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I really like the Nero Burning ROM program and was happy to see they had a Linux version. I downloaded and installed it and when it started it said I had a "trial date" until April 29th. Fine. I went to the Nero web site to buy a license only to find that they've dropped support and won't give out a key. Bummer.

So is there a way I could easily change the environment of the execution of this one program so that it always thought it was April 28th?

I don't mean to rip the Nero people off, I do have a Windows version license, but that number doesn't work for the Linux version.

Any thoughts?

LarryM
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1 Answers1

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Without knowing exactly how nero works, we can't be sure how it gets time and thus how to fool it.

But the package faketime may do what you want. From their documentation:

The Fake Time Preload Library (FTPL, a.k.a. libfaketime) intercepts various system calls which programs use to retrieve the current date and time. It can then report faked dates and times (as specified by you, the user) to these programs. This means you can modify the system time a program sees without having to change the time system-wide. FTPL allows you to specify both absolute dates (e.g., 2004-01-01) and relative dates (e.g., 10 days ago).

How to run it:

You could start nero like so:

 faketime '2017-4-28 08:15:42' /path/to/nero

If that works for you, then you could alias it in your .bashrc to always start like that.

prolificslacker
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