Install BackTrack 5 R1 on an Asus Eee PC 701 4G

The latest and greatest release of BackTrack was just made available for download a couple of days ago.  This distribution of Linux is based on Ubuntu 10.04, and brings together some of the latest and greatest, freely available, security "testing" tools.  A pre-release version of 5 R1 was given out at this year's Black Hat convention in Las Vegas, which I was fortunate enough to attend, and many of those tools, plus additional bug fixes, were added in for this public release.

As the various releases of BackTrack have been coming out, like all other operating systems, it's been getting... bigger.  This newest entry is no different, and if you were to try and do an install onto the Eee's tiny SSD, you would find that it runs out of space quite inconveniently.  The image that you download utilizes Squashfs to compress everything into a read-only, much smaller, more manageable size.  However, once decompressed for installation, it blows right past the 4GB limit of the SSD.  You could install it onto an SD/SDHC card, at the expense of speed and (a little) money.  The other option is to install the live image onto the SSD, and treat it like a live DVD/USB thumb drive, only faster, with nothing additional plugged in, hanging off the side of the Eee.  A side benefit is that everything that you do will be running in RAM, so, in theory, a slight performance boost there.  Here's how to do it:

1. Follow their instructions for how to create a USB live install thumb drive after downloading your version of choice from here.  You could alternatively burn the DVD, and use an external optical drive for this project.  Whichever you choose needs to be under the 4GB size of the Eee's SSD.  For my purposes, I chose to go with a 2GB 32-bit GNOME ISO:
2. Plug in the USB drive, turn on the Eee, and hit F2 to enter the BIOS Setup Utility.  I've got BIOS Revision 1302, so your view may differ slightly.
3. Tab over to the Boot menu, and select Boot Device Priority.  Select your USB thumb drive as the 1st Boot Device, then hit F10 to Save and Exit.
4. On reboot, when the UNetbootin menu comes up, hit Enter to choose the Default boot option, then hit the space bar to continue past the video mode prompt.  You'll be greeted by the BackTrack splash screen while the system loads up, then you'll get dropped into a root bash shell.  At this point you *could* type "startx" and hit Enter to load up the live X graphical environment, but where's the fun in that?
5. Now we're just going to image the USB drive onto the 4GB SSD of the Eee by typing "dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda".  This effectively clones the USB drive onto the SSD, partitions and all.  For example, I used a 2GB USB drive for my install, so only half of the 4GB SSD will be visible/usable to the OS, unless you work some partitioning magic, which I haven't gotten around to yet.
6. Once that's done, unplug the USB drive, type "reboot" and hit Enter.  The Eee should go through the exact same boot steps with the SSD now, only faster, as if you were booting from the USB drive.  Once you're greeted with the root shell again, type "startx" and hit Enter to load up the live X environment!

Remember this is still only a live environment, and nothing is persistent.  When you reboot, everything will be back to the way it was on first boot, just as if you were using a live CD/DVD.  Standby works fine (though you may need to reconnect the WiFi connection when you resume), so if you don't power off the Eee, you should be good to go for multiple sessions of use.

As a side observation, this setup works phenomenally as a WEP-cracking solution.  You know, as far as I can tell from working with my OWN test wireless networks.  Yeah, that's the ticket... ;-)

Happy Hacking!  I mean, Testing!

Install Ubuntu 11.04 / 11.10 / 12.04 / 12.10 on an Asus Eee PC 701 4G

Ever since I got my iPad last summer, my grand-daddy of all netbooks, the Asus Eee PC 701 4G, has become somewhat... neglected.  These days it serves as a test bed for various flavors of linux and their respective updates.  I've run the default Xandros, XP Pro (full installation, compressed), Fedora, Ubuntu, and Joli OS (Jolicloud).  Even with XP Pro, all updates, I never had an issue installing any OS within the confines of the tiny 4GB SSD that is soldered on the board of this device.

Leave it to a bug in the latest version of Ubuntu (11.04) to ruin that perfect record.  An issue that I ran into, and subsequently found information about at Ubuntu in Launchpad, is that the Ubiquity installer imposes an arbitrary minimum hard disk size when the actual final installed size of the OS is far below that limit.  Observe.

After creating a bootable USB key with the Universal USB Installer from Pendrive Linux, boot from the key, and at the Installer boot menu, choose Select Run Ubuntu from this USB to boot into a live session of the OS:

Double-click on the icon to Install Ubuntu 11.04.  At the Welcome window, Select your language, and use Alt-Left Click anywhere in the window to drag it up to click the Forward button, since the massive 800x480 resolution of the Eee PC isn't QUITE able to fit it all on-screen.

On the Preparing to install Ubuntu window, you'll see the specifications that you'll need "For best results" including:

• has at least 4.4 GB available drive space
• is plugged in to a power source
• is connected to the Internet

This time, when you Alt-Left Click-and-Drag the window up, you'll find that the Forward button is greyed out.  So really instead of being suggestions for best results, these are actually requirements to even continue with the installer!  Finks.

Click the Quit button to return to the Ubuntu desktop.  Hit Alt+F2 and type:

• gksu gedit /usr/lib/ubiquity/plugins/ubi-prepare.py

Then on line 310 of that file, change the "fudge factor" from

• min_disk_size = size * 2

to

• min_disk_size = size * 1.4

Update: For Ubuntu 11.10, the same bug rears its ugly head, but instead of line 310, it's now on line 250.
Update 2: For Ubuntu 12.04, the file is now /usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/misc.py, line 796.
Update 3: For Ubuntu 12.10, the file is still /usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/misc.py.


Click the Save button, exit the editor, and then double-click on the icon to Install Ubuntu 11.04 again.  Proceed through all the same windows, and this time you should find that the Forward button is no longer greyed out.  Hey, would you look at that!

Feel free to check the boxes to "Download updates while installing" and "Install this third-party software," and click the Forward button.  Once you finally get to the point where you get the Installation Complete message, click on the Restart Now button, go ahead and restart.  Once you login for the first time, run the Update Manager for any additional updates that didn't get picked up during the course of the installation.  When you open up a Terminal window, and run:

• df -h
• cat /proc/cpuinfo 

you will notice a few things.  First, the final installed size of the OS is actually only around 2.7 GB instead of the 4.4 GB that the installer was requiring .  Second, even though the processor in this netbook is a Celeron M 900, it is downclocked to 630 MHz.  This is fairly common, also happened by default with XP.  In both cases, additional utilities are required to get that back up to 900 or higher for better performance, but poorer battery life obviously.

Not that I'm playing favorites or anything, but for comparison purposes, a Fedora 15 installation on the same hardware comes out to a final installed size of 2.5 GB, and a clockspeed of the full 900 MHz, out of the box.

Anyway, hope that helps if there's any of you out there that are like me, a closet hoarder of technology, always looking to repurpose older tech, rather than dispose of or recycle it.  You can have my gadgets... if you can pry them from my cold dead fingers!