Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Software

  • Windows Vista Beta notes…

    What follows are some notes that I’ve taken on the Vista beta that I installed into a VM. I’ve got a lot of toying around yet to do with it (and at least one Internet Explorer bug I want to mention.) But… I’ll go ahead and post this. [warning – rambling and long text…]

    A few days back I undertook an effort of self torture. After finally getting the Vista Beta 2 downloaded and having Vmware server up and running I thought I’d give a go at installing and see what things looked like. I did NO pre-googling for tips and so this is a pure “discover as you go” process.

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  • VMware Server

    OK – just fresh off solving the reason I couldn’t get vmplayer to start on my 1Ghz AMD 64 1GB of memory machine…. I started looking at vmserver. (RC1). Now, vmplayer is a free download (so is vmware server). I’m really liking what I see from vmware server and am pretty sure I’m going to stick with it over the player. There are quite a few interesting features and I’ll try to give a skim over them. For starters, there is a management console that gives you the ability to connect to a vmware server on a different host (with credentials as a user on that system), or the localhost. On the localmachine it shows what virtual machines you have configured and gives you the chance to create another one, open an existing one not in the list, or tweak host settings.

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  • Big Windows June update day

    Updates for Windows for the month of June are out today and it looks like some list! 12 updates covering 20 or more vulnerabilities. MANY of these are tagged as critical. (Critical vulnerabilities are considered remotely exploited or with little (or no) user interaction.) Sans has a good listing of the advisories. This month it is a bit much to track in one big whallop… but I’ll try to give a summary here.

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  • Wine-Doors the future of Windows software installing on Linux

    I just came across this article about wine-doors which sounds VERY promising. Of course, let me set the stage. Wine is a windows compatibility api for linux. The goal of wine is to allow windows applications to run on top of a linux system without modification (of the original windows version.) There are codeweavers wine (a commercial version that drives most of the development – and is known for easier installs of software.), the main open source wine and cedaga (aimed towards games 3d directx implementation.)

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  • VMPlayer on Mandriva 2006 finally…

    As you might recall some time back I talked about the release of vmplayer which is a free virtual machine “player” from vmware. Mostly, I wrote about the problems I had running it on my main desktop which was running Mandrake 10.1 at the time. The error was basically a signal 11 in the log file, which MOST everyone says is a hardware problem (or kernel…) Well, I tested the memory, everything seemed fine. Finally, I was having other issues and an itch for an upgrade, so I upgraded to an AMD64 3000 based system with 1GB of memory and did the upgrade to Mandriva 2006 as well (first with the original kernel, now with the updated kernel.) Vmplayer still refused to run.

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  • Qemu 0.8.1 speed improvement with -kernel-kqemu and kqemu 1.3.0pre7

    I mentioned the other day revisiting the qemu site to discover new versions of both qemu and the non-redistributable kernel module kqemu (qemu is now at version 0.8.1 and kqemu is at 1.3.0pre7). There’s also a new startup switch -kernel-kqemu which enables FULL virtualization of both kernel and user code. I could feel a difference in speed, but I wanted to give a test with a stopwatch to see what the numbers were and this is what I found.

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  • The “secure software” dilemma

    It’s quite a dilemma when a software product is billed as more secure than another…. several days back when Mozilla Firefox released v. 1.5.0.4 which fixed a number of security issues, I saw someone comment “I thought firefox was supposed to be secure.” I think there’s a misunderstanding when it comes to software. I think the misunderstanding is that one piece of software can be secure and another not. Out of the box. Let’s take a stab at clarifying…. Security is not a product, it’s not a feature, it’s a way of doing things. Along those lines….

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  • New malware sightings

    Incidents.org had an entry in the last couple days on a malware infestation that was interesting and showed a couple things. 1) You can’t bet on antivirus to keep you safe (the initial installer was not detected by most AV vendors – suspicious by 1.) (If you think about it, this makes perfect sense – antivirus is reactionary and needs to have seen a bug once to recognize it again.) 2) Malware, once in the system, can bring all their friends.

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  • Qemu 0.8.1 (with kqemu 1.3.0pre7)

    While I was testing out the “single cut and paste” linux vnc remote desktop sharing script and x11vnc binary…. I spent a fair amount of time booting up livecd’s n qemu to test various distributions/ages of linux setups to see how compatible things were. I had not checked in at the qemu site in quite a while (a few months), but there was a new version out… in fact, I think 0.7.1 is what I was running previously, so I missed 0.7.2 and 0.8.0… Anyway, I’m running 0.8.1 now and I compiled kqemu as well (now at 1.3.0pre7)…. wow qemu has made great strides (with kqemu) since 0.7.1 ….

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