The guide mentioned Intrepid has the ability to create an automounting private folder using ecryptfs‐utils with next to no setup. That’s nice, but I’d rather have a bit more control over the folder – having it just pop up on login isn’t very appealing since my system gets used from time to time by other people. A bit of googling around turned this up:

1. How to auto-configure
   
2. How to configure hands on
3. The basic truecrypt way

Ubuntugeek has a nice writeup on the under-the-hood way to use ecryptfs-utils. The reason I’m going with this over Truecrypt is I’d rather have the files encrypt on the fly without needing a set amount of space first (as in a container). I’ll keep the containers on my thumb drives for now.

Started with the Ubuntugeek step by step:

• sudo aptitude install ecryptfs-utils
• mkdir ~/crypt
• chmod 700 ~/crypt
• sudo mount -t ecryptfs ~/crypt ~/crypt
  • chose 4 for passphrase
  • created passphrase<
  • selected aes for cipher
  • 16 for blocksize

After selecting my options:

Attempting to mount with the following options:
 ecryptfs_key_bytes=16
 ecryptfs_cipher=aes
 ecryptfs_sig=1c56a17407ef3160
 WARNING: Based on the contents of [/root/.ecryptfs/sig-cache.txt],
 it looks like you have never mounted with this key
 before. This could mean that you have typed your
 passphrase wrong.

Would you like to proceed with the mount (yes/no)? yes
 Would you like to append sig [1c56a17407ef3160] to
 [/root/.ecryptfs/sig-cache.txt]
 in order to avoid this warning in the future (yes/no)? yes
 Successfully appended new sig to user sig cache file
 Mounted eCryptfs

Not quite sure what just happened there. I just installed this thing, of course I haven’t mounted with this key before. I wasn’t asked for a plaintext passthrough either. Check to see if it worked anyways.

• cp Firefox_wallpaper.png ~/crypt
• ls ~/crypt
• sudo umount ~/crypt
• ls ~/ | grep crypt

Crypt is still there! Blast.

• ls ~/crypt

It still shows my png file too!

• gnome-open ~/crypt/Firefox_wallpaper.png

“Fatal error reading PNG image file: Not a PNG file”

Alright, so that’s good, it’s probably encrypted then. I’ll remount and see if it’ll open.

• sudo mount -t ecryptfs ~/crypt ~/crypt -o key=passphrase,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_passthrough=n
• gnome-open ~/crypt/Firefox_wallpaper.png

Yep, opens fine now. Since I was expecting Truecrypt style mount behavior from Windows I was expecting the entire folder to just disapear (even though I specifically created one, duh). Reading through the ecryptfs page and here made a bit more sense. Without pre-allocation there isn’t much of a choice anyways. Time to turn this bulky command into an easy use alias:

• echo "alias mount-crypt='sudo mount -t ecryptfs ~/crypt ~/crypt -o key=passphrase,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_passthrough=n'" | tee -a ~/.bash_aliases
• source .bashrc

Figuring out the above took a bit longer than those two lines… here’s some insight into my rookie mistakes. (460 through 471 was me playing videos in terminal via ascii, heh.)

hyperq just replaced his InputDevice section with the code below, when I checked my own xorg though I didn’t even have an InputDevice area at all – so I just pasted the following into the end of my xorg.conf and restarted X (ctrl+alt+backspace).

Section "InputDevice"
       Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
       Driver          "evdev"
       Option          "CorePointer"
       Option          "Buttons"       "7"
       Option          "ZAxisMapping"  "4 5"
       Option          "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7"
       Option          "Name"  "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse"
EndSection

Once X loaded up I was able to use the buttons in Firefox, but that was about it. Still didn’t work in Nautilus, which is really where the functionality should be.

After a bit of hunting around I found this excellent UbuntuForum post by detyabozhye.

First step was to make sure that xserver-xorg-input-evdev was installed:

• locate evdev


Returned this for me:

xserver-xorg-input-evdev is already installed, no need to snag that particular package. Next was checking my installed USB devices to see exactly what Ubuntu thinks my Logitech MX-518 actually is.

• cat /proc/bus/input/devices

The device list is quite extensive, and I just pulled out the Logitech related bit

I: Bus=0003 Vendor=046d Product=c01e Version=0110
N: Name="Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse"
P: Phys=usb-0000:00:0b.0-4/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0b.0/usb1/1-4/1-4:1.0/input/input4
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse1 event1
B: EV=17
B: KEY=ff0000 0 0 0 0
B: REL=103
B: MSC=10

Perfect, this is the same thing I added into my xorg from earlier, so it definitely has the right mouse, and the Firefox back/forward buttons show this – but time to get it working with Nautilus. Unfortunately there isn’t a native way to do this, the buttons actually have to be bound to certain keys.

To do this there are two necessary packages, xvkbd and xbindkeys.

• sudo apt-get install xvkbd xbindkeys

Then xbindkeys needs to be configured to map the keys to Nautilus shortcuts.

• gedit ~/.xbindkeysrc

Paste in the following:

"/usr/bin/xvkbd -xsendevent -text "\[Alt_L]\[Left]""
  m:0x0 + b:6
"/usr/bin/xvkbd -xsendevent -text "\[Alt_L]\[Right]""
  m:0x0 + b:7

Hit CTRL+S to save, then ALT+F4 to close.

Started up xbindkeys and tested it in Nautilus – and nothing happened. Made sure the key commands themselves worked by hitting ALT+LEFT and ALT+RIGHT – moved back and forward just like it should, but my side buttons didn’t do it. The only thing different from what detabozhye did and myself is I defined the buttons, so I removed that part and matched deta’s suggestion, then restarted X. Firefox still worked, Nautilus didn’t.

This time I loaded xev to try and see what button was /actually/ being pressed since it obviously wasn’t 6 or 7 at this point.

• xev

(That was easy, eh?) Unfortunately xev is a pain in the arse to actually use. What I had to do was click, and hold the button to stop xev output from spamming my terminal and make very sure to not move the mouse (or more mouse movement spam would scroll by).

When I held down my large side button and scanned the output I saw this:

ButtonPress event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x4000001,
root 0x13b, subw 0x4000002, time 13076697, (36,18), root:(1014,814),
state 0x10, button 8, same_screen YES

Finally, it’s not 6, it’s 8. Great. The little upper one was 9. Changed my .xbindkeysrc to update with the new buttons and then restarted xbindkeys

• killall xbindkeys
• xbindkeys

Finally works.

Of course, after doing all of this I had a flash of insight… I could’ve simply had xev output to a file instead of trying to watch the terminal window and then searched for it later, which I did as a test with a left click, then a right click, then a middle click.

• xev > xevoutput.txt
• left click, right click, then middle click (in the xev window)
• cat xevoutput.txt | grep button

Returns:

state 0x10, button 1, same_screen YES
state 0x110, button 1, same_screen YES
state 0x10, button 3, same_screen YES
state 0x410, button 3, same_screen YES
state 0x10, button 2, same_screen YES
state 0x210, button 2, same_screen YES

There ya go… left click = 1, right click = 3, middle mouse click = 2. If I did that earlier (and made life easier on myself) it would’ve returned 8 and 9 respectively.

Now this needs to be added to your startup list so it isn’t necessary to start it each time manually. The easy way to do this in Gnome is by clicking System -> Preferences -> Session. Click “Add”, then type xbindkeys for the name, and xbindkeys for the command, and a description if you’d like.

I don’t like doing things through the GUI if I don’t have to, so I hunted around for a way to configure it manually (mainly because I spent half my time SSH’d into the box from work and would rather have the way to work with or without a mouse). After all of the above though I decided I’m done screwing around with this nonsense for the day and will make that into another post later tonight.

First thing I did was go and get Bootchart, “a tool for performance analysis and visualization of the GNU/Linux boot process”. Bootchart is easy enough to install,  and unpacks at 51mb:

• sudo apt-get install bootchart

Wandered over to the bootchart documentation to see if there was anything special I ought to know about and realized I’m using Ubuntu… none of this is necessary.  Simply install and restart.

• sudo shutdown -r now

Once restarted,  you’ll want to check out /var/log/bootchart for the png files with the bootchart output.  Here’s an example from my 8.04.2 test machine I’ve been working with today.

Ubuntu 8.04.2 bootchart

Ubuntu 8.10 bootchart

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2 bootchart

For added awesome, since I have Dropbox running on my work ubuntu, work XP, and home ubuntu installations I was able to do this to get the .png over to my WinXP while writing this post:

cp /var/log/bootchart/*.png /home/kyle-test/Dropbox/Public

By the time I had turned back to XP Dropbox had already synced, and I was able to right click the uploaded PNG and choose Dropbox -> Public link, send a copy to my friend, and upload here into the post with absolute minimum effort. I’ll also have the file for comparison when I get home and do the same thing on 8.10.

Once I’ve learned enough to sufficiently decode this I’ll make another post explaining what each thing is and what can be configured/removed to make boot times faster.

In a nutshell, my HP dx5150 here at work boots in 30 seconds.

[UPDATE 6-20-09 4:36pm]
Just ran another bootchart on a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2 on my main machine – dropped from 24 seconds to 15, probably due to ext4 being the main filesystem.

[UPDATE 1-28-09 12:28am]
Finally got around to getting bootchart up on the 8.10 installation at home,  this one clocks in at 24 seconds!  Taking a look between the two it seems as if hard drive throughput is my biggest limiter – I only dropped 6 seconds on total boot time and this machine is at least 5 times as powerful as the dx 5150 at work.

• sudo apt-get install xchat
• wget http://mircryption.sourceforge.net/Downloads/mircryption_xchatsrc.zip
• wget http://voobar.follvalsch.de/files/mcps_xchat_0.4.0-alpha.tar.bz2
• unzip mircryption_xchatsrc.zip
• tar -xvf mcps_xchat_0.4.0-alpha.tar.bz2 -C /src
• cd /src/mcps_xchat_0.4.0-alpha
• mv Makefile ../ && mv dh1080 ../ && mv mircryption.cpp ../
• cd ..

Ran into this error on install and realized I hadn’t installed a compiler since reinstallation. There actually is no readme.txt and no .so file was created.

Trying to install mircryption.so into ~/.xchat2 (see readme.txt for more info)
cp mircryption.so ~/.xchat2
cp: cannot stat `mircryption.so’: No such file or directory
make: *** [install] Error

• sudo apt-get install g++
• make install
• xchat

On first load mircryption will have you set a masterpass phrase.  /setkey <key> sets your key.  Oh yes,  and you’ll want to remove everything afterwards…

• cd ..
• rm -R src/ README.txt mircryption_xchatsrc.zip mcps_xchat_0.4.0-alpha.tar.bz2

i386 instructions:

• sudo apt-get install xchat
• wget http://mircryption.sourceforge.net/Downloads/mircryption_xchatsrc.zip
• unzip mircryption_xchatsrc.zip
• cd /src/xchat
• make linux
• make install
• cd ../..
• rm -R src/ README.txt mircryption_xchatsrc.zip

“Google Gears” could not be installed because it is not compatible with your Firefox build type (Linux_x86_64-gcc3). Please contact the author of this item about the problem

Stan Joel posted the lastest (5.18.0) on Issue 335

• Download: http://jms.id.au/~shenki/gears/gears-linux-x86_64-opt-0.5.18.0.xpi
• In Firefox,  click File -> Open File, find gears-linux-opt-0.5.18.0.xpi
• Click “Install Now” when prompted
• Restart Firefox

I keep up to date on the latest by checking Issue 335 on code.google.com. [Update #5]

Just as I installed (and was very impressed by) Wordpress 2.7,  I immediately ran into an issue trying to get Google Gears going in Firefox x64.  It says right under the install button that it isn’t supported,  but of course I didn’t even notice that the first time around and got this error:

“Google Gears” could not be installed because it is not compatible with your Firefox build type (Linux_x86_64-gcc3). Please contact the author of this item about the problem

Did a quick search and found a TechRecipes post which has everything you need.  Already having burned myself once,  I checked to see what the latest Gears version was,  then read through the user group link from TechRecipes which has a really interesting discussion between an independent developer and some of the Gears devs about earlier x64 patches.

Now that Gears 5.7.0 was installed I went back into my Wordpress Site Admin and clicked the Tools menu – the button still showed “Install Now”.  Burned twice.  Clicking “Install Now” took me to the Gears install site again.  I checked my Firefox addons and saw that 5.7.0 was successfully installed.  Took a look at the source code to see if there was a direct link and found a variety of status messages (gears-msg1 through 4 in source) so for some reason the site did not realize that I had Gears installed at all.  Went back to the drawing board from earlier and found that everyone who has said that Gears works for them was using 4.9.0.  Removed 5.7.0,  restarted Firefox, installed 4.9.0 and was able to get ‘Turbo’ mode working,  all files downloaded successfully.

Man, I gotta say – the dashboard is definitely snappier.  It was worth it.

(Update) Ivanhoe has helpfully mentioned that his version was built for the latest gentoo in the comments and will have instructions on making your own for the next update.

(Update #2) Neils Peen has posted version 5.1.1 compiled on Kubuntu using Firefox 3.0.5 – I removed the 4.9.0 addon and updated with his and it worked fine.  While digging around I also found Issue 335 on Google Code which details this problem.

(Update #3) livibetter has posted version 5.1.3 compiled on Fedora 10 x64_63 with instructions to do so yourself – I removed the 5.1.1 addon and updated with 5.1.3 – tested by removing my Wordpress Gears download and going through the process again successfully.

(Update #4) Tux Wears Fedora has the latest x64 Gears version, tested with 8.10 & Firefox 3.0.6,  worked fine.