] to bring up the IP Manager menu. Then
bring down the ethernet interface by pressing [S] and
following the wizard. Now press [D] and delete the default IP
address before pressing [G] to set the default gateway
address to your existing router’s IP address. In our case, this
is 192.168.3.1, and many routers like to sit at x.x.x.1, but yours
may be different. Now press [A] to enter a new static IP
address for the Zeroshell server, say 192.168.3.151. To bring
the changes into effect press [S] to change the status of the
ethernet to up. The interface will now change to reflect the
new IP addresses. Press [Q] to return to the main menu.
You can now access Zeroshell using a web browser on
any computer within the network by pointing that browser at
the IP address that you’ve just set. When it prompts you for
login credentials, use the admin username along with the
password you defined at the start.
Although the web interface can handle the bulk of its
configuration, you’ll occasionally need to access Zeroshell’s
console interface as well. Instead of hopping over to the
Zeroshell server, you can remotely access it via SSH. To
enable SSH, head to the web interface and click on the SSH
tab under the Setup section. In the popup window, toggle the
Enabled checkbox. Then enter the subnet of your network
(such as 192.168.3.0/24) in the IP address text box and press
the + button. Bring the changes into effect with the Save
button. You can now ssh into the Zeroshell server from any
computer on the subnet with, for example,
sudo ssh admin@192.168.3.151

Do more | Zeroshell

on ClamAV’s server and tune down the number of times
Zeroshell checks it for new definitions and updates from
the default 12 to, if you’re confident, 2. Also make sure you
change the default mirror to one that’s closer home.

Widespread access

Zeroshell lets you save and load different configurations
inside profiles which is really handy for experimenting with
and testing new features.

Take charge
Next up, let’s configure the wireless adapter on the Zeroshell
server to act as a wireless access point. For this you’ll first
need to head to the console-based menu – remember that
you can now access this via SSH. In the menu press [W] to
bring up the WiFi Manager menu. Once inside press [N] which
will kick off a wizard that helps define the settings for the new
access point. Zeroshell will prompt you for the SSID of the
new access point as well as the encryption mechanism you’d
like it to use. While the default options will work in most cases,
review each carefully – especially the encryption mechanism.
Once you’re through with the wizard your wireless access
point should be visible to the devices in the vicinity. However,
to hand out IP address to these devices and allow them to
browse the Internet, you’ll need to create a bridge interface
between the wireless adapter and the router that’s connected
to the Ethernet card.
For this, log in into the web-based interface and head
to the Network tab under the Setup section. Then click the
button labelled Gateway to make sure the default gateway is
set to your router’s IP address – 192.168.3.1 in our case.
Close the window and click on the New BRIDGE button.
This pops open a window which lists both the ethernet (eth0)
and wireless adapter (wlan0) interfaces under the Available
Interfaces list. Select each and click the button with the three
right arrows to move the selected interface into the Bridged
Components list. Do this for both the interfaces, then click
Save to activate the new bridged interface. That’s it. You can
now connect devices to the new wireless access point which
will hand out an IP address the same way it takes them to the
Internet – via the router.
Furthermore, you can also shield the devices connected
to Zeroshell’s access point from nasties on the Internet by
enabling the Transparent Antivirus Proxy feature. Scroll down
to the Security section in the left-hand column and click the
HTTP Proxy link. Here, toggle the Enabled checkbox and
click the Save button to bring the proxy online. This can take
several minutes, since Zeroshell will fetch the latest antivirus
definition from ClamAV’s website. The Update Log button
will help you keep track of the progress.
Once the proxy is active, click on the + icon in the HTTP
Capturing Rules section and add two separate Capture
Request rules for all traffic passing through the wireless
and ethernet adapters. Unless your users are known to
frequent the darkest corners of the Internet, you can go easy

The final feature we’re going to enable is VPN access.
Configuring an OpenVPN server is quite an involved process
which includes pulling in and configuring various pieces of
software and generating the appropriate secure certificates.
However, Zeroshell ships with OpenVPN, which means all
you need to do to use it is to enable it and export the
certificates for your clients.
Zeroshell supports different mechanisms for VPN
authentication. You can use simple usernames and
passwords, X.509 secure certificates, or both – which is
what we’ll be using. To grab the certificates, click on the Users
links under the User section on the left. By default this will list
only the admin user. You can use the Add link in the top bar to
add more users and repeat the process for each.
For now, select the admin user and click on the tab
labelled X509 in the top-bar. From here you can review,
revoke and generate a new certificate for the selected user.
For the moment though, we’ll just save the certificate. Use the
pull-down menu to select PEM certificate format and then
press the Export button and save the admin.pem file to your
local machine.
We’ll now grab the certificate for the Trusted Certificate
Authority, which in our case is the Zeroshell server itself.
Scroll down to the Security section in the left-hand column
and click the X.509 CA link. Now switch to the Trusted CAs
tab from the top bar, which pops open a window with a list
of trusted CAs. Select the only listed entry for our local
Zeroshell server and click on the Export button to save the
TrustedCA.pem file.
Finally, click the VPN link under the Network section in the
left-hand column and toggle the Enabled checkbox. Click on
the Save button to bring the server online. That’s all there’s to
it. Now follow the detailed instructions on Zeroshell’s website
(http://www.zeroshell.org/openvpn-client/) to configure
your Linux, Windows and Mac OS X clients to connect to your
Zeroshell OpenVPN server.
There’s a lot more you can do with Zeroshell. Just like
OpenVPN, the server ships with a Captive Portal and a
RADIUS server installation. All you need to do is enable it
and tweak it as per your network.

Along with the
antivirus, you
can also blacklist
URLs from under
the transparent
HTTPS proxy
section.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 139

Do more | Website cloning

HTTrack:
Website cloning
Need a challenge? Why not quickly get into web development by
cloning websites and altering the HTML without prior coding knowledge.

Quick
tip
To make the most
of HTTrack, you’ll
need to get your
HTML, CSS and
Javascript skills up
to scratch as you’ll
need them to tweak
you clone once it’s
been copied.

he tool HTTrack makes cloning websites quick and
easy. But why would you want to clone a website?
Well, there are many reasons: for instance, if you've
ever had any inclination to build stylish websites, cloning
makes it easy to start with a copy of a website you like which
you can then modify to suit your needs.
Essentially, almost anything on the web can be captured
to provide you a template along with all of the required files
(with exceptions of websites created on platforms like Wix
and several others). However, you will need to use discretion
when making a clone of a website since you likely don't want
to violate any copyright laws.
In addition to being a great learning tool, it can benefit
website owners as it can be a valuable way to acquire a copy
of your website, especially if the web developer is reluctant to
hand over the all of the files for some reason or other.
On another level, you can clone from a bloated or
outdated CMS platform and end up with lean, fast loading
static HTML files. For example, you can clone an outdated
Joomla or Wordpress website to make static HTML files with
all images and JavaScript. This is one way around security or
compatibility issues of an outdated CMS which are often

140 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

targets for hackers. Finally, web developers will love this as it’s
a great tool for making quick copies of your favourite website
work, which can easily end up as components in other
projects and websites.
At this point, the developer will probably want to hand
code, or re-theme the website with a template from a source
like Themeforest. The new update from the clone with a more
contemporary theme will also likely load much faster than the
previous website installation and be easier to maintain, if the
changes are only minor.
Although this tutorial is geared to using HTTrack for
cloning websites, much of the content covered will explain
what to do with your clone. Cloning is actually quite easy to
do and can you can perform the whole operation within
minutes. The more tedious part is knowing how to make
changes to the clone. But by the end of the tutorial, you'll
have the secrets to creating your cloned template and how to
change it to suit your needs. Even if you decide one day to
buy a commercial template and build your own website with
Linux free of cost, these tips will guide you to getting an
excellent finished result. No previous coding knowledge is
required for this too, but you will see how to make basic text
changes and some basic markup.
Below are a list of commands to install and use httrack
with a Debian-based Linux operating systems, such as
Raspbian and Ubuntu. These installations are required on a
clean Linux install. If you already have the installed packages,
such as apache and php, just skip these steps:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo apt-get install httrack
Do you want to continue[Y/n]
Type Y and hit Enter on the keyboard.

Cloning options
Using the command line, the command below will get the files
and links of the main directory. Note: This won't clone the
subfolders that could contain data like other HTML or PHP
files, shopping cart scripts and more:
sudo httrack http://example.com/ -O "/websites/example.
com" -%v -%e0
The command below, however, clones a subfolder
sudo httrack http://example.com/store/ -O "/websites/
example.com/store" -%v -%e0
and while we're covering cloning of a website or subfolders,

if (count($_POST) > 0) {
$url = htmlspecialchars($_POST['url'], ENT_QUOTES,
"utf-8");
//CREATE CLONE
shell_exec('sudo httrack http://' . $url . '/ -O "/home/pi/'
. $url . '" -%v -%e0 2>&1;');
}
?>
"
method="post">

Just open the URL in a browser, add the URL and submit.
The site is stored in the /home/pi folder. Depending on the
size of the site and files, the clone can take a little while to
complete. Often, a website can be cloned in less than a
minute. Essentially, using this basic script is a time saver and
making the clone can be done by anyone. Let's go on to
explain how the script works.
The code contains a simple text box and Submit button,
and once the button is clicked, the input is sanitised. After it's
sanitised with the htmlspecialchars() function, the new
variable called $url is dumped into the shell_exec() function.
The shell_exec() function is one way to run Linux shell
commands within PHP files and by default it's generally
enabled, and that is very likely the case with your system.
Therefore, if you plan to clone with your Ubuntu, Linux Mint or
Rapbian machine at home, you are automatically set up.
However, you may find that the shell_exec() function is
disabled if you plan to use the script on a web hosting

account. The reason that it's often disabled is down to
security measures.
Nevertheless, if you have shell access on a web hosting
account, you can enable it to use a specified folder or remove
it from a blacklist by editing the loaded php.ini file. With
shared hosting, you can ask if they will enable it for you.

Fixing up the clone
To do a quick check, open the main files called index.html in
a browser. At this point you should be able to see the web
page exactly as you'd expect it to look like. That's a good
starting point, but you may want to clean up the code a little
since HTTrack can leave extra pages and extra code.
For example, your index.html file may just be a file that
redirects to another page like index-2.html. It makes sense to
make the redirected page the index.html file. It will still work
by having two duplicate pages, but, from a web developer's
perspective this is messy navigation and having redundant
pages is bad practice.
If you happen to know some web design and development
and have an editor that can search all files for words or
regular expressions, making the change from index-2.html to
index.html is quick and easy. For command liners, you can
use the find command to find the files and use sed to change
the text:
sudo find /websites/example.com/example.com -type f -exec
sed -i 's/index-2.html/index.html/g' {} \;
Once you are done with the operation, you will want to
change the folder permissions which is currently root, unless
your user is in the sudoers file.
chown -R username:username /websites
Now, if you have saved index-1.html to index.html,
all links and navigation should work correctly. If you want to
clean up the code between the tags, you can still do
that too. It may include a comment that HTTrack was used to
make a website copy. You can remove the entire line that
starts with and any other comments
that could exist in the header.
Firebug is an extension you can add on to Firefox or
Chromium. However, you'll get many more features using
Firefox and it’s much more efficient to use with this browser.
With Firebug, you can drag your mouse over any web page
to work with any desired element on the page. You will have a
panel on the bottom and a sidebar on the right. With these,

Quick
tip
You can add
custom PHP/
MySQL for dynamic
web pages by
moving your clone
into folder /var/
www or /var/
html/www, and
renaming the
files with a .php
extension and
changing the menu
names to match.

Installing the Firebug addon for Firefox or Chromium makes analysing and
changing web page content for display a painless process.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 141

Do more | Website cloning

for those that want to explore other uses for HTTrack you can
find a lot more information at http://bit.ly/HTTrackGuide.
You should now be able to see the files within the specified
directory. In the case above, browse to the /websites/
example.com folder.
cd /websites/example.com
cd example.com
Alternatively, you could run HTTrack from a browser. You’ll
need to allow the Apache user www-data to become a super
user and allow it to use the httrack package without a
password. So, open up that /etc/sudoers file and give
Apache permission to use the desired service(s). Type nano
/etc/sudoers to open the file:
www-data ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/httrack
In order to submit a URL and clone the website, you'll need
a basic script that can do this. The code below can do exactly
that. The code shown can be copied and pasted into a file
stored within the /var/www folder. For simplicity, let's call it
cloner.php. This code will store the clone in the /home/pi
folder, but you can change the directory to wherever you want
the clone to reside:
,
, ,
, , , and

others, you could end up with a page that looks broken.
Again, just stick to changing the words and punctuation until
you learn about the other stuff.
Links As with any other template, links are something that
will need to be changed. Links have a beginning tag '' and
end tag ''. Within the beginning tag is a 'href' attribute
that contains the link web address. After that tag closes, the
text in between the two tags is the actual text link. Finally, at
the other end is the closing tag which makes it complete.
A simple link with an absolute URL is shown below:
Link text
A simple link with an relative URL is shown below. This link
to page.html is a link where the file page.html exists in the
same folder as the page which contains the link.
Link text
Images These are displayed on a web page with a selfclosing tag. The code to display an image is shown below:

List tags I've included list tags since they are often used in
menus. Since the menu of a cloned web page is unlikely to
suit your needs, you’ll want to know how to change these
details. The parent tags for lists are usually . These
stand for unordered lists.
The other possible parent list tags are ordered lists . They are usually used to display lists in numerical order,
which would not desired in menus.
If you look at the code below and look at the web page in a
browser, you can see that the menu items exist between the
tags. You can simply delete an entire set, or add
them as you need them.

Home
Page 1
Contact Us

Web page structure
We've covered ways to customise a page, but that doesn't
actually explain the other aspects of a web page, such as the
doctype, head section, body and div tags, so here we go:
Doctype This is located on the first line of the website code.
To see any code of a website, you can use Firebug, which we
mentioned earlier, or you can use a web browser to view the
source code of any web page.
A modern HTML5 Doctype will be at the top of the page

Altering the PHP configuration
When you make clones with HTTrack using
a web browser – search the Linux Format site
for sample code – your system will end up
working with PHP. This adds other factors
which need to be considered since PHP using
a configuration of its own.
There will be a configuration file that you can
always tweak, either on your PC, Raspberry Pi,
VPS or dedicated web server, and that file is
called php.ini.
username# php -i | grep "Configuration File"
Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /etc/php5/
cli

142 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Loaded Configuration File => /etc/php5/cli/php.
ini
username# nano /etc/php5/cli/php.ini
Your main concern with this file is to make
sure that the script doesn't time out and that the
shell_exec() function isn’t disabled at any point.
The main line that you need to find will begin
with max_execution_time.
By default, max_execution_time is set to 30
seconds. You can bump that number up and
restart Apache after saving any new changes,
eg, you may want to change it to 5 minutes
which is 300 seconds (60 * 5). To restart
Apache, see the following line of code:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Aside from that, this configuration file also
enables and disables functions. By default, you
don't have to make any changes because
everything is already enabled. But, if you want to
have more fine-tuned control of PHP, you can
always enable or disable functions by making
alterations in this file.
The code snippet below shows an example of
disabled functions, including the one this article
uses to run httrack in the browser.
disable_functions =exec,passthru,shell_
exec,system,proc_open,popen,curl_exec,curl_
multi_exec,parse_ini_file,show_source

Firebug installs in seconds, and as well as being
used by a lot of professional web developers, it
can also be a very useful tool for someone who
just wants to make minor changes to a web page
as it can pinpoint the precise location where you
need to make your alterations.
To install Firebug, select Tools > Addons >
Search for Firebug > Select install. To use the
extension, you simply click the icon in the top-

right of the Firefox browser that looks like a
ladybug. After Firebug pops up, click the pointer
that shows up on the bottom of the browser
window. You should be able to see a window on
the bottom and one of the right.
At this point, you can move your mouse
around the page and the bottom window will
show you exactly the code which is responsible
for displaying the relevant content. This will help

and look like this: . It’s used with popular
HTML5 documents and responsive CSS frameworks, such as
Bootstrap and Skeleton. Other Doctypes, like those for
XHTML documents will contain more text.
HTML tag After the declaration tag, comes the opening
tag. Its closing tag '', is the last piece of text
in the entire website.
Head tags The head tags have a beginning and end head
tags(). In general, all end tags look like the
opening tag, but with an extra forward slash. Within the
opening and closing head tags, are self-closing meta tags
with attributes, the tags,

When you run the httrack package from the command
line, you can watch it as it works away at cloning all the
different elements of your target website.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 143

Do more | Website cloning

Firebug primer

Do more | Deploy with Fog

Deploy multiple
machines

Image and rollout several computers from the comfort of your workstation.

The Fog server’s
web-based
dashboard eases
management,
even for
complex network
deployments.

anaging a network of computers is an involved
process. Before you can tackle the problem of
actively monitoring the machines, you have to
install an operating system on each one of them. This is
a time consuming task even for a small network with about
10 computers. Computer cloning involves setting up the
operating system, drivers, software, and data on one
computer, then automatically replicating the same setup
on other computers. The technique that’s also known as
ghosting or imaging is used by system admins for rolling
out multiple identical machines over the network without
much effort. Fog, which we’ll use here, is one of the most
popular open source cloning systems.
To use Fog you need to setup an imaging server. The
project officially supports several Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian,
and CentOS releases, but it’s known to work on other distros
as well. Before installing Fog make sure the server has a static
IP address, which you can ensure from your router’s admin
page. For this tutorial we’ll assume our Fog server is at
192.168.3.51. Also ensure that all the machines in your
network are configured to boot from the network card. Finally,
make sure your disable any existing DHCP servers on the
network as we’ll setup the Fog server as a DHCP server and
dole out addresses to all the computers on the network.
Once you have your network set up, head to the machine
that’ll be your deployment server and download the latest
stable Fog release from Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.
net/projects/freeghost/files/FOG/). Then fire up a
terminal and extract the downloaded tarball with
tar xvf Fog_1.2.0.tar.gz -C /opt
Then change into the bin/ directory under the extracted
tarball, and fire up the installation script with
sudo ./installFog.sh
The installation script will prompt you for several bits of

144 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

Fog depends on several mature open source tools such as
partclone to image a computer.

information such as the version of Linux you’re running it on,
the type of installation, the IP address of the server, the router
and the DNS server and whether you’d like to setup the Fog
server’s own DHCP server. In most cases, it’s best to go with
the default options suggested by the installer, but make sure
you enter the correct IP addresses for the server.
The script will install various required components. When
it’s done it’ll display a URL for Fog’s dashboard (such as
192.168.3.51/fog/management). Open the link in your web
browser and log in with the default credentials (fog:password).
On initial launch you’ll have to load the default settings into
the server’s database by clicking on the button on the page.
The first order of business when you are at the proper
administration dashboard is to create a new user. To do
this head to User Management > Create New User.

Create a base image
Now that our imaging server is set up, we’ll use it to image
a computer. Once a computer has been imaged we can then
deploy that image to other computers with a single click.
To begin the process, fire up a browser on the imaging
server and head to Fog’s dashboard and log in with the
default credentials. Then head to Image Management >
Create New Image. Use the fields in the form to describe the
image. For example, let’s assume we are creating an image of
Fedora Workstation 22 installation that we’ll then install on all
our computers in the Science Lab. So we can name the image
‘Fedora for Science Lab’.
Next, use the Operating System pull-down menu to
specify the operating system of this image, such as Linux.
Finally, select the correct disk layout scheme from the Image
Type pull-down menu. Our Fedora installation is on a single
disk with multiple partition so we’ll select the second option.

Fog is a complex piece of software and while
we’ve covered the core feature of the server,
it ships with several more. The Fog server is
scalable and can manage large networks spread
over multiple locations in the same building or
around the world. It allows you to arrange hosts
into several groups for easier management. One
of the most useful features of the Fog server,
especially for admins of larger networks, is the
multicast ability. Using this feature you can
deploy multiple machines in one go.
However, to use this feature successfully you’ll
need to make sure your Fog host has enough

computational and network resources to
stream multiple images simultaneously. For
such larger networks, you can have multiple
Fog installations configured as storage servers.
These storage servers share images and take
the load of the main Fog server when imaging
computers. The distributed storage servers
also speed up unicast transfers and introduce
data redundancy.
Besides the two most important Fog server
tasks that we’ve covered in this tutorial (upload
and download images), you can create several
different tasks for any of the hosts in Fog’s

repository. You can run the Debug task which
boots a Linux image to a bash prompt for fixing
any boot errors. You can also create a task to
remote wipe hosts, to recover files with TestDisk,
or to scan for viruses with ClamAV.
The Fog server can also install and manage
printers on the network. Depending on the OS
on the host you can also use the server to track
user access to computers by their Windows
usernames and automatically log off users and
shut down the computer after a specified period
of inactivity. Fog can also install and uninstall
apps via snapins.

Now assuming you’ve already installed Fedora on one of
the computers on the network, head to that computer and
boot it up. Since the computer is set to boot from the network
card, it’ll display the PXE boot environment from the Fog server.
Scroll down the Fog menu and select the ‘Quick Registration
and Inventory’ option. The Fog server will now scan the
computer and add it to its repository of known hosts.

You can deploy
and image your
computers by
accessing Fog
dashboard from
a mobile device
like a tablet.

Upload an image
When it’s done, shutdown the Fedora computer and head
back to the Fog server. Fire up the dashboard and head to
Host Management > List All Hosts. The Fedora server will be
listed here. By default Fog identifies each host by its MAC
address. You can change it to something more meaningful
(like ‘Fedora 22’) by clicking on the edit icon. Here you can
change its name and add a brief description to identify this
computer. Most importantly, use the Host Image pull-down
menu and select the Fedora 22 image you created earlier.
Now that our basic framework in ready, it’s time to
image the installed Fedora installation. Head back to Task
Management > List All Hosts which will list your rechristened
Fedora 22 installation. Under the Task section corresponding
to this image, click on the green upload arrow. Fog will give you
multiple options to schedule the upload task. You can explore
the options after clocking some mileage with Fog but for now
it’s best to go with the default option for instant deployment.
Then head back to the Fedora machine and boot it up. It’ll
again detect Fog’s PXE and automatically image the machine
and upload it to the Fog server. The process will take some
time depending on the size of the disk it has to image, the
processing capabilities of the computers involved and the
speed of the local network.
The Fedora computer will restart once it’s done uploading

Once a host is registered you can query its hardware and
get compatibility information before imaging it.

the image. You can now use Fog to deploy this Fedora image
on all the lab computers with a single click! You can similarly
image any other computer on the network, including the new
Windows 10 installations.

Deploy the image
Before you can deploy an image, you need to register the
targets machines as hosts with the Fog Server. The
registration process is the same as before. Boot the new
computer from the network which should detect Fog’s PXE
environment. When it does, select the ‘Quick Registration
and Inventory’ option.
When the computer has been added to Fog’s repository
of known computers, login to the Fog dashboard and head
to Host Management > List All Hosts. Click on the edit icon
corresponding to the newly added machine and rename it so
that it’s more identifiable, something like Lab PC #1. Again,
remember to use the Host Image pull-down menu to select
the Fedora 22 image that we’ve just imaged from another
computer. Repeat the process to register all the computers
in the lab with the Fog server. Then edit them in the Fog
dashboard to give then an identifiable name and select the
Fedora image as the host image.
Now to replicate the Fedora image on to the other lab
computers, head to Task Management > List All Hosts.
Browse the list of hosts to find the entry for the computer you
wish to deploy to and select the corresponding down arrow
Deploy image option. After the deploy task has been created,
head to the lab computer and power it on. It’ll automatically
detect the task from the Fog server and copy the image
from the server on to the local machine. When it’s done, you’ll
have a mirror copy of the Fedora installation on the Lab
computer. Repeat the process to deploy Fedora on other
Lab computers as well.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 145

Do more | Deploy with Fog

Advanced Fog features

Do more | DD-WRT

DD-WRT: Hack
a wireless router

Find out how to power up the device at the heart of your home network with
your very own software for a truly custom spin on routing.
While installing a custom firmware is almost always a
beautiful learning experience, sometimes what you learn is
how it feels to break a perfectly good router. It probably won’t
even seem like it’s your fault when it happens, but implicit in
your willingness to continue is the understanding that it will
be your fault, because you were the one who poked it.
Now that’s clear, we can continue and the most advisable
way forward is to use an older, spare router. Look at it this way
– you’re going to end this process without a manufacturer’s
warranty, so you may as well start it without one. You’re also
less likely to feel a sense of gnawing, visceral guilt if you sneeze
and pull out the power adaptor during a firmware update, and
proportionally more likely to unlock new features. By contrast,
it can take a reasonably long time for custom firmware such
as DD-WRT to adapt to new technology (and longer still to
make it run reliably), so you may be on a hiding to nothing with
this year’s super router, even if you’re cavalier enough to try it.

Router support

Quick
tip
There are other
firmware that might
reasonably vie for
your attention. In
particular, various
forks of the Tomato
project, Merlin’s
take on AsusWRT
(a halfway house
between custom
and stock firmware
strictly for Asus
routers) and even
OpenWRT, which is
the expansive base
on which many
others are built.

owadays a decent router can be relied on to do its
own thing without bothering you, making it a great
time for home networking. However, it can still be a
challenge to get it to do your particular thing instead. If you’re
ready for a change, the world of custom firmware opens up
an embarrassment of configuration choices, as well as an
enticing catalogue of new functionality.
With DD-WRT as our firmware of choice, we’re going to
firmly encourage these sleek and unassuming embedded
devices to reach their full huffing, wheezing potential. There
will be sweat, there may be tears, but we’ll guide you through
the process of selecting and installing a firmware, show you
some of the nattiest ways to trick it out, and open the door for
your own challenges to follow.
DD-WRT is one among many custom firmware for wireless
routers, but it beats at the heart of the custom firmware
movement, with a broad range of support, relative ease of
use, consistent development and a treasure trove of features.
Installing DD-WRT isn’t a minor tweak, though – it will
completely rewrite the way your router operates, potentially
opening up functionality, such as: SSH; file and media
serving; guest networks; QoS; VLANs; and VPNs in more
flavours than you could find in a bag of Revels. However, there
are risks commensurate with the scope of the change.

146 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

We’ll deliver the bad news up front. With no notable
exceptions, combination router/modems won’t work – BT’s
famous range of Home Hubs, for example, aren’t supported.
But all is not lost if you’re on VDSL/BT fibre, because you
should be able to arrange to use a standalone OpenReach
modem instead, and connect up a router of your choice.
Other ISPs’ combination devices may even have a modemonly mode that enables you to plug in your own router – eg,
Virgin Media’s Super Hubs fall into this category.
If you do have a standalone router, you can’t necessarily
just go ahead and plonk a new firmware on it. Some routers
don’t have the right chipset, some don’t have enough flash
storage, and some don’t have the RAM. Some, frankly, don’t
have the moxie. All that said, a surprisingly wide range of
routers are supported. So how do you know whether yours is
one of them?
Your first port of call should be DD-WRT’s router database
(www.dd-wrt.com/site/support/router-database). Simply
put your model number into the search field, and then cross
your fingers. The database will usually give you a straight yes
or no answer, but don’t jump for joy when you see your model
appear in this list until you have checked that the revision
column also matches up with your router – some
manufacturers change out the internals almost completely
between revisions of the same router model.
Just for fun, try searching for the WRT54G in the router
database, and count the iterations. The WRT54G is the
granddaddy of DD-WRT, and it has a lot of history. But note
that at least one revision isn’t supported at all, and that the
specs can be wildly different between others. Many have

Firm forum friends
The forums are the best place to find out what’s working,
right now, for other people using the same hardware (see
www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2). You should pay particular
attention to threads where users trade blows over their
favourite or most stable builds. Look out for the guru posters,
who often have long signatures containing details of the
many different routers they run, and which firmware versions
they’re running on them. These guys have done their
homework, so make sure you do yours, too, even if that
sometimes means leaning across the metaphorical desk to
copy their notes.
DD-WRT exists in an ongoing beta, and the newest release
is not always going to be the best one for your own particular
hardware. There’s no shame or loss in using a build which
might be significantly behind the bleeding edge. If it’s the
right fit for your kit, just go for it. With older releases, the main
thing you need to concern yourself with is to make sure that
you’re not exposing yourself and your hardware to any critical
security flaws. As a starting point, build revisions between
19163 and 23882 are a poor vintage; any components
making use of OpenSSL will be affected by the Heartbleed
bug. The good news is that none of the vanilla builds are
affected by the Bash-specific Shellshock vulnerability; like
many embedded device firmwares, DD-WRT relies on
BusyBox to provide A Shell.
Likewise, the use of uclibc means that the glibc Ghost
vulnerability is no concern for today. However, running a
custom firmware does tend to send the security ball zipping
over the next into your side of the court, so you really do need
to keep abreast of any emerging vulnerabilities.

The make or model is usually on a sticker, either on the back or the bottom of
your router. Note any version information in addition to the model number.

Now, let’s go through a worked example. We have a Cisco
Linksys E3000 router, which treads a decent balance
between age and relevance. It’s around five years old and
there’s none of that new-fangled wireless AC technology,
but it was a powerhouse in its day, with support for
simultaneous 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless bands. The router
database shows a firm yes, and there is some specific
information on the wiki relating to it. Particular points of note
are the implications of it having 60K of NVRAM, and the
requirement to flash a trailed build (see overleaf for the
box: Trailed Builds and TFTP). We’ll need to take both of
these things into account.
We’re lucky, as it happens; on the forums, a build from
February 2015 (build 26138) is being touted as stable with the
Linksys E series. There’s some debate about a bug in the
Guest Wi-Fi implementation, but it sounds as though it’s
going to be worth our time.
The main area for new DD-WRT releases is at ftp://ftp.
dd-wrt.com/betas and we know from the wiki that E3000compatible builds are to be found in the broadcom_K26
subfolder. We can pick a mini-trailed release for the E3000
from here with no problem, so we’ll get that now, but if we
want to move to a larger general build afterwards, then we’ll
need to remember our 60K NVRAM limit, and pick one of the
60K builds from the same folder. The mega 60K build is
(just!) too large for our 8MB flash storage – It’s a good job we
checked that out, because it came down to counting the
bytes – so we’ll go with the so-called ‘big build’ instead.

Firmware update time

Now is the time for a moment of quiet reflection…

Quick
tip
DD-WRT gives
you control
but it doesn’t
necessarily give
you performance.
If blazing fast speed
is the only thing
that interests you,
a manufacturer’s
own firmware
is often faster
than the custom
alternatives.

Warning
Following this
tutorial can destroy
your hardware.
Future PLC
accepts no liability
(including through
negligence) for
any damage, loss
of data or costs
you might incur
as a result of this
tutorial. Use this at
your own risk.

Now it’s time for us to check and double-check all our
sources of information, because we’re ready to do the
firmware update. The steps that follow are usually applicable,
but you should read up on your model to see where any
differences might occur.
First, you need to connect your computer to the router
using a wired connection, and then configure it to have a
static IP address on the same subnet as the router. Things are
not guaranteed to go wrong if you don’t do this, but do you
really want to leave the router in charge of business while
you’re in the process of brainwashing it? The answer is a
definite no. No, you don’t.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 147

Do more | DD-WRT

reduced flash storage space, for instance, and will be limited
in which features they can support.
Once you’ve established that your router is supported,
there are two major lights in the darkness: DD-WRT’s wiki,
and the community forums. The wiki is great for getting a
baseline understanding of any issues which might affect your
particular router. Start with the Supported Devices page
(www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices).
Links from this page often indicate that your router has a
specific installation guide, which might just mean that it’s a
popular model, but it could mean that the flashing process
comes with some caveat or special requirement, so be aware.

Do more | DD-WRT

Success for
your firmware
update will look
like this.

Quick
tip
NVRAM is the
persistent memory
in which variables
are stored between
resets, and it’s
measured in
kilobytes. The
more features
you use, the more
variables you store
(VPN certificates
are particularly
greedy). It’s both
a limiting factor
and a risk; if you
reach the end
of your NVRAM
allocation and keep
writing, you can
reset or even brick
the device.

Do a 30-30-30 reset (see box opposite), and then log in to
your router’s web configuration page (with the now factory default
username and password). Find wherever your manufacturer has
hidden the firmware update section, and browse your computer to
find the DD-WRT firmware file you prepared earlier, which is
probably a trailed build specific to your router.
Go ahead and do the update using the built-in firmware
updater. There may or may not be a progress bar, but ignore
it either way. You’re going to wait at least five minutes. Use a
clock and not your patience to gauge this. Then turn the
router off and on again, giving it time to reboot and get its
bearings – then, and only then, do another 30-30-30.
Open up a web browser and go to 192.168.1.1, which is the
default IP address for a DD-WRT router, and check that you
are indeed looking at a DD-WRT interface. That’s the first
good sign, and the second is whether it’s asking you to
change the password, which shows that the 30-30-30 reset
after the update has also worked properly.
If all is well, decide whether you’re sticking with the build
you’ve just installed or, if you were using a trailed build as an
intermediary step, repeat the process again in full, until you
have reached your final destination.

private key pair, enter the following into a terminal on your
local machine.
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa_ddwrt
You’re prompted to set a passphrase, but hitting Enter
twice enables you to continue without – choose your balance
of security and convenience. Two new files are created under
your home directory, in the ~/.ssh/ hidden folder: id_rsa_
ddwrt and id_rsa_ddwrt.pub, which contain your newly
generated private and public keys, respectively. Make sure you
keep prying eyes away from the private key, but we’ll use the
public key to set up easy password-free access to your router.
Go to the Services tab in your new DD-WRT Web GUI, and
then click the enable checkbox for SSHd. This expands some
new options. It’s up to you whether or not you leave password
authentication active, but what you do want to do is copy the
contents of your id_rsa_ddwrt.pub file into the Authorized
Keys box. Make sure the entire sequence occurs on a single
line. Save and apply these changes. At this point, one simple
terminal command on your local machine should let you in
through the door:
ssh root@192.168.1.1
Substitute in the correct local IP of your router, if you’ve
changed it. If you see the DD-WRT message in the terminal,
well done, you’re in. But you didn’t think we were going to
stop there, did you? Getting the local access is only half the
battle. How about an interesting and powerful way to manage
your router from the outside world? Remote access to your
router is always going to be a controversial subject but, let’s
be honest, sometimes it’s useful enough to be worth the risk
you are taking doing it.

Configuration work
Now that you’re up and running, feel free to do some basic
configuration. Get the router set up the way you like it;
that’s what we came here for. DD-WRT’s interface is neat and
functional, and you should be able to find the options you’re
comfortable with, albeit buddying along with a raft of new
features. Get your wireless security set up, and then give it a
test drive. Now are you ready to try something that you
couldn’t do before?
How about logging directly into your router via SSH? Yeah,
we can do that. We can even do it without a password, using
the public key method. To generate an appropriate public/

Note that the only user for SSH is root, regardless of what
username you set for the Web GUI. The password is the
same, if you’re using one.

Trailed builds and TFTP
A trailed build could quite accurately be
described as a custom custom firmware. It’s a
firmware that’s been built specifically for one
particular model of router (which is mentioned
in the filename). Trailed builds contain headers
that check out as legitimate with the
manufacturer’s own firmware, which then
conveniently and quite cleverly enables you to
use the existing interface to overwrite itself. A
trailed build might not be your end point,
however, but more like a transitional step

148 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

between using stock and custom firmware.
Once you have installed a trailed build of
DD-WRT, you’re generally able to move more
freely between different firmware builds – you
still need to pick the correct ones, though.
Now let’s take a look at tftp, which is quite
literally a trivial file transfer protocol. This is
necessary for the initial flash of a few routers –
older Linksys, Buffalo and Belkin models being
the prime examples. It’s comparatively rare to
require this on Wireless N or newer routers. If

you don’t need to use tftp, then it’s not
recommended, regardless of whether or
not it’s available.
However, it’s worth remembering that lots
of different routers have a tftp connection
available for a limited window during the boot
process, because it could be one of the first
ports of call if you need to try to recover
from a bad flash. Although it’s never to be
relied upon, it may help bring you back from
the brink in a pinch.

Do more | DD-WRT

The 30-30-30 reset
Don’t underestimate how skew-whiff things can become
when the vestigial variables of firmware A come out to play
with custom firmware B. The 30-30-30 is a catch-all hard
reset for clearing NVRAM and returning most routers to
their firmware defaults, which you’ll do before and after
flashing each new firmware version.
Your router’s Reset button is probably on the back of the
unit, sometimes inset. Grab a paperclip if you need one, and
get into a comfortable position; you are going to be holding
your router’s reset button down for 90 seconds or more,
which is a long, long time for someone with cramp.
Start holding down your router’s reset button, and count
a full 30 seconds. Not letting go of the reset button, pull the
AC plug out of the back of the router. Count 30 more
seconds. Keep holding that reset button, and plug the router
back in. Count 30 more seconds. Finally, let go of the reset
button and throw up some jazz hands to brighten the mood
and get your circulation flowing again. Your router should be
back to default values for whichever firmware you currently
have installed. (You can put your hands down now.)
A handful of older routers, but an ever-increasing number
of new AC routers, need to be hard reset in other ways. If the
30-30-30 doesn’t return yours to default values, check what
does work for your router, and use that method instead.

DD-WRT will happily support remote access to the GUI via
HTTP or HTTPS. There’s no way in this life that you’d want to
give the world a shot at the core of your home network
without a single security layer, but you might be thinking
about allowing HTTPS connections.
Wait, though. Here’s a neat trick instead: why not disallow
remote Web GUI access altogether, and just connect via
SSH? You can then log in and administer the router remotely
by command line or set up an SSH tunnel to give you,
effectively, local access to the Web GUI. This will work from
any location – and you only have to open one door to enable
both types of access. Let’s look at how this can be done.
First, setting up the remote access to SSH is done in a
different part of the DD-WRT GUI to enabling the service.
This time you’ll want to go to the Management tab under
Administration. There’s a remote access section here.
Don’t bother enabling the remote Web GUI Management.
Instead, enable SSH Management. You’re given the option to
select a port for this. You don’t need to – and, in fact,
shouldn’t – use the typical SSH port 22; we’ll use port 19198
in this example. We made this up so feel free to make up your
own, but don’t worry – the connection made on this port will
forward through to the SSH service on your router without
any extra work on your part.
Now you can SSH to your router from the outside world, in
the same way that you do from your local network – the only
differences are that you need to specify the port, and use the
outward facing IP rather than the local one:
ssh -p 19198 root@WANIP
You should replace WANIP with the global address of your
local network. This can be a DNS name, or an IP address.
In the highly likely event that your ISP doesn’t provide you
with a static IP address, you won’t necessarily need to keep
track of every change of IP address. DD-WRT supports
automatically updating of a number of different dynamic DNS
services – take a look at DDNS under the Setup tab for the

Yes, you can buy a tool that does the job of a paperclip.

various options.
So we’ve come this far, but what about that Web GUI?
Well, try starting your SSH session with this command:
ssh -p 19198 root@WANIP -L 8080:localhost:80
This starts an SSH session as before, but the last part of
the command creates a tunnel from port 8080 on your local
machine, to port 80 on the router. Now try opening a browser
window to the following URL: http://localhost:8080/
Wow. Presto. There it is. You’ve got your Web GUI from a
remote location, and it’s all encrypted through your SSH
session. Now the world, quite literally, is at your disposal.

The gauntlet
Now you’ve got access via the Web GUI and SSH, what new
things are worth trying? Actually, what new things are not
worth trying? If that sounds like a challenge, read it as one.
How about building on the SSH tunnelling method we
looked at, to have your home router run a SOCKS5 proxy,
via which you can encrypt your traffic when you’re away
from home? If you’ve got a VPN account, how about
connecting with your router as the client? (This can be great
for hooking up other, less hackable embedded devices which
might not support VPN natively.) Maybe you have a USB
mobile broadband dongle? DD-WRT can play with those. Why
not try creating an alternative internet feed through your
router, for those days when your main ISP connection dies?
If you really want to start playing with fire, you might even
find a way to host your own cloud-style file service from a
USB hard drive, hanging off the back of your router. It’s not
like you were planning on turning your router off, were you?
So there we have it. Some absolutely astounding
possibilities that would previously have taken all kinds of
wizardry to arrange, running on something you probably
already had sitting in a cupboard. Remember that routing
network traffic is this device’s bread and butter, so don’t be
afraid to make it earn a living!

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 149

Programming skills are the
mark of the complete hacker.
152

Tux’s Coding Academy
Starting from scratch? Just brushing up?
Let us take you through the essentials of
coding quickly and easily.

162

Scripting languages
Bash is not the only one. In fact, it’s facing
some stiff competition...

168 Riak NoSQL
Databases done the easy way.
172

PHP feed aggregator
A quick challenge to close out the book:
build yourself something useful!

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 151

Coding | Intro

Coding

Coding | Coding academy
Coding isn’t scary. Promise. If you’ve always wanted
to learn, there’s no better time to get started.
oding is the new cool. If you
don’t know how to Python, all
your friends are going to be
laughing at you…
We’re not being flippant. Knowing how
to code is almost an essential for the open
source fiend. Be it basic Bash scripting or
knowing how to read a bit of PHP, coding

152 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

knowledge is more than useful, it’s an essential
skill, particularly now that coding is being
taught in schools.
Knowing a bit of code helps with using
Linux itself, helps you get more out of the
terminal, can open doors to a new career or
help you troubleshoot why that webpage
won’t work correctly. Other than taking a bit of

time to pick up, there’s also no cost and as a
FLOSS user, access to every language under
the sun is just waiting an apt-get away.
So take our hand and let’s take just a few
minutes to create a fun game in Python, learn
which languages are right for you and your
projects, then see how you can tackle the new
school curriculum and even web development.

his is going to be a very gentle
introduction to programming in
Python in which we’ll explore the
basics of the language, then use the Pygame
module to make a simple game. That we are
able to do this is testament to the power of
Python and Pygame: much of the tedium
inherent in game work is abstracted away
and, once we’ve covered some elementary
programming constructions, for the most
part we work with intuitive commands.
First follow the instructions in the box to
check which version of Python you have and
install Pygame. Whether you’re on a Raspberry
Pi or a larger machine, start at the command
line. So open up a terminal (LXTerminal in
Raspbian) and start Python 2.7 with
$ python2
Alternatively, start up IDLE and start a
command prompt from there by choosing
‘Python 2.7 Shell’ from the Window menu. Both
will start the Python interactive interpreter,
wherein Python commands can be typed at
the >>> prompt and evaluated immediately.
It is here that we will forge our first Python
program, by carefully typing out the following
incantation:
>>> print('Hello World')
As you might suspect, pressing Enter
causes Python to display a global greeting.
You can exit the interpreter at any point by
pressing Ctrl-D or using the exit() command.
For larger programs it makes sense to work in
a text editor, or an Integrated Development
Environment (like IDLE), but the interpreter
is a great way to test smaller code fragments.
So we’ll use it to now to introduce some
fundamental coding concepts and constructs.
First let’s introduce the idea of variables:
>>> name = 'Methuselah'
>>> age = 930
>>> print(name, ' is ', age, ' years old.')
So we can assign values to variables,

The IDLE development environment is purpose built for Python. You can install it on
Ubuntu (or in this case ElementaryOS) with apt-get install idle .

change them to our hearts’ content, and use
print statements to see them. Technically, the
brackets in the print line are only required in
Python 3, but they don’t do any harm and it’s
good practice to write, wherever possible,
ambidextrous code that will run in both
versions. Variables in Python are automatically
assigned a type based on their content. So
name is a string (short for a string of
characters) and age is an integer (a whole
number). You can check this by typing
type(name) etc.
Some types can be coerced to other types
– we can transmute age to a floating point
number (one with a decimal part) with:
>>> age = float(age)
>>> age
Just typing the variable name into the
interpreter will show you its value, so you can
easily see the changes you have enacted. We
can convert ints or floats to strings, using the
function str() . Python can also go the other
way, converting a string to a float for example,

but this will only work if the original string
looks something like its target type:
float('10.0') will work, but
float('Rumplestiltskin') will not.
Just as division works differently for
floats and ints, so addition works differently
for strings. Here the + operator stands for
concatenation, tacking the latter string onto
the end of the former. Thus:
>>> 'Hello ' + 'world'
'Hello world'
>>> str(123) + str(456)
'123456'
>>> 'Betelgeuse' * 3
'BetelgeuseBetelgeuseBetelgeuse'
The last line shows that we can also
multiply strings – division and substraction,
however, are not defined for strings.
Data types dictate how data is
represented internally, and the effects of this
can be quite subtle. For example, in Python 2
the division operator / works differently if
one of its arguments is a float:

Installing Python and Pygame
If you’re using Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi or
any flavour of desktop Linux, then the chances
are that you already have at least one (probably
two) versions of Python installed. While the
latest release (1.9.2) is now Python 3
compatible, no distributions are shipping this
version yet, so we’ll stick to Python 2 (2.7 to be
precise) for this tutorial. Check your default
Python version by typing:
$ python -V
If this returns a result that begins with 2, then

everything is fine. If, on the other hand, you see
3-point-something, then check Python 2
availability with the command:
$ python2 -V
Some distros, notably Arch Linux and the
recently released Fedora 22, don’t ship the 2.7
series by default. Installing Pygame, however, will
pull it in as a dependency, so let’s do that now.
Users of Debian-derived distributions (including
Raspbian on the Pi) should use the following
command to install Pygame:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pygame
Users of other distributions will find a similarly
named package (on Arch it’s called python2pygame) and should be able to install it through
the appropriate package manager, whether
that’s pacman yum, zypper or whatever. Most
distributions bundle the IDLE environment with
each version of Python installed; if you can’t find
an icon for it, try running the commands idle or
idle2 . If that fails to produce the goods, then go
hunting in your distro’s repos.

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 153

Coding | Coding academy

Get with the Program

Coding | Coding academy

>>> 3/2
>>> 1
>>> 3/2.
>>> 1.5
Funny the difference a dot can make.
Note that we have been lazy here in typing
simply 2. when we mean 2.0. Python is
all about brevity. (Besides, why make life
hard for yourself?) Sooner or later you’ll
run into rounding errors if you do enough
calculations with floats. Check out the
following doozy:
>>> 0.2 * 3
0.6000000000000001
Such quirks arise when fractions have a
non-terminating binary decimal expansion.
Sometimes these are of no consequence,
but it’s worth being aware of them. They can
be worked around either by coercing floating
point variables to ints, or using the round()
function, which will give you only the number
of decimal places you require. We’ll see this
in practice when we program our Gomoku
game later.

Going loopy
Very often programmers desire to do almost
the same thing many times over. It could be
appending entries to a list, adding up totals
for each row in a table, or even subtracting
energy from all enemies just smitten by a
laser strike. Iterating over each list item,
table row or enemy manually would be
repetitive and make for lengthy, hard-to-read
code. For this reason we have loops, like the
humble for loop below. When you hit Enter
after the first line, the prompt will change to
… . This is because the interpreter knows
that a discrete codeblock is coming and the
line(s) following the for construct ‘belong’ to
it. Such codeblocks need to be indented,
usually using four spaces, though you can
use as many as you like so long as you’re
consistent. If you don’t indent the second
line, Python will shout at you. Entering a
blank line after the print statement will end
the codeblock and cause our loop to run.

There are all kinds of Pygame-powered games. This one, You Only Get One Match, features
lots of fireworks but limited means of ignition. Check it out at http://bit.ly/LXF202-onematch

>>> for count in range(5):
…
print('iteration #', count)
There’s a few things going on here. We have
introduced a new variable, an integer by the
name of count . Giving sensible names to your
variables is a good idea; in this case it implies
(even in the absence of any other coding
knowledge) that some counting is about to
happen. The range() function, when used in

isolation, returns a list consisting of a range of
integers. We’ll cover lists in just a moment, but
for now we just need to know that range(5)
looks like [0, 1, 2, 3, 4], which you can verify in
the interpreter. So our variable count is going
to iterate over each of these values, with the
print() line being issued five times – once for
each value in the range.
Another type of loop is the while loop.

How to play Gomoku
Gomoku is short for gomokunarabe, which is
roughly Japanese for ‘five pieces lined up’. The
game in fact originated in China some 4,000
years ago. Players take turns to each place a
counter on the intersections of a square grid
with the goal of forming unbroken lines
(horizontal, vertical or diagonal) of length 5.
Traditionally the board has 19x19 intersections,
but we’ve gone for the smaller 15x15 board
used in some variations. We haven’t included
an AI (that would be somewhat too complicated
for a beginner tutorial) so you’ll need to find a

154 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

friend/other personality with which to play.
Alternatively there are plenty of online versions
you can play, and KDE users get the similar
Bovu game with their desktop.
It’s easy to figure out some basic strategies,
such as always blocking one side of your
opponent’s ‘open three’ line or obstructing a
‘broken four’. Yet to become a master takes
years of practice. The basic rule set as we’ve
implemented it heavily favours the starting
player (traditionally black). In fact, work by L.
Victor Allis has shown that a good player

(actually a perfect player) can force a win if they
start. To mitigate against this, big tournaments
use a starting strategy called swap2. The first
player places two black counters and one white
one on the board, and the second player then
either chooses a colour or places another black
and another white counter on the board and
allows player 1 to choose colours. You are free
to modify the code to force use of swap2, but
it’s entirely possible to obey this rule without
any code modification: just disobey the first few
‘Player x, make your move’ prompts.

The opposite of listless
We mentioned lists earlier and in the exciting
project that follows we’ll use them extensively,
so it would be remiss not to say what they are.
Lists in Python are flexible constructions that
store a series of indexed items. There are no
restrictions on said items: they can be strings,
ints, other lists, or any combination of these.
Lists are defined by enclosing a commaseparated list of the desired entries in square
brackets. For example:
>>> myList = ['Apple', 'Banana', 'Chinese
Gooseberry']
The only gotcha here is that lists are zeroindexed, so we’d access the first item of our
list with myList[0] . If you think too much like a
human, then 1-indexed lists would make more
sense. Python doesn’t respect this, not even a
little, so if you too think like a meatbag, then be
prepared for some classic off-by-one errors.
We can modify the last item in the list thusly:
>>> myList[2] = 'Cthulhu'
Lists can be declared less literally – for
example, if we wanted to initialise a list with
100 zeroes, we could do:
>>> zeroList = [0 for j in range(100)]
This is what is known as a list comprehension.
Another example is
>>> countList = [j for j in range(100)]
which results in a list containing the integers

0 up to and including 99, which could equally
well be achieved with range(100) in Python 2.
However, the concept is more powerful – for
example we can get a list of squares using the
exponentiation (to the power of) operator ** :
>>> squareList = [j ** 2 for j in range(100)]
And after that crash course we’re ready to
program our own game. You’ll find all the code
on the disc (in Tutorials, in the file gomoku.py)
or at http://pastebin.com/FRe7748B, so it
would be silly to reproduce that here. Instead
we’ll focus on the interesting parts, in some
cases providing an easier-to-digest fragment
which you can play with and hopefully see how
it evolves into the version in the program.
To dive in and see the game in action, copy
gomoku.py to your home and run it with:
$ python2 gomoku.py
On the other hand, if you want to see some
code, open up that file in IDLE or your favourite
text editor. Starting at the first line is a
reasonable idea… It looks like:
#!/usr/bin/env python2
This line is actually ignored by Python (as
are all lines that begin with #) but it is used by
the shell to determine how the file should be
executed. In this case we use the env utility,
which should be present on all platforms, to
find and arm the Python 2 executable. For this
nifty trick to work, you’ll need to make the
gomoku.py file executable, which is achieved
from the command prompt (assuming you’ve
copied the file to your home directory, or
anywhere you have write permission) with:
$ chmod +x gomoku.py
You’ll find you can now start the game with
a more succinct:
$ ./gomoku.py
Next we have three import statements, two
of which (pygame and sys) are straightforward.
The pygame module makes easy work of
doing game-related things – we’re really only

One of many tense counter-based battles
which Jonni ultimately won. [That’s cos you
were playing both sides – Ed]

scratching the surface with some basic
graphics and font rendering. We need a
single function, exit() , from the sys module
so that we can cleanly shut down the game
when we’re done. Rather than importing the
whole sys module we import only this
function. The final import line is just for
convenience – we have already imported
pygame, which gives us access to pygame.
locals, a bunch of constants and variables.
We use only those relating to mouse,
keyboard and quitting events. Having this
line here means we can access, say, any
mouse button events with
MOUSEBUTTONDOWN without prefixing it
with pygame.locals.

It’s all in the (Py)game
Throughout the program you’ll notice that
some variables are uppercase and some are
not. Those in uppercase are either from
pygame.locals or should be considered
constants, things that do not change value
over the course of the game. Most of these
are declared after the import statements
and govern things like the size of the game
window and counters. If you want to change
the counter colours, to red and blue for
example, you could replace the values of
WHITE and BLACK with (255,0,0) and
(0,0,255) respectively. These variables are
tuples (a similar structure to a list, only it
cannot be changed) which dictate the red,
green and blue components of colours.
Next you’ll see a series of blocks
beginning with def: – these are function
definitions and, as is the case with other
codeblocks in Python, they are demarcated
by indentation. The initGame() function
initialises the play area. Here’s a simple
version that shows what this function does:
WIN_WIDTH = 620
GRID_SIZE = (WIN_WIDTH) / 14
WHITE=(255,255,255)
BLACK=(0,0,0)
BGCOL=(80,80,80)
def initGame():
screen.fill(BGCOL)
for j in range(15):
pygame.draw.line(screen, WHITE, (0, j
* GRID_SIZE), (WIN_WIDTH, j * GRID_
SIZE))
pygame.draw.line(screen, WHITE, (j *
GRID_SIZE, 0), (j * GRID_SIZE, WIN_
WIDTH))
pygame.init()
pygame.display.set_caption(‘LXF Gomoku’)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((WIN_
WIDTH,WIN_WIDTH))
initGame()
pygame.display.update()
If you add the three import lines to the
beginning of this, then this is actually a

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Coding | Coding academy

Rather than iterating over a list, our wiley while
loop will keep going over its code block until
some condition ceases to hold. In the following
example, that condition is that the user claims
to have been born after 1900 and before 2016.
>>> year = 0
>>> while year < 1900 or year >= 2015:
…
year = input("Enter your year of birth: ")
…
year = int(year)
Again the loop itself is indented, and again
you’ll need to input a blank line to set it
running. We’ve used the less than ( < ) and
greater than or equal to ( >= ) operators to
compare values. Conditions can be combined
with the logical operators and, or and not. So
long as year has an unsuitable value, we keep
asking. It is initialised to 0, which is certainly
less than 1900, so we are guaranteed to enter
the loop. We’ve used the input() function, which
returns whatever string the user provides. This
we store in the variable year, which we convert
to an integer so that the comparisons in the
while line do not fail. It always pays to be as
prudent as possible as far as user input is
concerned: a malicious user could craft some
weird input that causes breakage, which while
not a big deal in this example, is bad news if it’s
done, say, on a web application that talks to a
sensitive database. You could change 1900 if
you feel anyone older than 115 might use your
program. Likewise, change 2015 if you want to
keep out (honest) youngsters.

Coding | Coding academy

Astute readers will notice that the grid
overruns ever so slightly at the edges. This
is because drawing 15 equispaced parallel lines
divides the board into 14, but 620 (our window
size) is not divisible by 14. However, when we
add in some window borders, since we want
to place counters on the edge lines as well,
620 turns out to be a very good number, and
we were too lazy to change it. Though rough
around the edges, it’s still testament to
Pygame’s power and Python’s simplicity that
we can do all this in just a few lines of code.
Still, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, our game
still doesn’t do anything.
Joel Murielle’s graphical Gomoku is
available from the Pygame website.
Pygame takes all the pain out of working
with sprites, notorious troublemakers.

perfectly valid Python program. The
initGame() function doesn’t do anything
until it is called at the last line, by which time
we’ve already initialised Pygame, set our
window title and set the window size to 620
pixels. All variables set up outside of function
definitions, hence the five all-caps constants
at the beginning and screen are accessible
inside function definitions; they are known
as global variables. Variables defined inside
function definitions are called ‘local’ – they
cease to exist when the function exits, even
if they have the same name as a global
variable – again, something to be aware of in
your future coding endeavours. The variable
screen refers to the ‘canvas’ on which our
game will be drawn, so it will be used
extensively later on. The initGame()
function’s first act is to paint this canvas a
delightful shade of grey (which you’re very
welcome to change). Then we use a loop
to draw horizontal and then vertical lines,
making our 15x15 grid. None of this artwork
will appear until we tell Pygame to update
the display, hence the last line.

Finer points
From here onward, we’ll refer to the actual
code, so any snippets we quote won’t work in
isolation – they’re just there to highlight things.
You’ll notice that the FONT variable isn’t
defined with the other constants: this is
because we can’t use Pygame’s font support
until after the Pygame’s init() method has
been called. Let’s look at the main game loop
right at the end of the code. The introductory
clause while True: suggests that this loop will
go on forever. This is largely correct – we want
to keep checking for events, namely mouse
clicks or the user clicking the exit button, until
the game is done. Obviously we exit the loop
when the application quits – clicking the
button triggers a QUIT event which we react to
with the exit() function from the sys package.
Inside the main loop, the first thing we do is call
the updatePlayer() function, which you’ll find on
line 32. This updates the text at the top of the
screen that says whose go it is, drawing
(‘blitting’) first a solid rectangle so any
previous text is erased. Next we loop over the
events in the events queue; when the player
tries to make a move, the tryCounterPlace()
function is called, with the mouse co-ordinates
passed along.
To keep track of the game, we use a two-

dimensional square array (a list of lists) in the
variable grid. This is initialised as all 0s, and
when a player makes a move a 1 or a 2 is
entered accordingly. The first job of the
tryCounterPlace() function is to reconcile the
mouse coordinates where the user clicked with
a pair of coordinates with which to index the
grid variable. Of course, the user may not click
exactly on an intersection, so we need to do
some cheeky rounding here. If the player clicks
outside of the grid (e.g. if they click too far
above the grid, so the y coordinate will be
negative) then the function returns to the main
loop. Otherwise we check that the grid position
is unoccupied and if so draw a circle there, and
update our state array grid . A successful
move causes our function to return a True
value, so looking at line 111 in the code we see
this causes the next player’s turn. But before
that is enacted, by the updatePlayer() call at
the top of the loop, we call the checkLines()
function to see if the latest move completed a
winning line. You’ll find details of how this check
is carried out in the box.
When a winning counter is detected by
our state-of-the-art detection algorithm, the
winner() function is invoked. This replaces the
text at the top of the screen with a message
announcing the victor, and the gameover loop
is triggered. This waits for a player to push R to
restart or rage quit. If a restart is ordered, then
the player order is preserved and, since this is
updated immediately before checkLines() is
called, the result is that the loser gets to start
the next round.
This is a small project (only about 120 lines,
not really a match for the 487 byte Bootchess
you can read about at www.bbc.co.uk/news/
technology-31028787), but could be extended
in many ways. Graphics could be added,
likewise a network play mode and, perhaps
most ambitiously, some rudimentary AI could
be employed to make a single player mode.
This latter has in fact already been done…

Reading between the lines
Part of Key Stage 2 involves learning to
understand and program simple algorithms.
We’ve already covered our basic gameflow
algorithm – wait for a mouseclick (or for the
user to quit), check if that’s a valid move, check
if there’s a line of five, etc. At the heart of that
last stage, lies a naïve, but nonetheless relevant,
algorithm for detecting whether a move is a
winning one.
Consider the simpler case where we’re
interested only in horizontal lines. Then we
would loop over first the rows and then the
columns of our grid array. For each element
we would check to see that it is non-zero (i.e.
there is a counter there) and if the four

156 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016

elements to its right have the same value. In
Python it would look like this:
for j in range(15):
for k in range(10):
pl = grid[j][k]
if pl > 0:
idx = k
while grid[j][idx] == pl and idx < 14:
idx += 1
if idx - k >= 5:
# game winning stuff goes here
Note that the inner loop variable k reaches a
maximum value of only 9. We do not need to

check row positions further right than this
since our algorithm will reach out to those
positions if a potential line exists there. Our
variable idx effectively measures the length of
any line; it is incremented using the += operator,
short for idx = idx + 1.
The algorithm is easily adapted to cover
vertical and diagonal lines. Rather than having
four separate functions, though, we’ve been
clever and made a general function lineCheck(),
which we call four times with the parameters
necessary for each type of line checking. Said
parameters just change the limits of the for
loops and how to increment or decrement grid
positions for each line direction.

ne of technology’s greatest
achievements was IBM’s Fortran
compiler back in the 1950s. It
allowed computers to be programmed using
something a bit less awkward than machine
code. Fortran is still widely used today and,
while some scoff at this dinosaur, it remains
highly relevant, particularly for scientific
computing. That said, nobody is going to
start learning it out of choice, and there are
all manner of other languages out there.
Traditionally, you have had the choice
between hard and fast languages – such as
Java, C and C++ – or easy and slower ones,
like Python or PHP. The fast languages tend to
be the compiled ones, where code has to be
compiled to machine code before it can be run.
Dynamic languages are converted to machine
code on the fly. However, on some level all
programming languages are the same – there
are some basic constructs such as loops,
conditionals and functions, and what makes
a programming language is simply how it
dresses these up.
For those just starting
coding, it’s simply baffling.
Opinions are polarised on what
is the best language to learn
first of all, but the truth is that
there isn’t one, though for very
small people we heartily recommend Scratch.
Any language you try will by turns impress and
infuriate you. That said, we’d probably not
recommend C or Haskell for beginners.
There is a lot of popular opinion that favours
Python, which we happily endorse, but then
many are put off by the Python 2 versus 3
fragmentation Python has a lot going for it: it’s
probably one of the most human-readable
languages out there. For example, you should,
for readability purposes, use indentation in
your code, but in Python it’s mandatory. By
forcing this issue, Python can do away with the

curly brackets used by so many other
languages for containment purposes. Likewise
there’s no need to put semicolons at the end of
every line. Python has a huge number of extra
modules available, too – we’ve already seen
Pygame and our favourite, the API for
programming Minecraft on the Pi.

Beginner-friendly
Other languages suitable for beginners are
JavaScript and PHP. The popularity of these
comes largely from their use on the web.
JavaScript works client-side (all the work is
done by the web browser) whereas PHP is
server-side. So if you’re interested in
programming for the web, either of these will
serve you well. You’ll also want to learn some
basic HTML and probably CSS too, so that you
can make your program’s output look nice, but
this is surprisingly easy to pick up as you go
along. PHP is cosmetically a little messier than
Python, but soon (as in The Matrix) you’ll see
right through the brackets and dollar signs. It’s

allocate memory as it is required
and free it when it is no longer
required. Failure to do this
means that programs
can be coerced into
doing things they
should not do.
Unfortunately, 40
years of widespread C
usage have told us that
this is not a task at which
humans excel, nor do we seem
to be getting any better at it. Informed by
our poor record here, a new generation of
languages is emerging. We have seen
languages contributed from Google (Go),
Apple (Swift) and Mozilla (Rust). These
languages all aim to be comparable in speed
to C, but at the same time guaranteeing the
memory safety so needed in this world rife
with malicious actors.
Rust recently celebrated its 1.0 release
and maybe one day Firefox will be written
using it, but for now there are
a number of quirks and
pitfalls that users of
traditional languages are
likely to find jarring. For one
thing, a program that is
ultimately fine may simply
refuse to compile. Rust’s compiler aims for
consistency rather than completeness –
everything it can compile is largely
guaranteed, but it won’t compile things
where any shadow of doubt exists, even if
that shadow is in the computer’s
imagination. So coders will have to jump
through some hoops, but the rewards are
there – besides memory safety and type
inference, Rust also excels at concurrency
(multiple threads and processes),
guaranteeing thread safety and freedom
from race conditions.

“Although any language will by
turns impress and infuriate you,
Python has a lot going for it.”
also worth mentioning Ruby in the accessible
languages category. It was born of creator
Yukihiro Matsumot’s desire to have something
as “powerful as Perl, and more object-oriented”
than Python.
Barely a day goes by without hearing about
some sort of buffer overflow or use-after-free
issue with some popular piece of software. Just
have a look at https://exploit-db.com. All of
these boil down to coding errors, but some are
easier to spot than others. One of the problems
with the fast languages is that they are not
memory safe. The programmer is required to

Programming paradigms and parlance
With imperative programming the order of
execution is largely fixed, so that everything
happens sequentially. Our Gomoku example is
done largely imperative style, but our use of
functions makes it more procedural –
execution will jump between functions, but
there is still a consistent flow. The object
oriented (OO) approach extends this even
further. OO programs define classes, which
can be instantiated many times; each class is
a template for an object, which can have its

own variables (attributes) and its own code
(methods). This makes some things easier,
particularly sharing data without resorting to
lengthy function calls or messy global variables.
It also effects a performance toll, though, and
is quite tricky to get your head around. Very
few languages are purely OO, although Ruby
and Scala are exceptions. C++ and Java
support some procedural elements, but these
are in the minority.
Functional programming (FP) has its roots

in logic, and is not for the faint-hearted. This
very abstract style is one in which programs
emphasise more what they want to do than
how they want to do it. Functional programming
is all about being free of side-effects –
functions return only new values, there are
no global variables. This makes for more
consistent languages such as Lisp, Scheme,
Haskell and Clojure. For a long time FP was
traditonally the preserve of academia, but it’s
now popular with industry.

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Languages: an overview

Coding | Coding academy

Coding in the classrooms
I

n September 2014, the UK embarked
on a trailblazing effort which saw
coding instilled in the National
Curriculum. When the initiative was
announced in 2013, then education
secretary Michael Gove acknowledged
that the current ICT curriculum was
obsolete – “about as much use as
teaching children to send a telex or
travel in a zeppelin”. Far more important
was imparting coding wisdom unto the
young padewans. Coding skills are much
sought-after, as evidenced by industry
consistently reporting difficulties in
finding suitably qualified applicants for
tech jobs n the UK.
The ‘Year of Code’ was launched to much
fanfare, though this was slightly quelled as
details emerged: a mere pittance was to be
added to the existing ICT allocation, and
most of this would be spent on training a
mere 400 ‘Master Teachers’ who could then
pass their Master Skills to lesser teachers
around the country. Fans of shadenfreude
will enjoy the BBC Newsnight interview with
the then Year of Code chief, wherein she
openly admits not knowing how to code,
despite claiming it is vital for understanding
how the world works.

Learning opportunities
Criticism and mockery aside, we’re
genuinely thrilled that children as young as 5
are, even as we speak, learning the dark arts
of syntax, semantics and symbolism. Fear
now, ye parents, when your
progeny hollers at you (that’s
what kids do, apparently)
“What’s the plural of
mongoose?” and then follows
through seeking clarification
on the finer points of
recursion and abstraction. Rightly or
wrongly, many private firms will benefit from
the concerned parents and confused kids
resulting from the new computing
curriculum. But there are more wholesome
directions in which one can seek help.
For one thing, you’ll always find great
tutorials monthly in Linux Format – just look
again at the previous five pages, such
exceptional erudition. There are also many
free resources on the web. Some of them
(such as the official Python Documentation)
are a little dry for kids, but we’d encourage
adults to learn these skills alongside their
offspring. Refurbishing an old machine with
a clean Linux install will provide a great

The FUZE box gives you
everything you need to start
fiddling with registers or
making GPIO-based mischief.

platform to do just this. All the software you
need is free, and distributions like Mint and
Ubuntu are easy enough to get to grips with.
Besides a stray PC, the Raspberry Pi is
another great way to provide a learning
platform. If you’re willing to settle for the older
B+ model, then you can get one for about £25,
and it’ll plug straight into your telly. Of course,
you’ll need to scavenge a keyboard, mouse,
SD card, HDMI cable and possibly a wireless
adapter too, if trailing an Ethernet cable to your
router is not an option. Mercifully, there are
many kits available (for example the Kano,
billed as a DIY computer) which will provide
these additional peripherals, not to mention

Microsoft is generously
providing the software and
training for this venture, and we
are relieved to hear they will
not tie the product to their
nascent Windows 10
platform, an unfinished beta
of which was released at the
end of July. The devices
have gravity and motion
sensors, as well as Bluetooth
and some buttons. There are five
GPIO rings that could connect further
sensors or contraptions. They can be
programmed in a number of languages
including C++, Python,
JavaScript and Blocks – a
visual programming language.
The Microsoft-provided code
editors are all web based, and
code entered here must be
compiled before being
downloaded to the Micro:bit. At present,
amidst the pre-launch hush, details are
sketchy, but it seems like this compilation all
takes place on Microsoft servers. It’ll be
disappointing if the code editors can’t be used
offline or no option to compile locally is offered.
You can find out more about it at www.bbc.co.
uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/microbit
Micro:bit spokesbods have been keen
to stress that device is in no way intended
to compete with the Raspberry Pi, but rather
to complement it. The Micro:bit features a
20-pin edge connector which connects it
to the Pi or another device so that the
machines can work in tandem. Such a pairing
will be necessary for the Micro:bit to have

“Without any coding, the ICT
curriculum was ‘as much use as
teaching kids to send a telex’.”

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the glorious array of Pi cases available to
protect it from dust and bumps. We particularly
like setups such as the FUZE box, which
embed the Pi into a more traditional, albeit
chunkier, all-in-one device. Yes, the Pi’s tiny
form factor is appealing, but with a heavy
rotation of USB devices thrown in, it’s all too
easy to end up in cable-induced tiny hell.
Speaking of tiny things, to coincide with the
new learning regimen the BBC will distribute
about a million ‘Micro: bit’ computers to Year 7
pupils. These are even smaller than the Pi, but
have no means of output besides a 5x5 LED
array. Unlike the Pi, then, they cannot function
as standalone computers, requiring instead to
be programmed from a more capable device.

The a Cortex M0 ARM
processor is at the heart of the
battery-powered Micro:bit

Get with the program
The syllabus comprises three Key Stages.
The first, for 5-6 year olds, covers algorithms
in a very general sense. Algorithms will be
described in terms of recipes and schedules,
to introduce the idea of formalising
instructions. The second stage (ages 7-11)
introduces core ideas such as loops and
variables. Alongside this, candidates will be
learning to use web services and how to gather
data. The final stage, for secondary students
aged 11-14, requires students to learn at least
two programming languages and understand

binary arithmetic, Boolean algebra, functions
and datatypes. Students will also touch on
information theory, at least as far as how
different types of information can all be
represented as a string of bits. They will also
gain insights into the relationship between
hardware and software.
Throughout the curriculum, students will
also learn the vital skills of online privacy and
information security – skills the want of which

has led to many an embarrassing corporate
or governmental blunder. All in all, it’s a
highly ambitious project, but perhaps such a
radical step is necessary to address the skills
shortage in this area. With luck the scheme
will also lead to much-needed diversification
among the coding populace. If it works out,
and pupils are learning Python alongside
Mandarin or studying Kohonen or Knuth
alongside Kant, then we’ll be thrilled.

Code Clubs
There are also over 2,000 volunteer-run code
clubs across the UK. Code Club, armed with
£100,000 courtesy of Google, provides the
material, and schools (or other kind venues)
provide space and resources for this noble
extracurricular activity.
The Code Club syllabus is aimed at 9-11
year olds and consists of two terms of Scratch
programming, then a term of web design
(HTML and CSS), concluding with a final
term of grown-up Python coding. Projects
are carefully designed to keep kids interested:
they’ll be catching ghosts and racing boats in
Scratch, and doing the funky Turtle and keeping
tabs on the latest Pokémon creatures in
Python, to name but a few.
If you have the time and some knowledge,
it’s well worth volunteering as an instructor.
All the tutorials are prepared for you and if you
can persuade a local primary school to host
you, then you’ll get a teacher to maintain order
and provide defence against any potential
pranksters. You will require a background
check, though. Code Club also provide three
specialist modules for teachers whose duty it is
to teach the new Computing curriculum.
This kind of community thinking is very
much in the spirit of open source, providing

an access-for-all gateway to coding free from
commercial interest and corporate control.
The Code Club phenomenon is spreading
worldwide too. You’ll now find them as far afield

as Bahrain and Iceland. The project materials
have already been translated into 14 languages
with more on the way. You can find out more at
www.codeclub.org.uk

The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 159

Coding | Coding academy

means of communicating with the outside
world. The device – indeed the combination
of the device and the Pi – has a great deal of
potential but there exists some skepticism
over whether anything like the excitement
generated by the 1982 launch of BBC Micro will
be seen again. Back then computers were new
and exciting, while these days kids expect them
to provide a constant barrage of entertainment
in the form of six-second cat videos or
140-character social commentary. Not all
of them are going to be thrilled at having to
program them. But anything that lowers, if not
entirely obliterates, any entry barrier to getting
into coding is fine by us. We also look forward
to ne’er-do-well students hacking each other’s
Micro:bits or engaging them in a collaborative
DDOS attack on their school’s infrastructure.

Coding | Coding academy

PHP: Code and calculate
P

HP used to stand for Personal
Home Page, but these days it’s
a recursive acronym for PHP:
Hypertext Processor. Many of the world’s
leading web applications, such as
WordPress and OwnCloud, are written in
PHP. It’s used extensively by some of the
biggest websites in the world, some of
which are so big (Facebook) that they had
to write their own engine (HHVM) for it.
Rather than using PHP in a traditional
setting (running as a module through a
webserver), let’s install PHP-CLI, the
command line edition. This saves us the
trouble of setting up Apache or some such
(although that’s pretty easy nowadays, so
you may want to do the tutorial this way
and that is fine).
On Debian-based distributions and their
derivatives, you’ll want to run:
$ sudo apt-get install php5-cli
Other distros will name their packages
differently – on Arch it’s called just php.
Ultimately, if you find your package manager
starts trying to install a
webserver and all sorts of
other gubbins, then you
chose the wrong package.
We’ll work in the text
editor of your choice – you
could use nano and do the
whole thing from the terminal, or you can
use something graphical like IDLE or Geany.
Whatever you choose, your first program is
going to be short – this short:

Save this as hello.php and then run it
with the following command:
$ php hello.php
You probably knew what was going to
happen. Similar to how JavaScript is
enclosed in HTML pages via

Note that you can use the downloaded files
from the Datatables website or you can use links
from the CDN (Content Delivery Network).
There’s just one more thing left to do and that’s
to add two attributes to the table tag:
id="example” class="display”
Now, if you load the page in a web browser
you will see it looks a lot more stylish.
For those with some responsive coding
experience, you may want to take things a little
further, eg you could use bootstrap media
queries and classes to resize the text and
remove columns when the width of the screen
being used changes.
Craigslist. If you navigate to http://craigslist.co.uk and look
at jobs in skilled trade/craft in London, you will see many
listings. You could just look at the bottom right corner of your
screen and click the RSS button to get the feed, or you could
narrow your search and get a feed from that.
At the upper left of your screen you’ll need to check the
box ‘contract’. Next, click the yellow RSS icon on the bottom
right and you will see the feed page. The URL in your browser
is an example of what you could add into your feed URLs into
the top of the index.php page.
Multiple sources
Another example would be gathering eBay RSS feeds, and
eBay’s feeds aren’t so obvious. But, you can narrow your
search to whatever you want by adding &_rss=1 to the end of
the URL in your web browser to see a new page with the
desired RSS feed.
The next two lines include the file Magpie will use to parse
and the customs.php file, which uses custom functions
and checking. Now, things get a little trickier. But, if you look
at around line 108 in the customs.php, you’ll see a function
that checks if the $urls array exists. When it confirms the
array exists, it runs through a foreach loop for each URL.
If the first set of conditions are met then it checks the URL
to see if a part of the string doesn’t contain the text ‘indeed’
There are many plugins available, such as Datatables (pictured) that
make it easy to stylise your desired output.
The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 173
Coding | PHP RSS aggregator
Styling your feeds and links
Coding | PHP RSS aggregator
or ‘careerbuilder’. The PHP built-in function strpos() is used to
determine if the word is positioned in the URL. If the URL
doesn’t contain indeed or careerbuilder, the custom_url($url)
function with the URL will be fired. This function is near the
top of customs.php.
After the URL is passed into the custom_url() function, it
will then get tossed into the fetch_rss() function, which is a
Magpie function located in the magpie/rss_fetch.inc file.
In short, Magpie grabs the URL and returns $rss_items.
At this point, the elements in the array which contain the title,
description, link are separated into individual variables with
names like $title, $description and $date.
Note that Craigslist uses $item['dc']['date'] for the date
while other sources tend to use $item['pubDate']. This
sample code makes it easy to check out a feed, but see the
tag and add a condition, if necessary.
Once the variables from the feed have been set, there are
conditions that create an origin variable called $origin, which
are based on the text from the URL. By doing this, you can
see the source in the browser when you run the script.
Finally, at the end of this function, the $tot_array grows as
each URL runs through the function. The $tot_array contains
all the variables, such as the date and title they were created
previously. The array contains strings that contain each piece
of data that is separated by commas.
Functions and conditions
Now looking back a little, do you remember that the custom_
url() function only runs if the URL isn’t from Indeed.com or
Careerbuilder? What about if it is from either Indeed.com or
Careerbuilder? Let’s answer that now. Since both Indeed.com
and Careerbuilder have different XML tags, they each will go
through a set of parsing specific to them. In fact, it’s good to
remember this because you can apply the same techniques
to other XML files that aren’t in this coding example – just
follow the pattern and make the required adjustments.
The source code of a feed, which contains entries in an organised manner.
174 | The Hacker’s Manual 2016
Magpie RSS can be downloaded from Sourceforge.
(Don’t worry, it’s just a TAR and not an installer.)
The code is set to check if the URL is from Indeed.com
first. If it isn’t, the check will be performed for Careerbuilder.
Now, let’s assume it’s your custom API from Indeed.com that
you can get free when you sign up.
First, a new DOMDocument is created that’s encoded
using utf-8. After that, the $dom->load($url) method is called
and the URL is loaded. At this point, you will have a list that
comes out. With an Indeed XML file, each result from it is
listed as ‘result’ while each listing from Careerbuilder would
be ‘JobSearchResult’.
For the rest of this example, only the explanation of
Indeed.com and its tags will be covered. To show what is
being interpreted, you can simply take your API URL from
Indeed.com and load it in a browser. It will be an XML file and
have all the tags and data for each listing.
Moving on, a foreach loop is used to parse each result.
As you can see from the code on the Linux Format website,
the getElementsByTagname() method is used and some
other coding to get the desired values; just like Magpie did
with the other RSS feeds.
You will note that there will be some coding and functions
such as htmlspecialchars_decode() that is used when
creating the value variables such as $jobtitle_value. Basically,
decoding converts character code to the desired symbol.
With Indeed, you will also see that if there’s a $jobkey_value,
a new $myurl_value is created. The reason for this is that it
will provide a link to the actual company listing, not the
Indeed post.
Note that with each foreach loop, the $tot_array gets
larger with each loop and contains all listings when the loop
comes to an end. Essentially, the $tot_array is everything
from both Magpie and the custom XML parsing. Now can go
back to the index.php and carry on where we left off, which
was near line 9.
If we got our listings from all of our sources, we have a
$tot_array. Code-wise, if the array exists, it runs through a
usort() function that calls the cmp() function. This is used to
parse the array so the newest listings show up on top.
Once that function runs its course the HTML code
displays a table for the results. The left side will be the title
Scraping is an alternative method to using if an
RSS feed if one isn’t available. This is a
technique where source code from a web page
is analysed for patterns of data that you might
be interested in.
Some of your sources may not supply RSS
feeds. But, since they likely provide some kind of
listings using HTML web page lists, tables or
ordered tags, you can always look at the
source code, find the relevant pattern and then
scrape the data out.
Often, entries of this kind will have a unique
class or some other set of attributes that can
make it easy to identify a beginning and end to
the useful data.
To scrape a page with PHP, you can use one
of its functions, such as file_get_contents() or
curl() to retrieve the source code of a page that
you fancy. Curl has many more advantages, eg
you can use a proxy such as Tor. However, you
must exercise caution when scraping data.
You may want to contact the copyright holder
and link to the post, the middle will be the description and the
date will be at the end.
To get a better understanding of how each of the listings is
displayed, look around line 28. As you will see, the array_
unique() function is used to ensure our results are unique and
have no duplicates. Then, near line 33, a foreach loop is used
to parse the $tot_array.
For each listing in the array, new variables are made in
order to create the title, date, URL and description entries.
Since each item in the $tot_array, which is also known as
$tot, comes through as a string with commas separating the
values, the explode() function is used to make another array
called $all.
The array $all contains the actual variables. Since the date
was the first item in the array, you will see it is $all[0]. In
addition, the title was the second element and took its value
from $all[1]. If you have limited array knowledge, keep in mind
that all indexed arrays begin with 0, not 1 as you may expect.
Finishing off your aggregator
Getting back to the latest date variable, you will see it
contains other code. Well, this is because the date function is
used to display the results with year, month and day.
The strtotime() function is also included to gather the date
and keep the content unpublished from the web
so the content isn’t crawled.
Once the content is gathered into a string,
you use regular expressions and PHP functions,
such as preg_match_all() and preg_match() to
separate the file into entries. In the end, you’ll
have the same data as you would with RSS
feeds. You could combine the scraping method
with RSS feeds if you want to keep all of your
data in one place, with only the addition of a few
lines of code.
from the loop located in the $all[0] element and convert it to
a Unix timestamp.
If you look at the source code in the index.php file, you will
see that a table row is displayed for each entry and each value
is shown between the tags. At the bottom of the
file you will also see the usual closing tag and
closing tag. With that done, you have a working RSS
aggregator and an explanation covering the details of our
lean-coded script. But, currently it does look a little too old
school and needs some style. As far as usability goes, you
could add and draw the URLs from a database so that you
could have various aggregated sources at your fingertips.
Another feature you could add easily enough is listing
management. Since each listing will have a specific URL, you
could make buttons to insert the data into a database, eg one
button could be used to make it a favourite and another could
be to mark it as a dud that you don’t want to see in the list the
next time you open the page.
So there you have it. You have your own RSS feed
aggregator that will display the source and job description by
date. Whether you’re looking or comparing jobs, trying to find
bargains, or keeping up to date from multiple news sources,
this bit of PHP scripting can be used to find the prize data
that you are after.
Here’s a sample
RSS feed shown
in your web
browser.
The Hacker’s Manual 2016 | 175
Coding | PHP RSS aggregator
Using scraping
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