Hacking Express gate (Asus Splashtop)

[drosky]

I have only been modifying existing sqx files. If you create new ones, do they get mounted automatically, or do you have to tell the system about them somewhere? Thx.

[Kano]

They are automatically used. It is much more easy that way. Basically you only need to add the dirs and a vactl file that mounts em. I extracted debian packages and used those. Also I use now xterm because rxvt did not display mc correctly. Funnyly xterm started from rxvt showed mc in color, now only blackwhite directly. With the symlink to gnome-terminal you can really easy start a terminal with ALT-F1. You don't have to modify any of the existing sqx files. Also you can use a vactl file to insmod the modules you like to use, maybe 8139cp.ko or e1000.ko.

[sojourner]

Hi, Im looking for a way to flash a modified image file to the SSD in my P5E3 premium but so far, it seems the updater will only accept dfi files. Any hints on converting a raw img into a dfi?

[Kano]

file will tell you what it is. They did not invent something new, just gzip -9 compressed IMG with DFI instead of IMG.gz ending.

[sojourner]

file will tell you what it is. They did not invent something new, just gzip -9 compressed IMG with DFI instead of IMG.gz ending.

Hmm, I tried a gunzip on the dfi file originally after doing a file on it but did not get back a mountable image file. I tried your suggestion to rename the file.img.gz as file.dfi and used the updater to load the file but at the end of decompression, it reported that the version is 0.0.0.0 and that the md5 did not match. Briefly comparing the beginning of the original dfi file and my own shows quite a bit of difference. The oem dfi contains a small header with the date of release, version number and some chars which I assume to be the md5 the updater was complaining about.

[Michael]

Kano, enjoy http://feeds.theinquirer.net/c/554/f...74/story01.htm

[Kano]

The header is really trivial:

get header (consists of 48 bytes, 16 bytes are md5sum)

mv FILE.DFI FILE.IMG.gz
gunzip FILE.IMG.gz
dd if=FILE.IMG of=header bs=1 count=32

then forget this file and use the modified one now:

openssl dgst -md5 -binary MODIFIED_FILE.IMG >new-md5sum
cat header new-md5sum MODIFIED_FILE.IMG > NEW_FILE.IMG
gzip -9 NEW_FILE.IMG
mv NEW_FILE.IMG.gz NEW_FILE.DFI

Please try this code, should be easy enough to follow it.

[sojourner]

The header is really trivial:

get header (consists of 48 bytes, 16 bytes are md5sum)

mv FILE.DFI FILE.IMG.gz
gunzip FILE.IMG.gz
dd if=FILE.IMG of=header bs=1 count=32

then forget this file and use the modified one now:

openssl dgst -md5 -binary MODIFIED_FILE.IMG >new-md5sum
cat header new-md5sum MODIFIED_FILE.IMG > NEW_FILE.IMG
gzip -9 NEW_FILE.IMG
mv NEW_FILE.IMG.gz NEW_FILE.DFI

Please try this code, should be easy enough to follow it.

Thanks, I crafted a dfi manually for testing just now but your script is definitely going to make development a lot easier.

[curaga]

I'd like to try it in Qemu. But Asus' servers are really slow to load the menu, and trying to download the ~170mb splashtop file doesn't even begin. A mirror anyone?

[Kano]

The file you need is over 400 mb, of course you could install win + use exe installer too, but then you have to install grub4dos or grub2 inside win as bootloader. The direct way requires a huger download...