The Linux Ninja

Command Line Kung Fu is a blog started by Hal Pomeranz, Ed Skoudis of InGuardians, and Paul Asadoorian of Pauldotcom Security Weekly and PaulDotCom Enterprises, LLC. that “will include fun, useful, interesting, security related, non-security related, tips, and tricks associated with the command line. It will include OS X, Linux, and even Windows!” They started off with a one-post per day strategy for the first week, and now publish new posts every Monday-Wednesday-Friday.  The majority of the scripts are most useful to persons in the penetration testing realm, but like any good shell script they can be adapted to many different uses.

The post structure usually follows this formula: Ed Skoudis gives the Windows command shell version of a script, Hal Pomeranz gives a Linux version, and Paul Asadoorian gives a different Linux version or an OS X specific version. The best part about the posts is that there is an explanation of what they are doing that really helps make the scripts easier to understand, especially if you are unfamiliar with any of the commands or unfamiliar with one of the shells (e.g. me and the Windows command shell).

They’ve been going for a little over a month now and have some high quality posts and even have had a few guest posters to provide different perspectives in the standard shells or to introduce new things like  writing the script in Windows PowerShell. Congratulations on the great site guys, I can’t wait to see more great posts!

After buying my Asus EEE PC 1000HA, I initially installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. After learning more about (#!) CrunchBang Linux and seeing that they had released an optimized version for the EEE PC called CrunchEEE. I’ve been using CrunchEEE on my EEE PC for the last week and decided to do a review.

Continue reading

This weekend, I decided to check out GNOME Do’s latest 0.8 release with the new Docky task bar. As someone who has managed to avoid all the launcher hype bestowed on programs such as Launch Box, Quicksilver and Ubiquity, I have to admit that in the beginning, I was more than a little bit skeptical about GNOME Do. How useful can this program really be? I mean, all it does is allow you to use keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. I can use the the mouse for that. Right? Wrong. After using GNOME Do for only a few days, it has quickly risen to the top of my must-have applications list. Continue reading

I recently did a bunch of package unmasking in my desktop Gentoo installation and did an emerge of KDE 4 .2 and I thought I would share my experiences in my shiny new desktop environment (unfortunately I was unable to see how Amarok2 integrated with KDE 4.2 due to some MySQL embedded compilation issues for 64-bit Linux).

Continue reading