Warning: This hack will not just void your warranty. It will drop-kick it to the floor, stomp it in the gonads five or six times, shoot it in the head, douse the body in petrol and set it ablaze THEN spit on the remains for good measure. And that doesn’t take into consideration what it could do to you or your equipment . You have been warned. Don’t try this unless you’re comfortable with multimeters and soldering irons.
Now, on to the good stuff. Suppose you have a Linksys WRT54G router & antenna that you want to mount somewhere, say on your roof. So, one fine Saturday morining, you grab a few tools and get to work. About 35 minutes into your little project, it hits you: How exactly do you get power for your router? The roof has no power outlets and you need to keep the antenna cable as short as possible to minimize signal losses.

You start wondering, “Maybe I should have gotten a Meraki. They come with Power Over Ethernet(POE).” Then, it hits you, “Wait! Maybe I could run some power over the ethernet cable…” So you do a little scholarly research(a la google) and find a few people who have modified their routers to support POE.
Basically, ye olde ethernete cable has 4 pairs of wires, each pair consisting of a solidily coloured cable and a white-striped cable of the same colour. The usual arrangement(TIA/EIA-568-B) for most patch cables is:

100BASE-TX makes use of wires 1,2,3 & 6 to transmit and receive data, leaving wires 4,5,7 & 8 for our use.

Update: I forgot to mention. Once you do this hack, you have to remember that if you power the router up in the normal manner, power will still be supplied from the power terminals to pin 5 and pin 8 on the WAN port. Keep this in mind if you’re connecting the router to other equipment to avoid …unexpected results. I use a customized cable that has wires 4, 5 ,7 & 8 cut and terminated in the middle of the cable just to be safe

First we need to do is solder a couple of wires, one from pin 5 to the positive terminal on the router’s board and the other from pin 8 to the negative terminal. This will transfer the power coming in over the cable to the power jack on the board where the router can make use of it.
[singlepic=2,320,240,,center]

This is the only modification that needs to be done on the router itself. However, don’t pack everything up until you’ve tested to make sure its working.
Next up will be our injector. Now, there are many ways to feed power into the cable. You can buy a power over ethernet injector, splice the power cable directly in the network cable or build your own injector. I’d recommend buying a power over ethernet injector; it’s a more reliable option and you don’t have to mutilate the poor cables.

But then, if you’re reading this guide, you probably don’t have an injector available or are thinking,”Building my own POE injector is just so much cooler!!” In that case, you’ll need a keystone jack, a spare ethernet cable, and a power brick for the router (It’s usually better to get a spare of equivalent rating as the original since these instructions will make it …unwieldy for normal use)

[singlepic=9,320,240,,center]

What you do trim off one end of your ethernet cable and connect wires 1,2,3 and 6 to the jack. These are your data lines.

Then you take the plug off your power brick and connect the +ve to pin 5 on the jack and the -ve to pin 8. Trim off any unnessary lengths and you have your own power injector.

Once that’s done, feel free to call all your friends and gloat over how clever you are.

Router:

Power Injector:

Enter Splashy, a boot splash manager with some very flexible features. One of the thing I like about it is that it does require any kernel patching and runs completely in userspace. And it supports 8bit, 16bit and 24bit framebuffers and TrueType fonts. Even better, its ridiculously easy to create themes for Splashy.

This tutorial was written with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 in mind but with a little tweaking, it can be applied to Fiesty and Gutsy(if you’re using anything older, you really really realy should upgrade).

First, we need to get splashy on your system. Make sure your sources have universe enabled and are up to date. Fire up your favourite terminal and:

apt-get update

Once that’s done, next up is:

apt-get install splashy splashy-themes

This will install Splashy, a few themes and uninstall Usplash!. Once this is done, you need to edit your GRUB configuration file to setup the frame buffer:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.list
Scroll down and add vga=791(1024×768 millions colors) or vga=791 (1024×768 thousands colors to your default boot option
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.10-5-k7 Default
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hde6 ro quiet splash vga=792
initrd /initrd.img
savedefault
boot

Save and reboot. Voila! You should be looking at your new boot splash. However, the default splash is a bit … bland. If you want to spice this a bit, you can change to one of the themes you installed. First check to see what themes are installed.
kwame@amaterasu:~$ ls /etc/splashy/themes
aqua carbonalien default crux debian-cubism
kwame@amaterasu:~$
So let’s say I want to use the aqua theme, I used the splashy_config -s to set the theme
kwame@amaterasu:~$ sudo splashy_config -s aqua
>Set theme as: aqua [ DONE ]

Next, you’ll have to update your initramfs or it’ll look like the change hasn’t taken effect.
kwame@amaterasu:~$ sudo update-initramfs -u
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic
You can then reboot and admire your new theme.

You can get some more info here.

Coming soon..How to make your own Splashy Themes

So what do you do when you need to reinstall Windows and the computer your’re working is a tiny laptop with no floppy, no cdrom and a serious malware overdose? Since the computer supported booting from USB, all I had to do was figure out a way to get the Windows 98 bootdisk on a USB key. I tried several utilities but none worked for me.This is where Qemu and dd come in. Basically, what you do is :

• Download a Windows 98 Boot Image.
• Create a Qemu RAW disk image (big enough to hold the bootdisk files and any other files you might need. Mine was about 700MB)
• Boot up a Qemu virtual machine with the boot image for your floppy device and the disk image as your primary hard drive
• Use fdisk and format to partition and format the disk image
• Transfer boot & command system to disk image with sys.
• Use dd to strip off the first 63 512-byte blocks on the disk image
• Use dd to copy the disk image to USB Key.

Now for more detailed instructions:

Open a terminal (xterm, konsole, gnome-terminal; whatever you’re comfortable with)

Create a folder to contain all your files
ray@zangetsu:~$ mkdir win98boot
ray@zangetsu:~$ cd win98boot


Download the Windows 98 boot image from here
ray@zangetsu:~/win98boot$ wget http://


Create a 256MB Qemu RAW disk image (or whatever size you need)
ray@zangetsu:~/win98boot$ qemu-img create -f raw drive_c.dsk 256M

Next, we load a virtual machine that boots from the floppy image
ray@zangetsu:~/win98boot$ qemu -fda win98se.img -hda drive_c.dsk -boot a -m 32

Once the VM boots up, you should see something similar to the following:

What we need to do is partition our virtual drive, so
A:\fdisk C:


Enter 1 at the first screen to select the first option (Create a DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive)

Enter 1 at the next screen to Create a Primary DOS partition

Answer yes if fdisk asks you if you want make maximum use of your disk

After fdisk finishes, you will need to restart the VM before you can format your drive.

Just close it and run the following again:
ray@zangetsu:~/win98boot$ qemu -fda win98se.img -hda drive_c.dsk -boot a -m 32

Now you can format:
A:\format C:

Answer yes when asked if you want to proceed with format. After formating is done, you will be prompted to enter a volume label. This is optional.

Next, we transfer system to c:
A:\sys C:


Once that’s done. Close your VM and boot it up once more but without the floppy image this time.
ray@zangetsu:~/win98boot$ qemu -hda drive_c.dsk -m 32

If you did everything right, the windows 98 splash screen should flash briefly and you should get something like this:

Before we can copy the image to our usb drive, we need to modify it a little. This strips off the first 63 blocks of the image( Found this useful piece of info thanks to

http://colinux.wikia.com/wiki/Converting_Distributions)

ray@zangetsu:~/win98boot$ dd if=drive_c.dsk of=boot.img bs=512 skip=63

We can now copy the image to the drive. In this case, my drive happens to be /dev/sdb. You can use dmesg to find out what it is on your machine.
ray@zangetsu:~/win98boot$ dd if=boot.img of=/dev/sdb bs=512
524288+0 records in
524288+0 records out
268435456 bytes (256 MB) copied, 108.920273 seconds, 18.5 MB/s

Voila, you have a working Win98 bootable USB drive. You can now mount the drive and copy whatever else you need onto it. Your results may vary depending on the options you choose but they should be similar to the above.

/usr/bin/compiz: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is missing
/usr/bin/compiz: Failed to manage screen: 0
/usr/bin/compiz: No manageable screens found on display :0.0

I did a little looking around online and I found out that I needed to add the following to the Device section of my xorg.conf file

Option "UseFBDev" "true"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"


I then gave X the three fingered salute( for all you ex Win 98 users, I’m not talking about that one… I mean Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) and Beryl was loading now. But unfortunately, I hit another pothole. Window decorations were not displaying. Tried the normal GTK and Emerald decorations but no success with any of them. Turns out my version of libdecoration0 was being held back for some reason. This is what my sources.list looked like before I installed beryl:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-updates main restricted
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb feisty eyecandy
deb-src http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb feisty eyecandy


The beryl packages were supposed to come from the download.tuxfamily.org repo but the libdecoration0 seemed to be loaded from the main ubuntu servers.

So I commented out the entries for the ubuntu servers:

#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted universe multiverse
#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-updates main restricted
#deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb feisty eyecandy
deb-src http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb feisty eyecandy


Then:

apt-get update
apt-get install libdecoration0


When I reloaded Beryl, window decorations were back!!
Screenshots right after this commercial break:

I have a Meraki mini I’ve been playing around with. I’m running OpenWRT Kamikaze 7.06 on it and I love it. It’s very flexible piece of hardware and comes with an 8mb flash and 32mb of RAM, which is more than enough for the stuff I run on it. The only annoying thing is the lack of a web interface. It’s not that I have problems with using the terminal; it’s just that, it becomes annoying to switch on my desktop just to attend to a minor detail. Or I’m downstairs in a friend’s room and just need to check if my internet connection is alive. A web interface would allow me do all that from a browser as long as I was connected to the network.
Thankfuly there’s the Webif frontend by X-WRT . From what I’ve seen so far, it’s quite good though it’s still beta. It does everything I want it to do so I can’t complain.

Installing
You first need to install the haserl package, which webif depends on.Telnet or SSH into your router and enter the following:

ipkg update

This updates your package list

ipkg install haserl

Installs haserl which allows you to embed shell scripts in html.

ipkg install http://downloads.x-wrt.org/xwrt/kamikaze/7.06/atheros-2.6/webif_latest.ipk

Download and install webif from the x-wrt.org site since webif is not yet in the kamikaze repository

Note: the webif install will reboot your router!!

Once the router is back up, open up a browser of your choice and enter your router’s ip address. Voila

My Linksys WRT54G version 5 suddenly stopped working over the weekend. On powering the router, all lights powered on and stayed that way. I had previously been running DD-WRT Micro.I tried holding the reset button for 30 seconds, powering the router, holding for another 30 seconds and then usnig TFTP tool to flash the router but that did not work. My situation was desperate and I was ready for desperate measures. So I used this guide : http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/redhat/wrt54g_revival.html So I had to open up the router and short out pins 15-16 on the chip. The problem though was that in the pictures I saw, there were differences in the location of some of the components. So I’m posting a picture of what my board looks like just in case anyone has something similar to mine:

I won’t go into the details of the process since they are already documented elsewhere. All I’ll add is, funnily enough, after shorting out the pins, my router started working properly without me needed to reflash the firmware. Might work differently for you though.