techiehenry

Here’s a YouTube video about a phone shop in Harajuku, Japan that showcases everything Japan is capable of when it comes to mobile phone technology.

GPRS? Camera phones? Videophones? Weird but cool phones? They have it!

Don’t you just wish that we have at least one shop like this here in the Philippines?

This dawned on me just a while ago.

After installing Kubuntu 7.04 Beta on my machine and trying to reconfigure Enigmail for Mozilla Thunderbird. I wasn’t really noticing that I made a big mistake because I can get my public key. However, when I tried to encrpt messages, that’s where I started to realize that I cannot recover the private (or secret) key when it’s lost!

Retracing my steps, I lost it when I reformatted a partition during Kubuntu’s install process. Apparently the secret key is stored in my home directory, on one of the database files gpg made during key generation.

So I am now going through the inconvenience of creating another set of keys, uploading the public key to the keyservers, and then reconfiguring my Launchpad account to accept the new key and cancel the old one. Apparently I cannot create a revocation certificate for the old public key since it needs the private key to create it, so I just have to inform everyone I know that I changed my public key.

(I will not discuss the process of creating keypairs and uploading them to the keyservers anymore, since a lot of utility programs can do this.)

How do we get along with creating a backup set of keypairs?

1. Use gpg --list-keys to get a list of the keys stored on the machine. To store this to a file, redirect the output to your desired path and filename:

gpg --list-keys > /path/to/<filename>

2. Take note of the ID of the key you want to backup. The output file in the previous operation should contain a line where it shows something like: pub 1024D/1234ABCD... The hexadecimal code following the slash character is the corresponding key ID, 1234ABCD in our example. We will use this value to indicate the key ID in the succeeding steps.
3. Get the public key using the following command. You should be able to view the contents of the public key when you open the specified file:

gpg -ao /path/to/<filename> --export 1234ABCD

4. Get the private key using the following command. You should be able to view the contents of the private key when you open the specified file:

gpg -ao /path/to/<filename> --export-secret-keys 1234ABCD

5. Create a revocation key using the following command. You need this in case you want to revoke the corresponding public key:

gpg -ao /path/to/<filename> --gen-revoke 1234ABCD

I make sure that these files are placed somewhere else on my hard disk (and removable media), to avoid not being able to restore them after a reformat.

To restore the keys, we need to do the following:

gpg --import /path/to/<filename>

Now we don’t have any reason to say that we lost our keys again, do we?

As I’m writing this post I’m downloading an ISO image of the latest in the testing series for the upcoming release of Kubuntu Linux, which was made available just a few hours ago.

It is labeled 7.04 LTS, which indicates that the final release will be on April 2007, and it will be shipped with Long-Term Support. LTS would mean that support for the software will be provided for a 3-year period for desktops and 5 years for servers.

Prospective testers and early adopters are encouraged to try out the current beta release, which can be obtained from here. Instructions on how to provide feedback and report bugs can also be found in the same link.

Just this morning I was able to complete an ISO download of Herd 5 of Kubuntu’s upcoming Feisty Fawn release.

For the uninitiated, Herd 5 is one of a series of pre-releases being used by developers and testers to ensure that minimal problems would occur with the scheduled April release. I’m using Kubuntu, the variant of the original Ubuntu that utilizes KDE instead of GNOME as its desktop environment upon installation.

Why install a pre-release version of an operating system? I joined the Kubuntu-Testers group to be able to make use of the spare time i have at the moment. It would be quite worthwhile to be able to contribute (at least in testing) to something that I use for my home machine.

Some Filipino linux users are also on the group, it might be a good idea to get in touch with them first.

We have a tumblelog!

I created it originally to entice my wife to go blogging and have something to do on her leisure time. I guess I’m not the great motivator I think I am — I’m still the one updating it!
It’s here.