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mount a corrupted Windows filesystem,

and I was able to save some of the data.

DSL is fairly full-featured for its size, and

it comes with two window managers

(JWM or Fluxbox). It can be configured

to save its data back to the USB disk in a

persistent fashion, so you always can be

sure you have your critical files with you

and that it’s easily accessible.

All the Linux distribution installations

have one thing in common: they are all

network-based installs. Although this is a

good thing for Billix, as they take up very

little space (around 10MB for each distro),

it can be a bad thing during installation

as the installation time will vary with the

speed of your Internet connection. There

is one other upside to a network-based

installation. In many cases, there is no

need to update the newly installed oper-

ating system after installation, because

the OS bits that are downloaded are typi-

cally up to date. Note that when using

the Red Hat-based installers (CentOS 4.6,

CentOS 5.1 and Fedora 8), the system

may appear to hang during the down-

load of a file called minstg2.img. The

system probably isn’t hanging; it’s just

downloading that file, which is fairly large

(around 40MB), so it can take a while

depending on the speed of the mirror

and the speed of your connection. Take

care not to specify the USB disk acciden-

tally at the install target for the distribution

you are attempting to install.

The memtest86 utility has been

around for quite a few years, yet it’s a

key tool for a sysadmin when faced with

a flaky computer. It does only one thing,

but it does it very well: it tests the RAM

of a system very thoroughly. Simply

boot off the USB drive, select memtest

from the menu, and press Enter, and

memtest86 will load and begin testing

the RAM of the system immediately. At

this point, you can remove the USB drive

from the computer. It’s no longer need-

ed as memtest86 is very small and loads

completely into memory on startup.

The ntpwd Windows password

“cracking” tool can be a controversial

tool, but it is included in the Billix distri-

bution because as a system administra-

tor, I’ve been asked countless times to

get into Windows systems (or accounts

on Windows systems) where the pass-

word has been lost or forgotten. The

ntpwd utility can be a bit daunting, as

the UI is text-based and nearly nonexis-

tent, but it does a good job of mount-

ing FAT32- or NTFS-based partitions,

editing the SAM account database and

saving those changes. Be sure to read

all the messages that ntpwd displays,

and take care to select the proper

disk partition to edit. Also, take the

program’s advice and nullify a password

rather than trying to change it from

within the interface—zeroing the

password works much more reliably.

DBAN (otherwise known as Darik’s

Boot and Nuke) is a very good “nuke

it from orbit” hard disk wiper. It pro-

vides various levels of wipe, from a

basic “overwrite the disk with zeros”

to a full DoD-certified, multipass wipe.

Like memtest86, DBAN is small and

loads completely into memory, so you

can boot the utility, remove the USB

drive, start a wipe and move on to

another system. I’ve used to this to

wipe clean disks on systems before

handing them over to a recycler or

before selling a system.

In closing, Billix may not make you

coffee in the morning or eradicate

Windows from the face of the earth, but

having a USB key in your pocket that

offers you the functionality to do all of

those tasks quickly and easily can make

the lifeof a system administrator (or any

Linux-oriented person) much easier.

Bill Childers is an IT Manager in Silicon Valley, where he lives

with his wife and two children. He enjoys Linux far too much,

and probably should get more sun from time to time. In his

spare time, he does work with the Gilroy Garlic Festival, but he

does not smell like garlic.

www.linuxjournal.com august 2008 | 55

Expanding Billix

It’s relatively easy to expand Billix to support other Linux distributions, such as

Knoppix or the Ubuntu live CDs. Copy the contents of the Billix USB tarball to a direc-

tory on your hard disk, and download the distro you want. Copy the necessary kernel

and initrd to the directory where you put the contents of the USB tarball, taking care

to rename any files if there are files in that directory with the same name. Copy any

compressed filesystems that your new distro may use to the USB drive (for example,

Knoppix has the KNOPPIX directory, and Puppy Linux uses PUP_XXX.SFS). Then, look at

the boot configuration for that distro (it should be in isolinux.cfg). Take the necessary

lines out of that file, and put them in the Billix syslinux.cfg file, changing filenames

as necessary. Optionally, you can add a menu item to the boot.msg file. Finally, run

syslinux -s <device>

, and reboot your system to test out your newly expanded Billix.

I have a 2GB USB drive that has a “Super-Billix” installation that includes Knoppix and

Ubuntu 8.04. An added bonus of having the entire Ubuntu live CD in your pocket is

that, thanks to the speed of USB 2.0, you can install Ubuntu in less than ten minutes,

which would be really useful at an installfest. There is good information on creating

Ubuntu-bootable USB drives available at the Pendrive Linux Web site.

Alternatively, a really neat thing to do (but way beyond the scope of this article) is to

convert Billix into a network-boot (via Pre-Execution Environment, or PXE) environ-

ment. I’ve actually got a VMware virtual machine running Billix as a PXE boot server.

Resources

Billix Project Page:

sourceforge.net/projects/billix

Damn Small Linux:

www.damnsmalllinux.org

DBAN Project Page:

dban.sourceforge.net

Knoppix:

www.knoppix.net

Pendrive Linux:

www.pendrivelinux.com

Syslinux:

syslinux.zytor.com/index.php

Pxelinux:

syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

U3 Removal Software:

www.u3.com/uninstall

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