Backup your Gmail account in Ubuntu Linux with gmvault

This is a follow-up of my previous post “What to do when your Google disabled your Gmail account?“.

Here’s how to download all emails from your GMail account with Gmvault:

Download and setting up gmvault

1. First you need to install python-pip
[bash]
sudo apt-get install python-pip
[/bash]

2. Then using ‘pip’, install gmvault
[bash]
sudo pip install gmvault
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3. Finally you can sync and backup GMail accounts with ‘gmvault
[bash]
gmvault sync your_username @ gmail.com
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4. gmvault will ask you to authenticate yourselves with GMail, and after that, the syncronization process starts. gmvault stores all the gmail backup in the ‘gmvault-db‘ directory.

p/s: Some users encounters error telling that the “All Mail folder is not visible”. You can enable All Mail folder visibility by checking the “Show in IMAP” box in Settings->Labels. Also, IMAP access should also be enabled for this to work.

p/s 2: It might not be obvious right now why you need to backup your emails when Gmail has gigabytes of storage. But according to Gmail discussions group, Google can and might disable access to all of its services, locking the users out from their emails forever.

How to mount exFAT (used in SDcard / USB Drive) filesystem in Ubuntu

exFAT is a filesystem developed by Microsoft for use in flash drives or portable storage devices where the use of NTFS is not feasible. exFAT is inteded to be supported on consumer devices such as MP3 players, cameras, mobile phones and video recorders.

However filesystem formatted with exFAT are not currently supported by Ubuntu (as of 12.04) out from the box. In order to do that, you need to download exFAT filesystem module from relan PPA.

1. Add exFAT PPA repository

[bash]
sudo -s
apt-add-repository ppa:relan/exfat
[/bash]

2. Update apt-get repository
[bash]
apt-get update
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3. Install exfat modules
[bash]
apt-get install fuse-exfat
[/bash]

That’s it you’re done! Then you can finally mounts exFAT filesystem using the following command….

4. mounting exFAT filesystem
[bash][/bash]
mount -t exfat /dev/sdd /media
[bash][/bash]

You should be able to mount exFAT filesystem from now on… the fuse-exfat also comes with ‘exfat-utils‘ package which enables the creation, checking and labelling exFAT filesystem.

iotop: How to monitor processes that hogs hard disk writes

iotop is a small and handy tool to monitor processes that hogs I/O resources. iotop outputs is similar to ‘top’ except it lists the hard disk read/write activity as well as swap writes.

You can use the left and write key to sort the heading according to your preference and the R key can be used to reverse the sort. The ‘O’ key is used when you only wants it to display processes that are currently utilizing the disk I/O. While the ‘P’ key can be used to display accumulated IO disk read/write for all the processes (which can be sorted with the arrow keys).

BlackBuntu – Ubuntu-flavored Linux Penetration Distro

Blackbuntu is a Ubuntu-based distro used for penetration testing and security auditing. Blackbuntu is designed to be used by students and practitioners who are interested in the field of information security.

Blackbuntu tools are divided into several categories:

  • Information Gathering
  • Network Mapping
  • Vulnerability Identification
  • Penetration
  • Privilege Escalation
  • Radio Network Analysis
  • VoIP Analysis
  • Digital Forensic
  • Reverse Engineering
  • Miscellaneous

Which includes these tools among others: Lanmap2, nmbscan, dnsmap, fierce, hostmap, ltrace, tctrace, sqlbrute, sqlmap,sqlninja, mysqloit, sqlcheck, wfuzz,xsser,xssploit,jmeter, nikto2,skipfish,wbox, autopsy,scalpel,mboxgrep,galetta,afstats, wepcrack,giskismet,fakeap,aircrack-ng,cowpatty,bluebugger,bluescan, bluesnarfer, iwar,protos-sip,sipcrack,brutessh,hydra,sshater

…and many more.

Blackbuntu can be downloaded from its official website – http://www.blackbuntu.com/

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Latest New Features

The latest Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is going to be released in (28 April 2012), that is less than a week! The latest features of Precise Pangolin are:

1. Linux Kernel
Ubuntu 12.04 will use a kernel based on the 3.2.12 upstream Linux kernel, which include a patch that makes Linux powered laptop consumes more efficiently

2. HUD – Intelligent search feature in Ubuntu 12.04
Stands for Heads-up Display, HUD can be used to search for items in the menu bar in most applications. For example, if you are looking for a particular menu (or functionality) in GIMP, but can’t quite recall its position, you can use HUD to search it. Pictured here here is an attempt to search for ‘Blur’ filter for GIMP.

Ubuntu HUD

Currently HUD only works with application that supported Global menu, which means you can’t use it in LibreOffice.

3. Rhythmbox replaced Bansee as the default multimedia player
A decision came during the last Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS). This move is connected to the new community decision to remove Mono and any application that depends on it from the default installation.

Another casualty is Tomboy note-taking application and gbrainy (game) which also depends on Monoi

**personally, I find depending on Mono application could be problematic, moreover those applications aren’t taking advantage of the ‘portability’ of the .NET platforms (It can’t be used on Microsoft Windows either, not without extensive hacking). So what’s the use of including Mono application on Ubuntu, except for bloating distros?

4. Global Privacy Settings
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS features “Privacy” option in the System Settings screen. The new Privacy Menu gives users the option of turning off History recording for users activities with a click of a menu.

Privacy 1

Privacy 2

Users may also disable activity recording for a specific group of applications (Instant Messaging, Web browsing, Office Documents, Emails and Multimedia), note that this option *MAY* only work on application that comes with Ubuntu default-installation.

5. Ubuntu *.ISO installer will exceed CD-ROM size
CD-ROM was used as installers on computer platform since 1994, back then the 650MB storage was larger than the average hdd capacity of around 320MB-500MB. The practice of releasing CD-sized ISO have since followed Linux distro for years, well after DVD drive and DVD-writers have become common.

Starting with Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04 LTS), Ubuntu *.iso sizes will not fit CD-ROM anymore. it’s ISO size is estimated to be around 750MB to 800MB. Users may burn the ISO on DVD or use utilities such as UNetBootin to create bootable USB Drive.

My Thoughts
I think Ubuntu is going strong on this release with vast improvements on the usability, especially on the aspect of the UI user-friendliness to those who are new to GNU/Linux. However, I still thinks that Unity UI (and to the extend, the Ubuntu Software Center) is VERY SLOW even when running on a modern system as it took about 10 seconds to load Ubuntu Software Center.

Frankly, I think Ubuntu and the general GNU/Linux desktop community should improve the perceived latency of its UI first in order to persuade people to use open source operating system.

Source:

Linux Mint ‘Lisa’ – a release with the old GNOME look and feel

Linux Mint ‘Lisa’, a popular Ubuntu-based distro has been released! The most noticeable feature of Linux Mint is the inclusion of GNOME 3 desktop environment that emulates the look and feel of GNOME 2 desktop. Additionally ‘Lisa’ includes MATE, a GNOME 2 fork with various enhancements, including the ability to runge GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 on the same system.

The standard GNOME 3 installations comes with Mint GNOME Shell Extensions (MGSE), a desktop layer on top of GNOME 3 that makes possible to use the desktop environment in a traditional way.

Read more about Linux Mint 12 release.