GS Design Just another developer blog

A friend of mine just bought a e-pc from acer that runs a custom linux OS called aspire one.
At first sight it seems like it a great solution for basic users since it has a very friendly interface, and it comes preinstalled with a a pack of software that is generally used like IM client, email reader, browser, office suite and much more.

But although this looks nice, it becomes a problem when you want more from your epc, when you want to install new apps or want to customize something. You dont even have a right menu on the desktop.

How to enable advanced menu [small hack]

To do this you will need to go to Files > My Documents. In the window opened go to the File Menu and click on Terminal.
In the terminal window input xfce-setting-show and hit enter.
This will bring up the Xfce Settings Manager.

Click on the Desktop link and you will get the Desktop Preferences window where you must select the Behavior tab.
Now mark under Menus the Show desktop menu on right click option and close the window.

Now you will bring up the normal desktop menu when you right click somewhere on the desktop which contains more options than the limited user interface on the Aspire One.

Changing the root password

Now for even more advanced usage you will need to use the root user. But after a lot of searching i came to the conclusion that you cant find out what the password for the root is, instead you can change it.

To do so you must click on the desktop and open a terminal window ( you can find it under System > Terminal ).
In the terminal window first type “Sudo –su” and hit Enter.
Then type “passwd” and hit Enter.
You will now be prompted to enter the new password. After typing press enter and retype it.
That is it. You have successfully changed the root password

Installing new applications

Now that you have enabled the advanced menu and have the root password you can proceed to installing new applications.
This is quite simple, you just right click on the desktop and select System > Add/Remove Software.
You will be prompted to enter the root password and after you enter it the package manager will launch.
And now the install should be easy as cake and is similar to any Linux based OS.

Adding new shortcuts to your desktop

Even though you have enabled the new advanced menu and you can access your new installed software from that menu, it just doesn’t feel right. I bet you want them to be included in the shortcuts from the desktop. Well that is just a bit tricky, you will need to edit an xml config file.
The address for it is :

/home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-a pp.xml

Hope this was helpfull,
Cheers

Recently i have had my blog hacked.
Somebody broke in and change the admin user account password and email adress. So this let me completely out. Well not quite, i could still get in by modifying the admin details directly in the database.

This incident made me search for more details about securing your wordpress blog. Although there are lot of ways to secure your wordpress Administration Panel like .htaccess blocking, using SSL or Banning Ips, most of them are a little complicated and require some little knowledge to implement. But during my search i came across a small tip that is going to make your administration panel a little harder to hack.

The Trick is changing the administrator username. The default installation name is admin, this make the hacker jobs more easy since the already know the username, they just need to guess the password. So by simple changing the username from the default admin to something different you will make the hacker job a little harder.

To do this you need to login into your PhpMyAdmin and browse to the table wp_users and edit the entry of your username and change username from admin to any other username ( make sure it is not already used by another user ). It is recomended that the username is not a dictionary name, since that will make it easier to break.

Hope this information helped you, and i await your comments.

Cheers