Hi,

I just wanted to share with you that I have been working a bit on winpass, that Rescatux option inspired on Trinity Rescue Kit’s winpass script that will let you reset your Windows password (mainly blanking it).

I have managed to extract in an automated manner the windows user, prompt the user to choose one of them.

The problem comes when one has to choose to blank the password. You have to choose an option on an interactive menu inside chntpw.

Now I need to test the original chntpw program because the chntpw debian package does not seem to be updated with the latest upstream release.

I will try to find some new command line options that will let me blank the password directly from command line.

If I do not find them I will try to implement them myself or ask the chntpw developer to add them for me. And I will also ask about an option that lists all the users (one per line) so that I do not have to use bkhive and samdump2 to obtain them.

The other option is to imitate input thanks to an input pipe but I prefer to do it in more elegant manner.

Let’s hope that I do not have to maintain a chntpw fork and a new repository for all of this stuff.

In the other hand next features I have been thinking about are: Share log with (ubuntu)forums and Boot info script option.

Log will be already available inside [CODE] [/CODE] marks!!!

So… let’s hope next weekend I can work a bit more on this stuff and make a new Rescatux release.

I join some photos of Les Borges Blanques Rescatux talk.

Note for English readers: This piece of news affects mainly Spanish users so I will write it in Spanish.

El próximo sábado 7 de Mayo de 2011 en Les Borges Blanques (Lleida – Spain) dentro de la install party de Ubuntu 11.04 del equipo catalán de Ubuntu tendrá lugar a las 11h de la mañana, hora local, la charla titulada: Rescatux.

El ponente será Albert Mas.

Entre otras cosas se explicará la nueva función Compartir logs y la nueva opción de arreglo del arranque de Windows.

Estais todos invitados aunque se ruega os inscribais en la fiesta.

Thanks for José Ramón Ruiz for this video. It will recorded for future references at wiki: http://rescatux.berlios.de/wiki/ .

This video shows you how easy is to use Rescatux for its main purpose: Restoring Grub to the MBR.

I think I have managed to do most of the work involved on the stabilisation roadmap. I have even finished the most tedious of them: Documentation ;).

However I think I am going to add another useful option before releasing Rescatux 0.26 version (As an user I wouldn’t like to see another Rescatux with no new useful options). Fix Boot of Windows (MBR). It is an option that it is already present on Super Grub Disk but I want to implement it. I doubt if I am going to using install-mbr command and I doubt about using sfdisk for activating the windows partition.

As you might know Windows boot has three steps: MBR Boot, Partition Boot, Kernel Boot. This option will only fix the first one of the Windows boot step which it is common for all the Windows versions.

By the way… I have already implemented the Share log option on my test Rescatux and it works quite well.

As you might have seen Forum and Wiki have been disabled for a long time now. I plan to reenable them with antispam methods in the short them.
In the meanwhile I am going to do an experiment. This post comments  are going to be open for you to give me feedback about Rescatux only. (Till I close its comments 😉 By the way comments are moderated (Because of spammers again)).

Today I have worked on Rescatux API as I already told you on Rescatux stabilisation roadmap. I thought that it was a matter of four or five functions but there are more functions than I expected :).

The functions are mainly saved into rescatux_lib.sh file and so far I have implemented these functions:

• rtux_Get_Etc_Issue_Content: Given a partition it returns its etc issue content
• rtux_Get_System_Partitions: Return partitions detected on the system
• rtux_Get_Linux_Os_Partition: Return partitions which have Linux os detector on them
• rtux_Get_System_HardDisks: Return hard disks detected on the system
• rtux_Choose_Linux_partition: Let the user choose his main GNU/Linux partition
• rtux_Get_Desktop_Width: Returns Desktop width

Having a Rescatux API will simplify Rescatux development. No more repeated code. Functions can be improved if needed without altering the rest. And, most important of it, it will help Rescatux contributors to code their rescue tasks without neither having to care about backend (Reading system partitions and so on) nor having to care about frontend (How to build a menu so that the user selects a partition).

By the way, after stabilisation I will try to improve the support menu with the “Share logs” option which will involve pastebinit tool.

Apart of working on Rescatux API I have reniced a lot of code because it seemed a mess. You know, identing lines of code, removing debug lines, unnecessary comments and so on. 😉

As you can see, Rescatux 0.22 has been released.
Rescatux’s current source code is a bit messy but that was intentional. I needed to test the different options a bit to try to imagine how an Rescatux API would be.

I think that I still needed more options to get a better idea and design but I want to tide up things a little bit.

So here there are some points about short-term Rescatux roadmap.

• Do not add any more useful options
• Add About option
• Redesign help system so that it is based on html instead of txt
• Write a good local documentation for the current three useful options
• Make the local documentation also online documentation
• Improve current options when there are problems (I.e. Restore Grub to the MBR should inform if no partition is found instead of offering you an empty selection choice).
• API restructuration. All functions that are repeated among useful options scripts should be found in one script that it is read from the original scripts.
• Improve source code here and there.

So I think this is most of the issues that I need to resolve till I release a new Rescatux.

As long as this new release would be kind of a stable one I will also try to release a Torrent file because I think that Berlios is something satured with Rescatux downloads.

About update grub configuration file option being updated to support SuSE, Fedora or other grub legacy distributions it will be postponed to later versions but comments on how to do this from a live cd are welcomed.

See you in the next Rescatux development post!

Happy new year 2011!