After Windows Vista Get Ready for a New Day launch event, time to get ready for another new day. This time it’s the launch of Linux Genuine Advantage (LGA), which will be in direct competition with Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) from Microsoft Corporation. WGA validates and authenticates copy of Windows XP and Windows Vista operating system installed on your system, indirectly making Windows harder to use and certain freebies on Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update inaccessible. And, no need you to guess, Linux Genuine Advantage will do the same thing too, well, sort of.

According to Linux Genuine Advantage website, LGA is meant for those who wake up this morning and say “I wish someone would figure out a way to let me do less with my computer”?:

Linux Genuine Advantage™ is an exciting and mandatory new way for you to place your computer under the remote control of an untrusted third party!

Linux Genuine Advantage™ works by checking our licensing server periodically to make sure that the copy of Linux you are running is Genuine. This is determined by whether you have paid us the appropriate licensing fees. If you are out of compliance, and are past the grace period, logins to your machine will be disabled until the license fees are paid. How to log in to enter the license key when logins are disabled is left as an exercise for the reader.

You can download Linux Genuine Advantage here (Linux does not support .exe extension and .zip is not popular).

Full source code has also been published so that programmers can view it and to make it easier to crack or find a workaround to bypass Linux WGA.

So what’s the way to crack or bypass Linux Genuine Advantage? It you manage to install the program, and you get locked out from Linux system after your password grace period expires after 30 days, here what you can do to uninstall LGA:

  1. Reboot the machine.
  2. Boot into single user mode.
  3. Remove the entry it created at the bottom of /etc/inittab.
  4. Type this command: kill -HUP 1
  5. Type this command: rm -f /usr/local/sbin/linux-genuine-advantage
  6. Type this command: rm -rf /etc/linux-genuine-advantage/
  7. Type this command: rm -f /etc/nologin

Final note, Linux Genuine Advantage is actually a joke (or hoax, whatever you want to call it). Read the FAQ for more information.

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