Create Bootable Ubuntu USB Drive with Persistent Storage from Win 10

Scenario:

One of my colleagues has a Windows 10 based laptop that uses multiple tabs of Chrome at any given point of time. Primarily for the use of Google Sheets and Google Docs. Besides this she also uses:

• Hangouts for conferencing wherein she needs to share her screen 

• Discord for Team Collaboration

• Skype for messaging

• Open Broadcaster Software(OBS) for audio-video recording

Performance finetuning of Win 10 has helped to improve the overall performance of her windows based laptop. But not as good as she would have preferred it to be. Hardware upgradation for performance improvement was not a factor for consideration . 

Crack PDF Password using John the Ripper in Ubuntu 20.04

Scenario:

So I have this old PDF file which is password protected and  forgot the password. I tried various permutations and  combinations that came to my mind and they did not work. So what to do?

I started with PDFcrack and almost 3 days later, the program is still running !!!. So that's when I started looking at alternatives. Nothing wrong with PDFcrack per se, just that it is one of the limitations of brute force password cracking. In fact there is even a beautiful blogpost from Ruby Pdf Technologies on some of the intricacies of PDFcrack.

I remembered using something earlier when I was experimenting with Kali Linux. So I went back to the "gold standard" which is called John the Ripper password cracker.  

Types of Password's:

PDFs can be encrypted for confidentiality by requiring either a user password  or a owner password (as in case of DRM). PDFs encrypted with a user password can only be opened by providing this password. PDFs encrypted with a owner password can be opened without providing a password, but some restrictions will apply (for example, printing could be disabled).

Install Nvidia Drivers & CUDA in Ubuntu 20.04 (in UEFI mode with Secure Boot Enabled)

In the previous article, we have dealt with Installation of Ubuntu in Dual Boot Mode using UEFI. Now lets look at the installation of Nvidia Drivers for the GPU.

Basic Verification's:

First let us find out the graphics card that is presently used by the system. Click on Settings->About. Presently we have "NV138 / Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 620 (KBL GT2)" installed.

 

Dual Boot Win 10 and Ubuntu for system with (SSD + HDD) using UEFI - GPT method

Scenario:

My laptop uses Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and not the good old BIOS. I have a hybrid drive system in my machine, a mix of 256 GB SSD and 1 TB HDD. In my 256 GB SSD drive, I have my Win 10 operating system installed and main programs like Office , Chrome  etc. installed. I use the 1 TB HDD primarily to store data.

I intend to use a Linux based VPS to host my trading strategies on AWS. So how do I create a dual boot in my existing Win 10 machine ?