Nuno Sousa's Corner

I have an Option Icon 255 from work to use when I'm out of the office. It is a 3G USB pen. I've used many outside scripts and graphical user interfaces but I never liked them. They crashed a lot and never seemed natural. Also I wanted a script that actually worked all the time instead of failing sometimes because it took the device a couple more seconds to register in the network. My solution: a mix of udev and shell scripts. First I made udev rules for the device. I want it to always have the same name on the /dev file system and that as soon as I connect it to the laptop it should validate the PIN and register in the network.I created a "49-hso.rules" (hso is the name of the kernel driver for the device) in the "/etc/udev/rules.d" folder as follows: ACTION!="add", GOTO="hso_end" SUBSYSTEM=="tty", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTR{hsotype}=="Control", SYMLINK+="wctrl0" SUBSYSTEM=="tty", SUBSYST...

My company has security policy that forces us to encrypt the hard drive of the computer and any other media. Well, not the whole hard drive, but 99% of it: the 1% is what is required for the PC to boot and ask for a password to decrypt the rest of the drive. The good news is that I'm allowed to use Linux. The bad news is that they have red hat enterprise linux and I like Gentoo. For a long time I've been using kubuntu. It is not bad, but it is too easy to use that it borks some time and I like the control Gentoo gives. Since I only installed Gentoo 2 times, one in 2003 and another in 2007 I decided to write all the steps for a bare minimum Gentoo installation. I have tested these steps on a Virtual Machine using KVM. Next step is to make it on the real laptop. It should take something like 35 minutes to do this on a Core 2 Duo at 2.2ghz. Notice: This works for me. Use it at your own risk and remember that these commands wipe your hard drive so, if you want something special ...