I also wanted to give him a hand, so I wrote to USB_ModeSwitch forums hoping that something could come out of this. I only wish I had time to work on this my self, but as always, I don’t.

I was so happy when to realise that Santa Claus didn’t forget me after all this year. I received a very nice present just like I wished for. Thank you Santa, I love you, too.

Anyway my father had a problem. He could not take colored prints as the colors were horribly misaligned. I investigated the problem just to notice that others had problems with color printing, too, and I was almost ready to give up (after a long long search and many tender thoughts on Canon). Then I just had an idea; let’s try using lower resolution. I lowered the print resolution from 600×600 dpi to 300×300 dpi and voilà the colored print came out just like it should!

I quickly updated the OpenPrinting database entry of the printer and decided to blog about this in hope that others who are giving some rough love with head to their desks can also benefit from this information.

God, I hate proprietary drivers. And Canon.

Anyway this is a great opportunity for me to remind you all about my amazon.com wishlist. The prices vary from pretty expensive to more affordable so there’s surely something for everyone just to show how much you love me.

After like 1,5 hours or so I finally had the backup decrypted and I thought that it would be useful to others, too, if I share my findings as I discovered from emergency googling that others are struggling from the same problem and no one has provided any complete solution.

The backup was on external USB HDD, but it should not matter as long as you have your old encrypted .Private somewhere at hand.

First you need to make sure ecryptfs-utils is installed:

$ sudo aptitude install ecryptfs-utils


Create a directory where the backup is opened:

$ cd /mnt
$ sudo mkdir OldHome


Then create a symbolic link to your backup of your old .Private:

$ sudo ln -s /media/3e8ea0ac-xxxx-xxxx-a35a-8ff17406fdb8/home/user/.Private OldPrivate


Now, here’s the part that was missing from all the instructions. At least Ubuntu is using filename encryption to hide the real filenames. You need two keys for accessing: one for accessing the file content and one to decrypt the filenames to be meaningful. To get the key do:

$ sudo ecryptfs-add-passphrase --fnek
Passphrase:

Enter the recovery passphrase: the long one you had to manually write down to a piece of paper when you installed the system. Then you should have a similar output as the following:

Inserted auth tok with sig [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] into the user session keyring
Inserted auth tok with sig [yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy] into the user session keyring


Now, write down the second signature [yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy].

Now you are ready to decrypt the backup:

$ sudo mount -t ecryptfs OldPrivate OldHome/
Passphrase:
Select cipher:
1) aes: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32 (not loaded)
2) blowfish: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 56 (not loaded)
3) des3_ede: blocksize = 8; min keysize = 24; max keysize = 24 (not loaded)
4) twofish: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32 (not loaded)
5) cast6: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32 (not loaded)
6) cast5: blocksize = 8; min keysize = 5; max keysize = 16 (not loaded)
Selection [aes]:
Select key bytes:
1) 16
2) 32
3) 24
Selection [16]:
Enable plaintext passthrough (y/n) [n]:
Enable filename encryption (y/n) [n]: y
Filename Encryption Key (FNEK) Signature [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]: yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
Attempting to mount with the following options:
ecryptfs_unlink_sigs
ecryptfs_fnek_sig=yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
ecryptfs_key_bytes=16
ecryptfs_cipher=aes
ecryptfs_sig=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
WARNING: Based on the contents of [/root/.ecryptfs/sig-cache.txt],
it looks like you have never mounted with this key
before. This could mean that you have typed your
passphrase wrong.


Would you like to proceed with the mount (yes/no)? : yes
Would you like to append sig [df3c98e4c85db0c5] to
[/root/.ecryptfs/sig-cache.txt]
in order to avoid this warning in the future (yes/no)? : no
Not adding sig to user sig cache file; continuing with mount.
Mounted eCryptfs


Now you ara able to access the decrypted backup in OldHome directory and you also have correct filenames.

MessageContent="55534243000000000000000000000011060000000000000000000000000000"


then run:

$ sudo usb_modeswitch

and you should have a working mobile broadband modem instead of a $180 80MB USB storage stick.

The next Ubuntu release, Karmic Koala, will have usb_modeswitch installed by default which will improve the user experience for many many people. Udev will handle the switch automatically so that the expensive modems just work

What’s nice about the list it also lets other people, hi, mom!, buy me stuff and have it shipped directly to me. What a great service

Photos by ALD Automotive

The site seems to be a campaign of Free Software Foundation Europe.

Well I’ve never heard before about Sumatra PDF, but as it’s listed on the website I thought I would give it a try. After using it for a while I can confirm it’s fast. In fact it’s like a rocket compared to Adobe® Reader®. I highly recommend everyone on Windows to give it a try!

Plug-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer are currently missing, but Sumatra can be set as the default PDF viewer and instructions to prevent Adobe® Reader® from stealing PDFs inside browser are available.