Problem
You have a table and want to see only rows that satisfy a specific condition.

Solution
Use the WHERE clause to specify which rows to keep. For example, to view all employees assigned to department number 10:

1 select *
2   from emp
3  where deptno = 10

Discussion
The WHERE clause allows you to retrieve only rows you are interested in. If the expression in the WHERE clause is true for any row, then that row is returned.

Most vendors support common operators such as: =, <, >, <=, >=, !, <>. Additionally, you may want rows that satisfy multiple conditions; this can be done by specifying AND, OR, and parenthesis .

Problem
You have a table and want to see all of the data in it.

Solution
Use the special “*” character and issue a SELECT against the table:

1 select *
2 from emp

Discussion
The character “*” has special meaning in SQL. Using it will return every column for the table specified. Since there is no WHERE clause specified, every row will be returned as well. The alternative would be to list each column individually:

select empno,ename,job,sal,mgr,hiredate,comm,deptno
from emp
In ad hoc queries that you execute interactively, it’s easier to use SELECT *. However, when writing program code it’s better to specify each column individually. The performance will be the same, but by being explicit you will always know what columns you are returning from the query. Likewise, such queries are easier to understand by people other than yourself (who may or may not know all the columns in the tables in the query).

[Akbar Ahmed : The Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and Professor
of International Relations, American University, Washington, D.C.]

==============================================================

The images of Islam prevalent in the world are of brutality, fanaticism, hatred and disorder: Libyans killing policewomen in London, Palestinians hijacking passenger planes, Iranians seizing foreign embassies and Indonesians blowing up the Borobudur temple in Java. The very names of the Muslim leaders of our times—Khomeini, Gaddafi, Arafat—have become symbols of these images. It is V.S.Naipaul’s vision of Islam and Muslims (Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, 1981): ‘Rage was what I saw…Muslims crazed by their confused faith.’

These images stem partly from a lack of understanding of Islam among non-Muslims and partly from the failure by Muslims to explain themselves. The results are predictable: the hatred feeds on hatred. I saw ‘kill a Muslim for Christmas’ written in the London underground stations. Following a nuclear holocaust, American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein has the white survivors enslaved, men castrated and baby girls eaten by Black Muslims, neatly fusing religious and racial prejudices (Farnham’s Freehold, first published in the 1960s). The Muslim leaders, hated and despised, are reduced to Walt Disney villains: ‘Kho Maniac, Wacky Kaddafi, Yucky Arafat’ (‘Garbage pail adults’, MAD, back cover, September 1986). The repugnance is contagious. Even the staid London Economist is not immune and panders to the stereotype: ImamKhomeini was ‘Savonarola’ and Colonel Gaddafi ‘the Devil’s godfather’ on its covers. The colours, red and black, were striking and indicated hell; both men appeared minatory and forbidding.

For Muslims therefore, it is a good time to pause, to reflect, and to attempt to re-locate the main features of, to re-discover, Islam. We therefore take stock, not because we have arrived at any significant stage of the Islamic journey but because the sheer range of trajectories and approaches, and consequent confusion, obliges us to attempt clarification. The problem is not that there are too few answers but that there are too many.

We need answers to other related issues in the Islamic world: how are we to make sense in Turkey of the tensions generated by the pull of an Islamic identity on the one hand and a European one on the other? Of the seemingly endless Shia revolution in Iran? Of the ongoing process of Islamization in Pakistan? Are there common themes linking these societies, universal principles that we can discern? Or is each society responding to earlier, atavistic obsessions reflected in the complex relationship of Christian Europe to Turkey, in the history of Shiaism in Iran, and in the relation of Hinduism to South Asian Muslims, the inheritors of Pakistan? Can we make any sense of Muslim history? Or is it all random dates, the rise and fall of despots and dynasties living in marble buildings and gilded harems? Is the past dead, ossified in mechanical ritual and neglected holy texts? Or is it part of our lives?

For me personally—in an Islamic sense when I have just turned 40, the critical age for Muslims—it is an appropriate time to attempt the exercise. The voyage in search of Islam is a journey into my own past. It is a voyage that opens doors to the past taking me straight to the seventh century. It is also a voyage of self-discovery. The attempt to peer into myself, my culture and my roots was stimulating and gratifying, but also disturbing.

In order to help answer the questions posed above I will create a key, a model, an ideal-type. Max Weber’s concept of the ideal or pure type is a useful one. But we must bear in mind its limitations. It depicts an average derived over time which reflects combinations, mixtures and modifications. It is only an approximation of, not a substitute for, reality.

With these qualifications, we base our ideal in seventh-century Arabian society. The device will assist in explaining Muslim society and history from the inception of Islam to our times, and over space from one kind of society on one continent to another on a different one. As we apply it we will learn about different places and times.

The two key elements of Islam, supporting and inter-locking, are firmly and unequivocally located in one book and one life. The holy Quran is the single divine Book of the Muslims and the life is that of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, which constitutes the sunna—his behaviour, practice, sayings and values. Together they form the Shariah, the ‘path’ for Muslims. Further instruction is obtained from the lives of the Prophet’s companions. The Prophet’s own position is central to Islam. The fundamental Islamic declaration of faith rests in belief in Allah and acceptance of Muhammad as the Prophet.

Together the two, a book and a life—‘we are calling out to you with the Quran in our right hand and the sunna in our left’ Hassan al-Banna would proclaim in Egypt—define and inspire the Muslim, affecting his life from birth to death. They are the primary sources of Islam. They provide us with a good idea of how a person ought to conduct himself to be called a Muslim. The ideal aims at paradise in the next world and satisfaction, if not success, in this one. We thus have not only a way of looking at the world but of living in it.

The Western perception of the revivalism, rediscovery or resurgence of Islam is faulty, as the West links it with Arab oil, PLO guerillas and Imam Khomeini. This is a mistake. The phenomenon has been in motion since the seventh century, continually emphasizing the drive to return to the Golden Age, the ideal times of the Prophet. Non-Muslims would usefully understand the return in the context of striving for the ideal and its values, not a turning back of the clock to remote, earlier times.

Certain fundamental problems which accompanied Islam’s rapid expansion and universal message, particularly the persistence of pre-Islamic social and cultural systems also need consideration. In the following chapters we will see how Islamic notions of society, history and politics were imposed on local structures and organizations, sometimes merging, sometimes clashing with them.

Islam comes with definite, specific ideas and does not encourage duality. We thus see the tension in the villages, away from the centres of Islamic learning, between the Islamic macro world-view and the day-to-day humdrum values dealing with kin and cattle of village society. It is the stress in society between what social scientists call the Great Tradition of a world religion and the Little Tradition of local, regional, village culture. We will define the latter as ethnicit and illustrate through cases how it is an important source of stress in contemporary Muslim society.

In certain ways Muslims are the same everywhere, and yet their societies are different everywhere,’ I wrote in an earlier book (Religion and Politics in Muslim Society, 1983). Confronted by the wide range and diversity of Muslim societies, the present generation of writers suggests their categorization thus: Moroccan Islam (Dale Eickelman, 1976), Pakistani Islam, Malay Islam and so on. ‘One is bound to conclude that there is not one Islam but many Islams’ (Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power: the Politics of Islam, 1982). But the categorization is not new. It is at least as old as European colonization: for instance, Indian Islam, by Murray Titus

(1930). This is the easy way out. And it not only simplifies grossly, it also distorts. It is no answer. We will attempt an answer below. For as it is true that in the thought of Muslim scholars and in their texts there is clarity, and a broad consensus regarding the ideal, it is also equally true that the way Muslims order their lives is sometimes far from the ideal. Economic, political and ethnic—social, cultural—pressures act to compromise notions of the ideal, thereby creating ambiguity around it. The demarcation of Muslim societies is therefore not a division between white ideal and black non-ideal but an ongoing relationship between the two marked by areas of grey. Taken together the arguments raised above will assist us in our search for a world-view, an Islamic world-view of society and history.

If you forget a password for your user on your Windows system (especially if the user is administrator), your computer immediately becomes a paperweight. It’s like being locked out of your car without a spare set of keys and without a way to contact a locksmith. Use Knoppix as your locksmith to reset the password to a new value or even completely erase it.

User accounts have an interesting history in Windows. The Windows 9x series did offer usernames and passwords, but every user could overwrite every other user’s files, and the system did not offer any real security. If you forget your password in Windows 9x, resetting it is as simple as deleting a .pwd file with a DOS disk. With Windows NT, 2000, and XP, Microsoft has increased its user security by creating different user accounts on the same system and passwords that protect them. However, unlike in Windows 9x, if you forget your Administrator password, your only recourse is to purchase a tool to reset your Windows password or to reinstall Windows to create a new administrator account. If you have a Knoppix disc, you can download and use the chntpw tool, which is a small program that lets you reset the local passwords on a Windows system, and return to your system.

Get chntpw

The chntpw tool is part of the ntpasswd package, which can be downloaded in boot floppy form from its web site at http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/. However, this gives you a floppy image and requires that you mount multiple loopback entries to extract the utility from the floppy image to use under Knoppix. While you can simply create an ntpasswd boot floppy, this means yet another rescue disk to carry with you, and the beauty of Knoppix is that you have access to all of your recovery tools in a single disc. Luckily, the chntpw tool is now part of Debian unstable, which means that you can grab it directly from Debian’s repository.

You can get the latest chntpw package from http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/chntpw. Download the .deb to your /home/knoppix directory. Most of the Knoppix system is read-only, so you can’t directly install this package. Instead, you must convert it to a tar file, and then extract out the chntpw utility. Open up a terminal, and run the following commands:

knoppix@ttyp1[config]$ alien --to-tgz chntpw_0.99.2-1_i386 .deb
knoppix@ttyp1[config]$ tar xvzf chntpw-0.99.2 .tgz ./usr/sbin/chntpw
knoppix@ttyp1[config]$ mv ./usr/sbin/chntpw ./

Change the .deb and .tgz filenames to match the version of chntpw that you downloaded. This command makes use of the alien utility, which has the ability to convert files between .rpm, .deb, and .tgz. This conversion is necessary to extract only the chntpw executable file. Once you are finished with these commands, the chntpw utility is in /home/knoppix and ready to use.

Reset the Password

To reset the password, you must have write permissions on the Windows partition. If you have a FAT or FAT32 Windows partition, click on the drive on the desktop to mount it, then right-click on the hard-drive icon and choose Actions|Change read/write mode, or on the command line, type:

knoppix@ttyp1[config]$ sudo mount -o rw /dev/hda1
 /mnt/hda1

Replace hda1 with your Windows partition. If you have an NTFS partition, follow the steps in Prev tuts to mount the NTFS partition with write permissions.

Once the partition is mounted, you must locate the directory containing the SAM file. For Windows 2000 and XP systems, this directory should be located under windows/system32/config or winnt/system32/config. In this example, navigate to the /mnt/hda1/windows/system32/config directory, and notice a number of files, including ones called SAM, SYSTEM, and SECURITY, that may or may not be in all caps. Once you have navigated to this directory on the command line, reset the Windows Administrator password by running:

knoppix@ttyp1[config]$ /home/knoppix/chntpw SAM

Remember that SAM is the name of the SAM file in the directory, and may or may not be all in caps. The default for this utility is to edit the Administrator password, so there is no need to specify an account. While you have the option to change the password to a different value, it is recommended to just reset the password and then change it when you get back into Windows. You can reset the password by typing * instead of a password when prompted.

knoppix@ttyp1[config]$ /home/knoppix/chntpw SAM
chntpw version 0.99.2 040105, (c) Petter N Hagen
openHive(sam) failed: Read-only file system, trying read-only
Hive's name (from header): <SystemRootSystem32ConfigSAM>
ROOT KEY at offset: 0x001020
...output supressed...
* = blank the password (This may work better than setting a new password!)
Enter nothing to leave it unchanged
Please enter new password: *

If you want to reset the password for a user other than Administrator, list the users in the SAM file with the -l option:

knoppix@ttyp1[config]$ /home/knoppix/chntpw -l SAM
chntpw version 0.99.2 040105, (c) Petter N Hagen
Hive's name (from header): <SystemRootSystem32ConfigSAM>
ROOT KEY at offset: 0x001020
Page at 0x6000 is not 'hbin', assuming file contains garbage at end
File size 262144 [40000] bytes, containing 5 pages (+ 1 headerpage)
Used for data: 218/16928 blocks/bytes, unused: 4/3392 blocks/bytes.
* SAM policy limits:
Failed logins before lockout is: 0
Minimum password length        : 0
Password history count         : 0
RID: 01f4, Username: <Administrator>, *BLANK password*
RID: 01f5, Username: <Guest>, *disabled or locked*
RID: 03e8, Username: <HelpAssistant>
RID: 03ea, Username: <SUPPORT_388945a0>, *disabled or locked*
Hives that have changed:
 #  Name
None!

This example has four users: Administrator, Guest, HelpAssistant, and SUPPORT_388945a0. Pick the user you want to edit, and then run chntpw with the -u option:

knoppix@ttyp1[config]$ /home/knoppix/chntpw -u username
 SAM

Once you change the password and save your changes, unmount the filesystem and reboot:

knoppix@ttyp1[config]$ cd
knoppix@ttyp1[knoppix]$ sudo umount /mnt/hda1

When you boot back to Windows, the password should be blank, so you can log in and change the password with the regular Windows tools.

One thing that has been missing from Knoppix (and Linux in general) is the ability to safely write to NTFS partitions. Now with Knoppix 3.4, you can edit, delete, and move files on your NTFS partition—jobs that are difficult with the Windows Recovery CD!

While the Linux kernel has been able to read NTFS partitions for some time, writing to them has always been considered very dangerous. The NTFS spec is a closed spec that requires kernel hackers to reverse engineer it to make a driver that supports it. However, this can be very problematic: if a programmer reverse engineers NTFS 3.0, she must repeat the process when NTFS 4.0 is released. Writing to NTFS has been so dangerous that instead of just warning users, some kernels go as far as disabling write support in the NTFS driver itself. Recently, a solution to write to NTFS partitions has appeared with Captive NTFS. This solution actually uses the NTFS drivers that Windows itself uses, and is included in Knoppix 3.4.

Configure Captive NTFS

The Knoppix Captive NTFS wizard makes it easy to configure and use the Captive NTFS system. When you run the wizard, it scans all the drives on your computer for the Microsoft-provided NTFS drivers it needs to safely write to your NTFS filesystems. Click K Menu|KNOPPIXUtilities|Captive NTFS to launch the program. The wizard that appears automates the process of finding and using the NTFS .dlls. Click Forward to see a listing of the system files that Captive NTFS has already found on your Knoppix system. Click Forward again, and the wizard mounts and scans your hard drives for the essential files it needs.

Once Captive NTFS has the modules it needs to mount NTFS, it enables the OK button even though it continues to scan other directories and partitions for drivers. If you are in a hurry, you can click OK to immediately mount NTFS partitions. If you wait for the scan to finish, you are presented with an option to list specific locations for drivers (which could be on a USB key drive, for instance), or you can click Forward to get the option to download the files from the Windows XP Service Pack 1.

If you have the time, Captive NTFS recommends downloading the latest version of the drivers, which is available in the Windows XP Service Pack 1. However, I have successfully written to NTFS partitions with Windows’s standard drivers.

Mount NTFS Partitions

Once you are finished with the wizard, you are ready to mount an NTFS partition.

Open a terminal and mount the drive manually using this command:

knoppix@ttyp0[knoppix]$ sudo mount -t captive-ntfs -o uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 

/dev/hda1  /mnt/hda1

Replace hda1 with the name of your partition. The -t argument is used to specify a filesystem type. Use captive-ntfs to use the NTFS drivers that the Captive NTFS wizard previously found. The -o argument passes other general options to mount. In this case, tell mount to assign the user and group knoppix to the files on this drive. I recommend that you mount the drive at /mnt/hda1, because this directory is created by Knoppix at boot time for this partition, but you can actually use any directory you wish. This drive is now writable by your regular knoppix user; you now possess the power to do good and evil to your drive. Once the drive is mounted, you can treat it like any other mounted filesystem, although I have noticed that write speed is substantially slower with Captive NTFS than with other filesystems.

Once you are finished with the partition, unmount it to ensure that any changes are synced. This is an important step, because normally, when you change a file on a drive, changes are cached to RAM to be written to the drive later. This is performance-enhancing behavior, because it allows writes to occur at an optimal time. Unmount the disk to synchronize any changes in RAM that haven’t yet been written to disk.

knoppix@ttyp0[knoppix]$ sudo umount /mnt/hda1