• Incognito does not boot when I start the computer
  
• Incognito boots but freezes/crashes/halts during the starting process
• I cannot connect to my network
• What about Intel based Macs?
• My network card/video card/screen/whatever is not working properly or at all
• I have problems creating large (>2 GB) persistent home volumes
• Incognito runs very slow in QEMU
• Incognito freezes during boot under VMWare
• TorK says some of my traffic is not going through Tor
• My ISP's login website is unreachable preventing me from getting my Internet connection

Incognito does not boot when I start the computer

Please try any of the following:

• If you fail to boot from CD, make sure that you burned the ISO image file correctly. In your CD-recording software you should not burn it as you normally burn files, but choose something like "burn CD image", "restore CD backup" and similar. You can verify that you have done this correctly by checking the contents of the CD by open in in you file manager. If you have done it right you should find files and folders like "isolinux", "image.squashfs" among others.
• The computer might not be configured to start from CD or USB, so you might have to reconfigure it with the BIOS setup program which usually can be accessed by pressing F2 or DELETE during start up. Just look for something like "Press F2 to enter setup" which should appear a few seconds after the computer is started. Once you are in the BIOS setup program, search for something like "Boot order". It should be a list which determines in which order your computer searches storage media for an operating system to start. In this list, place the CD or USB drives before the hard drive.
• If you are have problems starting Incognito from USB on an old computer it might be because some older computers do not have that ability. Most computers from 2000 and on should manage it, though.
• If you are trying to boot Incognito from USB on an Intel based Mac, see the entry below for Macs.

Incognito boots but freezes/crashes/halts during the starting process

Most likely it is a hardware problem. Please see the FAQ entry below for hardware problems.

In release 20080109.1 and earlier there is no SATA support, so if you try to boot from a SATA CD-ROM drive there will be problems.

I cannot connect to my network

First of all, Incognito's intended user interface for network configuration is through an application called knetworkmanager. It can be accessed by its icon in the system tray, located in the lower right corner of the screen. Right-clicking on it will show a menu with available networks (wire and wireless among other possibilities). If no network shows up, chances are that your computer's network devices are not detected and/or that there is problem with the network device drivers. Please see the FAQ entry below for hardware problems.

What about Intel based Macs?

The Incognito LiveCD has been reported to boot on Intel based Macs, but there are a few issues that are being worked or researched on:

• The touch pad is not working for some.
• The wireless network is not working. Unfortunately some of the Macs use a wireless card whose linux driver requires a firmware that cannot legally be distributed with the Incognito LiveCD.
• Booting from USB does not work. This is due to differences in how traditional PCs and Intel based Macs boot operating systems.

My network card/video card/screen/whatever is not working properly or at all

This is an area where Incognito definitely wants to improve upon. However, since not all hardware devices are available to the developers, it is hard for us to know what is working and not. Therefore your, the user's, cooperation is very important to the project. Please take the time and write an informative bug report describing in detail what happens (and what does not happen), the relevant hardware of your computer and other useful information. Then send it to the developers using the contact information available in the Contact section of this web page.

There are several informative sources for error messages and logs which can supplement your bug report and help us pin point the cause of the problem more easily. In case that the system is working after the error has been detected, it would be great if the output of the appropriate commands below can be attached in a text file with your bug report. Simply enter them in a console or terminal, which in the graphical user interface can be started by clicking the K-button in the lower left corner of the screen and choosing System -> Terminal Program (Konsole).

Of course, some problems might prevent this from being possible, and in that case it is understandable that this information is omitted. Also, if the problem prevents you from accessing the Internet you might have a problem submitting the bug report and the output from the below commands from that computer, but if you have a USB memory stick available you can store the output on it and submit the bug report from a working system instead.

In general, the following information is useful for most harware errors:

sudo /bin/dmesg

/bin/lsmod

/usr/sbin/lspci

cat /etc/sysconfig/gentoo

For network related issues:

/sbin/ifconfig -a

In the case of wireless network problems this is also useful:

/sbin/iwconfig

For problems with the X Window system (the graphical user interface):

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Many of these commands will output quite alot of text and we definitely do not want or recommend you to transcribe it (if you know your way around the internals of Linux systems, selective quotes are helpful, though). The best is to save the output directly fo a file (and attach it to the bugreport email), which can be done with:

[command] > [filename]

For example:

sudo /bin/dmesg > dmesg_output.txt

will put the several screens of ouput of the command dmesg into a file called dmesg_output.txt rather than printing it to the screen. The file will be created in the current working directory (existing files with the same name will be overwritten), which usually is the Incognito user's "home" located in /home/incognito.

I have problems creating large (>2 GB) persistent home volumes

When running Incognito from a USB drive Microsoft's FAT32 filesystem is used for Windows compatibility (so you can run Incognito in a virtual machine within Windows, for instance). Unfortunately FAT32 has a 2 GB* file size limit, so persistent home volumes larger than that cannot be created. Note that this also affects encrypted home volumes created by TrueCrypt.

* According to the FAT32 specification the file size limit shouid be 4 GB - 1 Byte, but ~2 GB seems to be the actual limit from my testing with the Linux implementation. 

Incognito runs very slow in QEMU

Virtualization is slow compared to running Incognito by itself because of all the overhead of emulating a complete computer. For better performance it is recommended that you install the KQEMU accelerator. Windows users can download it here, Linux users should search for a suitable package, most likely to be found with you package manager (apt/synaptic/adept, yum, emerge/portage etc.). Administrator privileges will probably be required for this installation.

Even with KQEMU installed QEMU will be slower compared to native performance, so whenever possible it is recommended to run Incognito by itself (this is also for security reasons -- it is possible that viruses, software keyloggers or other malware is installed on you host operating system can compromise you anonymity).

Incognito freezes during boot under VMWare

This problem should be fixed in the 2008.1 release of Incognito.

In releases prior to 2008.1 this was due to VMWare's unability to handle HPET correctly with the then current kernel configuration. If you run an old release this can easily be bypassed by adding "clock=pit" to the kernel cmdline in the boot menu (press TAB at the language selection menu).

TorK says some of my traffic is not going through Tor

While it is true that TorK does this (if "Enable Logging of Non-Tor traffic" is set in theTraffic Logging tab) it is not true that any traffic manages to bypass Tor (except local network connections which cannot go through Tor).

The problem arises when you are using a program that is not configured to use the Tor SOCKS proxy explicitly in one way or another, for instance when you have disabled Torbutton in Firefox. In this case, your traffic will go through Tor any way, but for this there is some magic going on too deep in the network stack for TorK to see it. Really, it is not TorK directly that is mistaking this, but netstat, which TorK uses for this type of logging. But still, this is entierly within the spec of how netstat should work so there is not much to do except disabling that feature and forget about it.

If you are not convinced yet, note that for each such entry in the Non-Tor Traffic log there is one in the Tor Traffic log so at least something is indeed going to the Tor network. Also, with Firefox (with Torbutton disabled) try to visit any of the sites that report your IP address (like whatismyip.org) and verify that your real IP address never shows up. To get reassurance beyond this you will have to fire up your favourite packet sniffer and analyze the traffic going to and from Incognito manually. You are encouraged to do this if you know how to do this. If you notice anything odd, please send a packet dump (preferably compatible with Wireshard) to the developers.

My ISP's login website is unreachable preventing me from getting my Internet connection

This problem arises when at least one of the services involved requires access to a computer outside of the ISP's local network, e.g. if the login website or DNS server is located on the Internet instead. This results in a catch 22 situation, since the traffic destined for these services will go through the Tor network, as will all of Incognito's Internet traffic. But the Tor software requires direct Internet access in order to make contact with the Tor network, resulting in that the connection to the services required for the ISP login gets stuck at your computer.

There is no easy solution to this problem and will require a direct (and thus not anonymous) connection to the Internet no matter what. It is very difficult to make the enabling of that process automatic in a secure way, so user intervention is needed. In the SVN there is branch using Torbutton, which can easily make Firefox get direct Internet access (including DNS queries). Considering the potential security implications this has for a user that misuses this feature, I'm very sceptical towards merging these changes into the main Incognito distribution.

As for now, a user can bypass this by temporarily disabling the firewall (which makes all connection go trough the Tor network), do the login and then immediately re-enable the firewall. This can be done by first opening a terminal by clicking the K-button in the lower left corner of the screen and choosing System -> Terminal Program (Konsole). Then enter the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/iptables stop

However, Firefox is still configured to use Tor in its proxy settings, so you need to there through Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network and press the Settings button to open the Connection settings, where you should choose the "Direct connection to the Internet" option and press OK. Then perfrom the login through Firefox, which now should bypass the Tor software.

When you are done using the direct Internet access, you can undo the above by going back to the Connection settings and choose the "Manual proxy configuration" option and press OK, and lastly enter the following command in the terminal:

sudo /etc/init.d/iptables start