How to Use CookieMonster With a Fedora 9 LiveCD This is probably the quickest, easiest way to go about testing your sites, especially if you are not a Linux user. Before performing these steps, it is strongly recommended you read the README-First.txt file, so you understand how the tool works and the the various options it has. I. ITEMS NEEDED: 1. Linksys WUSB54GC (~$50 USD) Or: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware#rt73 Other drivers are supported, but this chipset is setup by default. Also note that you cannot use your wireless card for normal Internet access while using this tool, so to test against yourself, a second card is needed. 2. USB storage with this tool on it (>= 4GB recommended - ~$20 USD) The tool itself requires only a few megabytes of space, but I have discovered the Fedora 9 LiveCD works much better if transfered to a USB drive instead. See below for instructions. 3. CDR with Fedora 9 Live burned on to it (http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora - $0) Once you have obtained all these items, you are ready to get started. II. Boot from your Live CD Intel-based Mac users will need to hold down either 'C' or 'Option' during startup to boot from the CD. Standard Intel users may similarly need to hit 'Esc' or some other key sequence to choose their boot device. You probably want to let Fedora verify your media the first time you boot, to ensure the burn was clean. You can select this by pressing any key on the very first splash screen. It only takes a few minutes. Plug in your USB key and Linksys USB device once the system has booted up. The USB key should cause an icon to appear on your desktop for the disk. Now, open a terminal from Applications->System Tools->Terminal. Enter the USB disk directory by typing: # cd /media/disk/CookieMonster Or wherever you extracted the tool to. III. Running the Setup Script A setup script is provided to set up an environment so that it is ready to go for a Linksys WUSB54GC. Run it with: # . ./fc9-livecd-setup.sh from the cookiemonster directory. You can safely re-run this script as many times as you like. IV. Other drivers and devices Precompiled versions of the three main drivers provided by http://homepages.tu-darmstadt.de/~p_larbig/wlan/ can be found in the FC9Live-binaries directory and will be loaded automatically. As far as devices, you should have good luck with any of the cards listed here: http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=compatibility_drivers#usb However, using them may require changes to that setup script, primarily because the other devices will have different interface names instead of "rausb0". Typing "/sbin/iwconfig" will give you a list of your detected wireless devices. If your built-in wireless isn't supported at all in the LiveCD (this seemed to be the case for Macbooks), you probably want to purchase a second wireless card with a different, non-rt73 based chipset, or just use your wired port for normal Internet access. Be sure to Google the model number before purchase to make sure it is well supported. If you do buy an additional external wireless card, it is important that you do NOT put them next to eachother in their slots, as they can damage eachother's antennas at such a close proximity. If you build additional drivers and they end up working, please let me know and I will include them (but only if you point me at sources to build myself :) V. Running cookiemonster.py Please consult README-First.txt for more infromation on cookiemonster itself, but running the setup script above should provide you with some further instructions for a quick start. ADDENDUM: Creating a Bootable USB Install for Added Speed+Stability I noticed that the temporary writable support on most LiveCDs was very unstable. The more data I wrote to the union filesytem, the more likely it was for the entire system to crash. For this reason, you may want to consider installing the Fedora 9 Live iso image to your USB key, as I've found this can make things a lot more stable. Mac users may need to repartition the USB drive to have a GUID Paritition Table (GPT) instead of the default MS-DOS table before completing the following steps. Unfortunately, I did not perform this on a Mac, as I simply used the wired interface, and the LiveCD itself was sufficient for this. Additional details from someone who has done this would be appreciated. Assuming you either have a Windows machine, or have dealt with the MacOS GPT reformat, the most straightforward way to do the install itself is to copy the Fedora 9 image file to your USB key, boot into the LiveCD you have burned (from that very same image file), and then run: # su # /mnt/live/LiveOS/livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 512 /media/disk/Fedora-9-i686-Live.iso /dev/ You can determine your usbdevice by typing 'mount' or 'df -h'. It should be the /dev filename that is listed as mounted on /media/disk The install process is non-destructive, and can be performed on live, mounted usb keys formatted with the default 'vfat' filesystem, and can even install the .iso FROM the usb key to ITSELF. It will not reformat or damage any existing data on the drive, so long as you have space. The process simply creates two directories: 'syslinux' and 'LiveOS'. After this process is done, you should be able to reboot into your USB key and use the tools from /media/disk/CookieMonster. If you encounter random stability issues with the beta version of Firefox that is installed, you can upgrade it with # su -c "yum upgrade firefox" I have also noticed that problems with my normal wireless card were resolved when I did: # "su -c "yum upgrade wpa_supplicant NetworkManager" and then rebooted, to upgrade the networking components of the machine. Upgrading the entire system (su -c "yum upgrade") is also possible. It will not actually replace your kernel (which means the custom drivers should still work). This may also fix random bugs you have with various aspects of the system, as a lot of stuff has been fixed between the time this LiveCD was mastered and the current Fedora 9. If you go this route, you probably want to change that 512 to at least 1024 in the livecd-iso-to-disk command and have at least a 4GB key. For some reason the Fedora project does not believe in remastering their LiveCDs with successive updates, which is why all these steps are necessary for a stable, working system. Still, they provided the most flexible usable LiveCD I was able to find (Knoppix had major X11 font issues), so I used it. For more information, consult: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo