Just another blog …

I guess most of you know what VPN is and how it may be useful for you. Among different VPN solutions, Hamachi seems to be the most popular and easy to use for home users. You can easially install it in Windows or Mac and create/join VPN network just in a few clicks. Under Linux, however, things are going less smoothly.

First, it is not open source However, you can download binaries for Linux for free: http://files.hamachi.cc/linux/ (x86 version only). If by some reason you cannot download files from Hamachi ftp, you can try my blog file storage.

So, download the file hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx.tar.gz to your machine and untar it. Read readme file and perform the installation:

(do this as sudo)

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
$ sudo make install
$ sudo tuncfg

(do this as regular user)

$ hamachi-init
$ hamachi start
$ hamachi login

Now you have a choice. You can either use Hamachi via command line (check README file) or you can download a GUI tool which replicates the UI of a Windows version: hamachi-gui. Download file hamachi-gui_0.9.5-0_i386-gutsy.deb or hamachi-gui_0.9.5-0_amd64-gutsy.deb depending on architecture of your distribution and install it using dpkg -i command, i.e.:

$sudo dpkg -i hamachi-gui_0.9.5-0_amd64-gutsy.deb

Now search “Hamachi” in your program list in section “Internet”. You can do most of the things you can do in Windows version: create networks, join networks, modify your computer name, etc.

However, if you reboot your computer, Hamachi would not autostart. You will have to manually start it via “hamachi start” each time which is quite uncomfortable You can solve this problem by editing your /etc/rc.local file and starting there “tuncfg” as a root and “hamachi start” as a regular user:

/sbin/tuncfg
/bin/su - USERNAME -c "hamachi start"
exit 0

Store this in your /etc/rc.local and make sure you set USERNAME to a name of your user, and after reboot everything will be autostarted properly.

When playing with different linux distributions I am using unetbootin tool to “flash” linux iso file on a USB flash drive, so I can boot from USB flash drive and avoid burning real CD or DVD disk.

This way it is cheaper & faster. However, recently I noticed that the latest Debian isos (6.0.3) are not working properly with unetbootin: during installation the installer complains that it cannot detect CdRom. And so it fails.

However, there is a workaround. Once installer complains about absence of CdRom, it shows you a screen of options where you can select “Execute shell” option. You can pick-up this options and perform the actual mount in shell window:

 # mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /cdrom

In this particular scenario /dev/sdb is my flash drive which is “flashed” with debian-6.0.3-amd64-CD-1.iso. The device /dev/sdb may be different for you, so pay attention to this.

After you successfully mounted /dev/sdb to /cdrom hit exit and retry again the “Detect CdRom task” in installer. It should work this time. So, do everything as usual – configure disk layout, specify passwords for root and users, etc and let it go.

For me it went well and installed base system, however it failed at “configuration of packages” task. Trying to re-mount disk did not help, so I choose to install GRUB and let the installer finish the job without actually installing the rest packages.

In the end installer asks you to reboot, and when you reboot you see a fancy command line prompt and absolutely no indication of kde or gnome desktop. Well, this is fixable

At this point, once you have base system, you can just configure apt to point to regional servers and install the require packages from command line. This way it is more fun

So, the file of interest is /etc/apt/sources.list – it tells apt where to get packages from. Because your installer did not work properly, most likely the sources.list file will just contain a reference to CdRom, which is not what we want.

You can generate a default debian sources.list file for your regional servers using http://debgen.simplylinux.ch/. Follow the form and specify the following details:

1. Select your country (for me it is Ukraine)

2. Select your release (for me it is squeeze stable)

3. Debian Branches (I use only main, i.e., free packages only)

4. Debian Updates (select all items)

Click “Generate list” button and it will generate your list which looks like this for me:

#############################################################
################### OFFICIAL DEBIAN REPOS ###################
#############################################################

###### Debian Main Repos
deb http://ftp.ua.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main
deb-src http://ftp.ua.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main 

###### Debian Update Repos
deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
deb http://ftp.ua.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-proposed-updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
deb-src http://ftp.ua.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-proposed-updates main

Now, store this data in /etc/apt/sources.list file and perform the apt-get update in shell:

sudo apt-get update

Now you your apt knows where to get packages from and it’s time to install kde desktop:

sudo aptitude install kde-desktop

It will take a while to download packages and install them. After everything is finished, reboot machine and login to your KDE

Have you noticed that by default Debian actually does not reboot machine when you try to reboot? Instead it uses kexec to “restart” the kernel.

This is not very useful sometimes, because in some cases if you have multiple operating system installed, and you need to boot one of these, you’d prefer actual reboot really to happen so you can select target OS from grub menu. In order to make this, you need to uninstall kexec-tools package:

sudo apt-get remove kexec-tools

After uninstallation of kexec-tools your reboots will actually become reboots.