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Wifi working again with ath5k! 10 October, 2008

Posted by aronzak in Backtrack, Linux.
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1 comment so far

Earlier this year, I bought an Acer Aspire 4315 laptop. It comes with an Atheros AR5BXB63, just like the Asus Eeepc. Initially, it came with Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10). It’s wireless was set up fine, using ndiswrapper. Upgrading to Hardy, I then lost wifi again. There was a method then, using madwifi drivers with a proprietary Atheros Hardware Adress Layer. That worked great for a time if you followed certain instructions. Then, unfortunately, that package dissapeared as the Madwifi team moved away from HAL, and focused on ath5k and ath9k. For some reason or another I reinstalled Ubuntu, losing the old setup. So, for about three months, I have resigned myself to having no wifi connection. It’s fine if you’ve just always had a cable connection.

Now, I’m pleased to report that I have been successful in installing ath5k drivers, something that failed before. The drivers are available from here. The best part of this is that the drivers are open source, so can be bundled by default.  Who knows, maybe someday we’ll have wifi working out of the box on all Linux distributions.  By the way, packet injection does not work, but Backtrack has always worked fine for me. Try not to get caught.

USB Linux Howto: Adding Another Distribution 7 October, 2008

Posted by aronzak in Backtrack, Linux, Live Disk, Live Linux, Live Usb, Puppy Linux.
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2 comments

You should already have a bootable USB stick with a Linux distribution. The non destructive method uses a tool called “Syslinux” to boot up. You can modify the settings to boot multiple Linux distributions, and use other tools.

There should be file called “syslinux.cfg” on your USB stick. It will be on the root of the drive or in boot/syslinux. It should have something like this in it:

default vmlinuz initrd=initrd.gz ...

Change this to match this format:

LABEL default
KERNEL vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=initrd.gz ...

Next, copy everything from a Live cd or an extracted .iso file (using winrar or another program that can extract an .iso file) your USB stick. Copy everything inside the file isolinux.cfg and paste it at the bottom of syslinux.cfg. Now, in order to allow you to choose what to boot, add to the top of syslinux.cfg

DEFAULT default
PROMPT 1
TIMEOUT 150

This will give you a choice of what to boot when you boot off your USB stick, and will boot the default after a time of 15 seconds.You’ll need to type the label of each Linux distribution at the prompt. Make sure you set the distributions with obvious labels. It may be helpful to set the labels to numbers. Additionally, you can display information when you boot up off your USB stick. To do so, create a file called Menu.txt saying something like this:

Booting off USB
Choose one of the following:
1 - Puppy Linux (default)
2 - Backtrack
Press Enter to boot the default.

Then edit the top of syslinux.cfg, adding this:

DISPLAY Menu.txt

If you want to move any files, change the information in syslinux.cfg to reflect this.

Back to USB Linux Howto

USB Linux Howto: Backtrack 31 August, 2008

Posted by aronzak in Backtrack, Linux, Live Usb.
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1 comment so far
Backtrack's Desktop

Backtrack's Desktop

Name:    Backtrack 3
Website:  http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html
Wiki:        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackTrack
Size:       778 MB

Backtrack is an excellent distro. It comes with a nice looking KDE 3 interface, and features a large number of tools. Most of these you would have to learn about first in order to use. It also has a pretty framebuffer interface that makes the shells (shown during startup) look really nice.

Backtrack has working wifi drivers for some atheros cards, and works out of the box on my Asus Eee PC 701. Comes with aircrack-ng and other interesting software. Try not to get caught.

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