This article is a work in progress. Feel free to expand.

VandalSniper is a great new counter-vandalism tool created by Crazycomputers. It is like VandalProof, but has a few crucial enhancements. It can be a little hard to install, because it is still in development. Before you do anything, you should probably read up on it first. Since this guide doesn't seem to get many visitors, and VandalSniper is still somewhat of a road less travelled in favor of other tools, here are two words that might pique your interest in the program: instant notification.

Before you attempt to run VandalSniper in a dedicated capacity, please get authorization to use VandalSniper first from Crazycomputers. You can apply for permission to use the program's rollback features at User:Crazycomputers/VandalSniper/Users.

Official instructions

The official installation guide for VandalSniper is at User:Crazycomputers/VandalSniper, the program's home page. This should be your first source for setting up the tool. Above all, you should trust what the official page says first.

VandalSniper 49 installation on Debian unstable ("Sid")

User talk:Crazycomputers/VandalSniper#VandalSniper_49_on_Debian_Sid
This page is a soft redirect.

VandalSniper installation on Knoppix

Right now, VandalSniper only works in Linux. Yes, Linux can be tough, but if you don't want to become a Linux convert and spend months learning the ropes, you can just download and burn Knoppix and run it on your computer. It's a Linux live CD, and it's generally pretty hard to mess your computer up while running it, even if it's on top of Windows. It doesn't normally install anything on your hard drive, and it's pretty easy to use. Honestly.

You can get Knoppix through http://www.knoppix.org/. I have only gotten VandalSniper working on Knoppix version 5.0.1, so please make sure that you're downloading a version of Knoppix in the fifth generation. You may be able to get VandalSniper working on other versions, but I have not successfully done it on any others yet. I know for a fact that the steps I've outlined for Knoppix 5.0.1 do not work on Knoppix version 3.9.

Knoppix 5.0.1

Here is a rundown of the steps I have used to install VandalSniper on Knoppix 5.0.1. I have simply typed out the exact series of terminal commands you can use to duplicate my actions, which proved successful for me on multiple systems. This was only tested on a CD-R-sized version of Knoppix 5.0.1, not a DVD version.

This guide assumes you have booted to the desktop in Knoppix and have made no major environment modifications since startup that might affect the following instructions. You should be connected to the Internet, and have a terminal window open. bash is my shell of choice for this guide, but this will probably not matter. For consistency, make sure you are running as user knoppix before you start at the first bullet point below. For text file editing, I used the vim editor, but you can use anything, such as the user-friendly nano or the KDE GUI editor kate.

Unabridged steps

cd ~/Desktop; su
wget http://www.chrishowie.com/files/vandalsniper-63.tar.bz2
wget http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2006/03/21/debian/pool/main/g/gecko-sharp2/libgecko2.0-cil_0.11-2_all.deb
Set up /etc/apt/sources.list. You need a working stable source and a working testing source. There are a number of servers you could use, but kernel.org is consistently fast for me, so you might just want to use what I did. Here are the copy-and-paste-friendly contents of my /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
Note: Yes, I skipped the security updates line(s). Leave the security portion in if you want; I removed it because of security.debian.org's frequent slowness for me.
apt-get update
apt-get install libnspr4 mozilla-browser
During the next part, I ran out of space on my RAMdisk, so to be on the safe side, run:
apt-get clean
apt-get install mono libmono1.0-cil libgtk2.0-cil libglade2.0-cil libgecko2.0-cil
(Copied directly from the the VandalSniper page.)
dpkg -i libgecko2.0-cil_0.11-2_all.deb
(Also from the VandalSniper page; do let libgecko2.0-cil version 0.11-3 install first and then use this command line to downgrade it, as I'm not sure dpkg alone will fetch the needed dependencies.)
tar xjf vandalsniper-63.tar.bz2
ln -s /etc /ramdisk/usr
(This corrects a missing path startup error.)
cp vandalsniper-63/*dll* /usr/lib
(Makes needed libraries accessible system-wide.)

That should do it as far as making it work. Now you should be able to simply open the vandalsniper-63 directory on your desktop and click on vs.exe. Yes, you will have to repeat this every time you restart Knoppix. You could always try installing a distribution of Linux, such as Debian, on a secondary computer, if you're literate in that sort of thing. Or you could just wait until the required libraries for making VandalSniper work on Windows are ported.

If you have problems, let me know where you got hung up on my talk page.

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Internal links

External links

http://www.knoppix.org/

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