LaCie biometric drives

Due to a loss in the family I gained access to 4 LaCie biometrically protected external drives.
There is one 40Gb 2u2s, 2x 500Gb3u2s and a 1Tb d2 with AES encryption.
My goal was to reuse the disks as the personal data were not important.
I checked the small disk and quickly realised that there will be more problems reusing it than gaining access to the data. I contacted LaCie, explained the situation and of course the answer was that there was no solution to get the data and that for the older drives out of warranty it was to expensive to get them "fixed".
So I decided to open the 2u2s drive, as there was no mention of encryption I was pretty sure that the data will be easily accessible.

Disassembly of the LaCie 2u2s

Flip the drive over, so that the biometric sensor is on the bottom and the USB and power connector are facing you. Carefully remove the two rubber pads and remove the screws under them. Now on the other side you have to carefully force the plastic with a small flat screwdriver.

After removing the plastic bottom

The plastic bottom

The chip in which I suspect the biometric data are stored
STMicroelectronics TCD41B1DN

Getting the data

Getting the data was trivial. I connected the drive to an USB IDE adapter. There is no partition defined, I suspect it's hardcoded in the hardware, or better there should be 3 partition, one FAT partition on which the Windows software resides, one for the MAC software and one "protected" partition. In fact I didn't care, although the partition layout should be easily guessed I just run PhotoRec on the entire device and in just 30 minutes the whole 34Gb data from the disk were safely stored on my desktop.

The next step is reinitializing the device. I already searched for the STM chip, but could not find any datasheet.
Any help is welcome ;-)

Asus EEE PC localisation (Stock Xandros)

After playing around with the EEE PC I started installing other distributions on it, and you know what? It's fun!
The stock Xandros is nice for it's quick booting time, but it lacks some things. The worst is the lack of national keyboard support. Even on the units sold in Slovenia (don't know for Italy & Germany) there is no support for the hardware keyboard.
My father decided to get one as he saw mine and asked me to prepare it for his work so the main things were:

• national keyboard support (si, it, de)
• spell checking for the same languages in OpenOffice and if possible in Firefox/Thunderbird
• change the language of the programs to German as he is much more fluent in German than in English which is the default on the EEE

btw shame on Asus for not updating the choice of the keyboard in the stock OS.

To get support for the keyboard the easiest thing was to copy the xmodmap definitions from Ubuntu so I just connected the EEE PC to the home network and copied from my desktop the needed files with scp.
So I opened a Terminal CTRL+ALT+T and created as root a directory for the definitions
sudo mkdir /usr/share/xmodmap

copy over the files
sudo scp user@b100w11-desktop:/usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.si /usr/share/xmodmap/

you can now enable the Slovenian keyboard with xmodmap /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.si

or the German, provided you have copied also the xmodmap.de etc.

Usable, but not really useful. I wanted a keyboard shortcut for it. So I created the directory bin in the user home directory and wrote a little script named si

nano ~/bin/si

in which I have put

#!/bin/bash
xmodmap /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.si

and two others for de and it, named respectively de and it ;)
After making the three files executable with
chmod 0755 ~/bin/*
The next step was defining a keyboard shortcut.
It was just a matter of copying over the icevm keys template and adding a few lines to it

mkdir ~/.icewm
cp /etc/X11/icewm/keys /home/user/.icewm/keys
nano ~/.icewm/keys

and add those lines to the end

key "Alt+Ctrl+s" /home/user/bin/si
key "Alt+Ctrl+d" /home/user/bin/de
key "Alt+Ctrl+i" /home/user/bin/it

it was almost working, there was just a little annoyance... When the computer started it still had the default US/International keyboard. The fix was letting it execute the si script on startup. But that proved to be more complex as I first thought.

I created a file named startup in ~/.icevm but it didn't get executed until I found out that I had to change the startup script that was calling up the GUI.
Goggling for it I found that the procedure to let the startup script execute was to:

sudo cp /usr/bin/startsimple.sh /usr/bin/startsimple.sh.ori
sudo nano /usr/bin/startsimple.sh

find the line /opt/xandros/AsusLauncher & and insert above it the following lines:

if [ -x /home/user/.icewm/startup ]; then
#we have a start up file to execute
/home/user/.icewm/startup &
fi

the script was to be made executable with

chmod 0755 ~/.icewm/startup

the script again consisted of two lines

#!/bin/bash
~/bin/si

So the pieces are now together and the only thing that lacks is a visual feedback of the keyboard that is in use, but In my opinion that is not really so important.

For the German language in the programs the main thing was to generate new locales by editing the file /etc/locale.gen and adding the lines for the wanted locales

de_DE.UTF8 UTF-8
sl_SI.UTF8 UTF-8
it_IT.UTF8 UTF-8

and running sudo locale-gen

After a reboot the German translations of some programs already showed up, while for the others there was still a little work to do. I found the instructions and the hints on the excellent EEE User pages.

Asus EEE PC

Everybody got it and me too ;)
I ordered one unit at Clove Technology in the UK before the tiny laptop was available on the European market. I also like the UK keyboard, so it wasn't really a hard decision :)
With Clove it was really fun making business. I had to wait a long time for the EEE to be delivered, but besides that everything worked as a charm.
When waiting for the unit from Clove I had the bad idea to order another one at LaptopsDirect - also in the UK. IT is a nightmare... I had to wait a long time. On the website there was nothing about the availability of the EEE so it seemed that they were on stock. After a few days they requested a proof of identity regarding my credit card and immediately charged it even before the item were ready for shipment. When the package arrived it was delivered to the WRONG address. When I opened the box I noticed, that it was already opened before shipment, but the worst thing... the battery was missing. I tried to call them on the customer hot line, but it's available only in the UK. I have tried to reach them by email and it takes ages to get a reply. At last a Mandy (if I got the name correctly) called me and offered me something, but due to a bad phone line (they are of course savvy and call abroad with VoIP) I couldn't understand what was she offering me. I asked her to write me an email but never received anything. After a week I again tried to contact them and got a very fast response from a person asking me to fill (again) a RMA request. He accorded me a return of the EEE PC (it was on Sunday). On Monday I got a phone call from the UK during a meeting and couldn't answer... :( again 2 days later they called me, but again it was during an important business call and couldn't get answer :(( Of course I didn't send the EEE back as I wanted to hear what instructions they have to give me.
The RMA number expired and I got an automatic notice to which I replied explainiing the situation... still no answer.

Ubuntu on the Lenovo X61s (work in progress)

The first thing to do is a backup of the Rescue and Recovery partition on an external DVD burner.
I tried with a CD burner, but it was not worth the effort... It requires 8 CD, but after CD 4 it started to give me some errors.
With the DVD you need one blank CD (for the boot) and a blank DVD (for the recovery data). It doesn't support a DVD-RAM
To start the procedure you have to enter Vista and open ThinkVantage --> Create Recovery Media, the just follow the prompts.

After that the install of Ubuntu is as simple as popping the install CD in the external CD reader and making an usual install. To not lose the ThinkVantage button functionality (it starts the Rescue and Recovery utilities) it's better to install GRUB on the Linux boot partition and note on the MBR. To access it, you just have to set the Linux partition bootable.

I tried an install with a USB flash, but it's a little bit messy... The USB disk was recognised as sda and the internal disk as sdb. It was funny when GRUB was installed on the USB flash.

Long time and a lot of things...

A long time with no updates, so a quick summary.
In August we went to the EuroBillTracker Meeting in Berlin, it was truly great, a lot of nice people and we learned some new things about Euro tracking techniques.
For the travel I decided to buy a new notebook, a smaller one, as my 15" is to cumbersome to carry around. I selected a Fujitsu Siemens Computers Amilo Pro V3205. The machine is great for that price, except for the malfunctioning of the SD card reader. As all my gadgets are mainly SD card based it was an important feature of the product. I went back to the shop where I bought the notebook and they kindly accepted it back and sent it to Fujitsu Siemens Computers Italy. At FSC the DOA was accepted and another notebook was ordered. WHen it arrived (it was already mid September if i remember right) I decided to check the SD function still being at the shop. Yes, you guessed it. It didn't work.
So also the second one was sent back to FSC Italy. That time the DOA was turned down because the FSC technician said that the SD reader was supposed to work in that way... The malfunctioning being, that the SD card wasn't ejected mechanically. It was protruding by 2mm out of the slot, which in really not enough to take it out with normal fingers. So after a quick check with the German FSC support, they confirmed, that the SD slot should work as usual - a mechanical spring should eject the SD card, I decided that enough was enough. A really sad experience and another producer on th Nobuy list.
I did not accept the notebook that was coming back from FSC Italy and instead bought a Lenovo X61s. The X61s was manufactured on 22/11/2007 and a week later I already had it in my hands.
So after 4 month I have a small notebook that suits my mobility needs.

The X61s is great... If you dump Vista. I ordered the Business edition to have a legal way to downgrade it to XP. But for the moment I just installed Ubuntu on it. Yes Ubuntu, me, a real fan of KDE... ok It was just because Ubuntu Gutsy has the Desktop effects enabled and I wanted to impress friends, relatives etc ;) KDE4 is due in mid January.
I will publish another post with the Gutsy installation and optimization procedure later today.

On the house front I started to open the floors and to see what is under them... The floors have to be completely removed and have to be redone with the modern techniques. It was all wet under them. I'm still waiting for the neighbors to let us know if they permit us to raise the house, but have no real hope in that. I plan to go to the architect this week and start the procedure for the house renewal. In the mean time doing all the works that don't have to be officially permitted.

Yesterday I went to the agency to get a part of the amount the insurance decided to give me because of the injury I suffered a year ago. It went almost well, except for the fact that the person who followed my case doesn't work there anymore and I had to explain some things about what happened to the new lady...

I'm seriously thinking about changing my car. Toyota sent me a very good offer for retiring my 6 years old Yaris and buying a new one. I have time 'till the end of the year to decide what to do.

At work I successfully managed to migrate all the users authentication data into an LDAP database and to convert the mbox files to maildir. There were quite a few problems, but I managed to solve the critical ones in a short time.
I am now unofficially on the list of the people who will get a employment contract with no termination date... Let's see how and when.