Wired HowTo Guide Linux Style
August 3rd, 2006 by 
jay
This months Wired magazine contains a 42 page pullout titled "HowTo: A Step By Step Guide Tp Making The Most of Your Digital Life". Wired is the hip cutting edge magazine of our generation or at least I though it was until this special issue. The HowTo guide has eveything covered like how to Liveblog an Event or Foil a Snooping Boss and how to Recover Tunes form Your iPod just to name a few.
So what's the problem?
Anything that requires software is demonstrated for either Mac or Windows. How hip and cutting edge can a digital technology rag be if they aren't even mentioning Linux? For gods sakes my Mother-in-Law can use Xubuntu!!
So I give you HowTo: A Step By Step Guide To Making The Most of Your Digital Life with Linux (Ubuntu)
aug 5, 2006 19:49 EST shred in thunar with right click
aug 5, 2006 20:30 EST - shred in krusader
aug 5, 2006 20:50 EST - secure files with pgp
Delete Files Forever
The simplest wat to delete a file forever is with shred. This little baby can over-write single files or entire harddrives so many times even a data recovery witch doctor will never get the data back.
Caution: This is delete with a 12 mega-ton nuke so you're not getting these files back.
He's what we're doing:
shred the GoogleJobOffer.txt so you boss doesn't find out they you took the job $10,000 a year and life time supply of RedBull.
-n 10 : Write over the file 10 times
-u : remove the file from the system (delete, put in trash)
-v : verbose, I like to watch.
-z : replace the spot on the harddrive with 0's
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$ shred -n 10 -u -v -z GoogleJobOffer.txt
Poof!! The file is gone.
Or how about erasing a drive or partition:
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$ shred -n 10 -u -v -z /mnt/hda1
Using shred in Thunar
If the comand-line gets your panties in a bunch a nice reader has pointed out a visual approach if you are using the Thunar File Manager which is the default file manager in Xubuntu.
Open Thunar
Click Edit-> Configure custom actions...
A new window will open titled Custom Actions
Click the "+" sign to Add a new action
Another window will open titled Create Action with 2 tabs Basic and Appearnce Conditions
On the Basic tab Name the new action: shred - file
Give it any description
For the Command add this: shred -n 10 -u -v -z %F
This is just like we did for the command line but instead of giving it a file name we are passing it a parameter %F which is the selected file to be shreded.
Now select the Appearnce Conditions tab.
From here you have several options to set what types of files can be shreded.
Leave the File Pattern as it is * for all files.
You can also set additional conditions to only show the shred command on certian file types like Audio Files, Text files or directories. Select whatever you like but I'd advise select Images and Videos just incase...
Once your done click OK to close the Create Action window and OK again to close the Custom Actions window.
Now in Thunar find a file you want to get rid of like that offer letter form Microsoft and Right-Click on it. In the context menu you should seen the menu item shred - file and select it. Poof!! Bye-Bye Microsoft Offer letter.
Thank You to ifb for pointing this one out.
Using shred in Krusader
If you are using KDE or have the KDE Libs installed then you can (and you should be) use Krusader to remove files forever.
It's simple open Krusader.
Navigate to the desired file.
Right-Click on it and select Shred.
A confirmation dialog box will pop up asking if you want to remove the file.
And your done.
OMFG!! That was easy.
Foil A Snooping Boss
How lucky for you, you're boss is a nut-job and he probably has installed some type of Key-Logger. But you got that knob fooled 'cause your running Linux!!
Well not all of us are that lucky and we still have to use Windows while making money for the man.
One thing you can do is check for rootkits but if you boss has the know how to install a root kit or keylogger on Linux then you're !ucked.
You've got 2 choices chkrootkit which it's very easy to use just switch to root and fire away. And RootkitHunter which is has loads of options and is a little meore verbose.
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$ sudo chkrootkit
It scans everything and provide a list of items that it has demed as security risks or root kits.
With RootkitHunter the easiest is way to scan you system is with the -c option which scans everything.
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$ sudo rkhunter -c
As rkhunter scans by security threat sections like binaries (system tools), rootkits, suspicious files and malware so you nned to interact by hitting enter for each scan type.
Secure Files and Directories using GnuPGP
Ok maybe you need to keep that offer letter from Google around for a few days just because. To hide it from prying eyes you can do 2 things comit it to memory then shred it or you can encrypt it.
First you need to obtain GnuPGP if you're using Ubuntu you can get it via Synaptic along with gpgp a GNOME front ent to GnuPG.
It would take me day to explain how to use GnuPGP so you'll need to Google it. I just wanted to point it out as an option.
Well that's all for now. I'll read the mag somemore to see what else they missed.
HOWTO Tips N Tricks
Posted in Linux, HOWTO, Tips N Tricks | 
August 5th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
How can this guide be really useful when you only include command line information in it? I.e. I'm no stranger to the shell but many other people find it uncomfortable, frightenning even.
This is especially true when you set the expectaions high by responding to a Wierd article that probably mentioned well-polished and full-of-eye-canty GUI tools. You make GNU/Linux come off as an archene system that only responds to textual commands.
But have no worries, Linux can GUI like the rest of them, why won't you mention how one can easly configure Thunar (Xubuntu's file manager) to enable right-click shredding by using the "Custom Actions" feature? (Edit->Configure custom actions)
August 5th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
And you expect that any one who uses Linux at work to have sudo access?
April 11th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
hi nice site.
June 14th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
hi all.
November 3rd, 2007 at 8:04 am
Your discussion around keyloggers is excellent. I have one suggestion for windows users if they want to detect keyloggers I highly recommend www.spycop.com
March 5th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Great page. Congrats.