Controlling RC5DES with clickable icons
The RC5DES project is an attempt to prove to the governments of the world that proposed encryption standards are easy to break via brute force, by simply dividing up a large problem and distributing its parts out to thousands of networked computers all checking into a central database. Participants band together into teams to promote a spirit of lively competition, and Team BeOS Central is rising slowly but steadily in the ranks. For information on on joining the project, see http://www.distributed.net and http://www.beoscentral.com/ho me/teambeos/. Once you’ve got it up and running, you’ll find that you have to control everything from the command line. To make things a little easier, this collection of brief shell scripts will let you double-click icons on the Desktop to turn RC5DES on and off, etc.
If you’d rather not bother creating these scripts manually, you download them as a prefab collection here. Unpack them and place them in /boot/home/config/scripts
, then place links to them on the Desktop.
Note: The location above assumes that you’ve added this path to your PATH environment variable. For instructions on that, see Add a scripts directory to your path.
To do this manually, save the scripts below to /boot/home/config/scripts
.
rc5on
rc5des -quiet &
rc5off
kill -term rc5des
rc5flush
Terminal -t "RC5DES Flush" /boot/home/config/bin/rc5des -flush
rc5fetch
Terminal -t "RC5DES Fetch" /boot/home/config/bin/rc5des -fetch
rc5update
Terminal -t "RC5DES Update" /boot/home/config/bin/rc5des -update
Next you’ll need to make your scripts executable. From the Terminal, cd to the directory containing your scripts and type:
chmod 755 *
This will make all of the scripts in the directory executable, which is essential to making them clickable. The last thing to do is to create links to them on your Desktop. Select all five scripts, right-drag them to the Desktop, and choose Create Link from the context menu.
You should find that you can now start, stop and flush the RC5DES cruncher by simply clicking the icons! Optionally, you can add custom icons to your new scripts for easy identification (icons are already included in the download mentioned above).