Run PirateBox on your Laptop from USB [Windows PirateBoxLive]

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PirateBoxLive
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Don't want to mess up your computer trying to install PirateBox on it?
Want to be able to switch between PirateBox and Your normal OS?
Don't want anything related to PirateBox on your actual harddrive?
Still want Windows as your normal operating system?

Try PirateBoxLive

Salesmanship aside PirateBoxLive is a liveCD / liveUSB version of
PirateBox with everything you need including Pre-installed scripts
(By Matthias Strubel) and PirateBoxManager (By Cale Black)
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___________________________| Instructions |___________________________

### Windows ###
### It is suggested you print these instructions because you will have to do most of this offline ###

Step 1:

Download and Install UnetBootin



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Step 2: Download the latest version of PirateBoxLive from this torrent or from GitHub

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Step 3: Select the ISO radio button and click browse. Select the pirateboxlive.iso you downloaded. And select the drive your USB stick is in.



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Step 4: When it is finished click reboot.

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Step 5: When your BIOS pops up hit the setup or configure key (normally F2 or Delete)

Step 6: Go to Boot (or Hard Drive Boot or Boot Sequence)

Step 7: Set the boot order to boot from USB drive first instead of hard drive (You may have to specifically select the USB device you have plugged in.

#Having issues with these steps?: More info can be found here, here, and here

Step 8: Reboot

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Step 9: It will boot into an Ubuntu distro and automatically log in and you should see this:



### Will add a piratebox / ubuntu for dummies ###

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Step 10: Click the terminal icon next to the Firefox icon and a command line will pop up like this:



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Step 11: Type in command line "PirateBoxManager" *without parentheses* and than hit enter. This is what your screen will look like:



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Step 12: Select option 1 by typing "1" *without parentheses* and hitting enter. This is what your screen will look like:



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CONGRATULATIONS!

You now have PirateBox running!

Feel free to play around with any of the options on PirateBoxManager (Built by me using Matthias's scripts) Some of these include:

Start PirateBox: Starts PirateBox #When PirateBox is running you cannot join other networks / connect to the internet#
Stop PirateBox: Stops PirateBox and allows you to connect to other networks
Manage Files: Opens up a file browser of the Share folder in PirateBox for you to delete / add things
Just Download the Scripts: Requires you to connect to the internet (not recommended for most users)
Config: A sub menu for quickly changing settings. It also has an option to clear the share folder

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Also, now when you run First Setup it copies shortcuts to start and stop piratebox to the desktop

that means that you can stop and start PirateBox just as easy as 2 clicks!

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Note: When you reboot into the USB drive you will have to run First Setup on PirateBoxManagers' options due to the fact that non of your changes will persist (This is the nature of LiveCD / US Although I am working on seeing if I can make a persistent version that saves all of your changes and even files (as long as the drive is large enough)
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12 Easy steps is now all it takes to get PirateBox for most laptop users now

A big shout out to Matthias Strubel who is the reason this got done
And another shout out to the rest of the PirateBox community who has gotten this to where it is. Who's awesome? You are.

Any Comments, Concerns, Criticisms, Suggestions, Fixes, etc. Please post them below.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/2012 02:14PM by TerrorByte.

Good work.
If you have a torrent file, Send me a PM, I'll share it infinitive.

Matthias

Wow, nice work! I've just added links to these tutorials from the PirateBox DIY wiki page.

Hi,

This is very very great news and it is working fine.

I have booted my white MacBook 2.1 (mid-2007), everything is working fine !

Thank you for such a work

Do you plan to make a ISO with Ubuntu 12.04 ? Everyone around me uses 11.10 and plan to get to 12.04, so they would be happy to get such a version.

PF

Excellent news! I also can confirm that it works on Macbook Pro

Actually yes yes I do , I will probably to a 11.10 and 12 version. Not for any particularly important reason but because I know some people prefer others. I was just most familiar with 10.04 (I run backtrack on my laptop) and so I just decided I'd do it real quick. I also have some plans to do a Arch Linux version using xcde or lxd to make a really small version of PirateBoxLive.

Although this will probably be a little later because I have some learning to do about how Ubiquity stores default settings... I hope to god its nothing like Gnome Config files lol

Torrent doesn't work ?

That was just a temporary torrent. I'll get the permanent one up tonight. Sorry about that.

After setting this up, I can't find the broadcast network. Everything seems to be running just fine otherwise.

Also, any tips for getting this to work on a large external HDD?

Is there any chance of something of like this for the MR3020? It seems quite strange that the current install is dependent on an giving the router an initial internet access during the install. Especially for someone like me who lives in an area where everyone around me has MAC filtering (most of my university live in college).

Hi Snow,
no. I started the development of this and recognized, that there is always something to install on MR3020.
Currently in 0.3.2 you have the possibility to lay the python packages to the usb stick... but these packages are only 25% of the packages which have to be installed on the classic openwrt firmware image.

And because a few packages gets installed on the USB stick, you can't create a image, which have all needed packages built in.

What about NATtting the internet connection to your MR3020 ?

Matthias



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2012 04:30AM by Matthias.

Thanks for the reply Matthias.

I don't really know much about NATing, but a friend of mine is doing his PhD using computer models, so hopefully he'll be able to tell me if that would work with our set up. It's a shame about not being able to a one-step install on the MR3020, as that would of made it easier for non-computer literate people like me to easily set them up on campus.

I guess I'll hold out in the hope that eventually the hard work of people like you and the other people involved in the project move it through a few more generations.

Is the ultimate aim to make pirate separate from openwrt? Like a complete open source package that can be installed on different routers?

Cheers again

This is just my understanding @Snow. One step install is nearly (even big projects like DD-WRT and OpenWRT don't have one step install) impossible because we are actually flashing firmware on the routers (which is different depending on the router) and the config files for firewall and routing are also slightly different per hardware. Easy is nice, doing it correctly means you aren't bricking your router

The Open source package does exist for laptop installs (Matthias's scripts, my manager, and PirateBoxLive) and I see no reason we can't get a repo set up to do a PirateBox opkg, although I have no clue how opkg repos are set up. But, if we could setup a PirateBox repo (set up like PirateBox-MR3020 or PirateBox-W703N as packages) and all the user would have to do is flash the router, add the repo, and install than that would be excellent. I will bring this up to Matthias and David. I also have 2 years worth of unlimited bandwidth hosting we could use for that.

I do not believe that PirateBox will be separate firmware from OpenWRT, but it is entirely possible we could do it per router like I previously stated. If it happens it will be after we get this perfected I would expect.

That is my understanding thus far, and as always I know Matthias has his own vision so please pipe in Matt

I'll join this discussion soon
I'm currently thinking about this.
But two things are clear:
There is no way to a "1 Step install" ! I tried to reduce steps with a special firmware, what had no effect, too ....
This is no fork and make my own stuff project (referring to "make an own openwrt") ... this is out of scope.

But about the other points, I'm thinking about... checking technical possibilities ... and so on

Any chance of having the broadcom drivers built in?

Unfortunately, when you build a LiveCD OS I don't get to choose what drivers it has (it wipes clean all my drivers). For now check out this and I will add a way to get it patched for all the broadcom users next release sorry about that.

I added a note in issues on PirateBoxLive

Excellent.. Thanks!

I saved the .iso file using unetbootin, but I can't boot using the usb. I have a Macbook. I restarted and pressed the option key, but USB doesn't show as an option in the boot. What can I do? Thanks!

When I started PB live on windows there is no WLAN interface present. To start and configure network manager I need to operate as administrator but after "su" command system prompt to enter root password. Where to find it ???

Uploaded the torrent 20 times

Sorry I didn't mention that the root password should be piratebox

I have the piratebox up and running but the free space for sharing appears only as 1.4 gb but the mem stick is 16gb - how can I access all the space?

Could someone make a step by step tutorial on YouTube - in English - on how to run piratebox on a windows machine..
I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks

@James "I have the piratebox up and running but the free space for sharing appears only as 1.4 gb but the mem stick is 16gb - how can I access all the space? "

Was the USB stick formatted for FAT32 with SINGLE partition? If not, you will have to do that. I found that HP has a USB formatting tool that restored "truncated" sticks back to their original size.

same here. any progress?

Progress is happening, I have been ungodly busy, I need to fork the latest version of Ubuntu and then add a Broadcom driver install directions / package locally. A step by step might happen but it won't be from me that quickly sadly. What part are you having issues with?

Hi, nice project. But I have an issue, or more like an idea. Is there anyway you can make the iso >700mb in size so it can fit on a blank cd?
I am currently trying with remastersys and quemu, but always fails on boot! Any Ideas?


Cheers

Hi !
I have the wifi card of my laptop and an external USB wifi adaptor connected.
How do I choose which one piratebox will use ?
How (in ubuntu config page) can I deactivate the internal wifi adaptor ? (please : step by step, I'm a newbie)
Many thanks for you help !
Chris.

Christophe,

are you using the liveCD or did you install PirateBox by yourself on your Ubuntu machine?

Using liveCD

If you are using the liveCD then all you need to do is edit the configuration file, which I assume is available under the Configure menu point when running the script.
Or you can of course edit piratebox.conf manually, from the terminal as well.
The default route to the piratebox.conf file is /opt/piratebox/conf/piratebox.conf so from the terminal you can do

sudo gedit /opt/piratebox/conf/piratebox.conf

Search for the line

#Name of the wlan interface
INTEFACE="wlan0"

And replace wlan0 with the interface name of the other card.
(you can find out what it is called with the command

ifconfig

or

iwconfig

from the terminal. If your default card is wlan0, it is likely that the external card is wlan1. In this case you need to re-write the above part with

#Name of the wlan interface
INTEFACE="wlan1"

save the file and start PirateBox)

Note that the script in the liveCD disables network-manager, sou your wireless cards will be "off-line" so you don't have to worry about this.

If using your own Ubuntu machine

If you are running PirateBox from your own Ubuntu machine, then do the same configuration as above, but also run

sudo service network-manager stop

This will stop the network manager and prevent cards from trying to connect to wifi networks etc.
Then you can start piratebox with

/etc/init.d/piratebox start

I hope this helps.

Nargren

carnageboy,

maybe you can burn it to a DVD instead of a CD? Unless you are using an older laptop with CD drive only...