Michael Gracie

Netword World Fusion posted a nice list of ways to stop spyware. Some of the ideas require a little expertise, while others require a little extra cashola output. But, don’t be too shocked Microsoft users, when you see that getting rid of Internet Explorer, and switching to OS X or Linux, made the list.

Read 10 ways to stop spyware, for more.

I am still trying to understand why the study is relevant, but the Denver Post reported on a security test of computers plugged in to the internet, by StillSecure, a Louisville, CO network security firm. The results, which I won’t quote (but you can read here: DenverPost.com - BUSINESS), says…are you sitting down…that Windows XP with Service Pack 1 is not secure! I just fell off my chair from the shock.

The study did side by side comparisons of XP SP1 and SP2, Linux and OS X systems, plugged in over a week period to see what effects virus and zombie attacks would have on them. The up-to-date (meaning patched) OS’s recieved a relatively insignificant number of attacks, and were never infected. The SP1 install was the stand-out, with many thousands of attacks, and infection in less than 20 minutes.

Hasn’t this study been done before (like last week), with the same results? Microsoft has provided a fix for this issue folks - its called Service Pack 2 (as in the one AFTER Service Pack 1). It has been out for ages (in technology time), so quit picking the guys in Redmond to pieces folks - its old news.

A week or so back I compared Apple to Toyota, regarding pricing and quality. I left one major issue out which some may say speaks to the difference between good products and truly excellent ones.

I’m talking about warranties.
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I’ve got to pass thanks on to michaelk, Senior Member at Linux Questions.org for figuring out why my PHP scripts would not work on FC3, despite my crude attempt at explaining the problem.

Repeat after me…..PHP scripts must have Unix permission 644 in order to run on Apache. Again, PHP scripts must have Unix permission 644 in order to run on Apache.

Dumb mistake figured out by a quick thinker. Thanks again.

The machine is a Dell Latitude C840 with the following general specs:

- Intel Pentium-M 2.2 GHz
- 1 Gb Ram
- 60 Gb 5400 rpm IBM/Hitachi hard drive - primary bay
- 80 Gb 5400 rpm Toshiba hard drive - modular bay
- Nvidia GeForce 440 Go 64mb graphics
- Dell Truemobile 1300 b/g wireless card

Now the primary bay is slated for Windows XP Pro SP2, and the modular bay is for the Fedora Core 3 install. Each has its own master boot record, and I can select the drive to boot from at BIOS.

The Linux is kernel 2.6.10 (and change). It is running the following very convenient module/services:

- NTFS - the primary bay drive mounts on boot in read-only mode

- Wireless - the Dell Truemobile is a Broadcom chip, so Linuxant’s Driverloader was required to get that puppy going. It is also running with WPA, using the wpa-supplicant add-on

- Database server is MySQL 4.1, including the Admin and Query Browser add-ons

- Printer is an HP Deskjet 5150

Note also that I have not messed with installing the aggregious Nvidia graphics drivers - the X does a damn good job on its own.

How It Was Done

Not too difficult, with some time. First, I pulled the primary drive from its bay, and inserted the “soon to be modular” drive in its place. Ran install, and ran user select so I could put my own database install on later. Everything was fine on first try. I then swapped the drives again, and inserted the drive bay module.

Booted to FC3, and ran the NTFS rpm. Edited fstab to mount on boot, and used the umask=0222 tag so users other than root could use the drive. Then did the driverloader installation. Added the wpa-supplicant, then dropped the supplicant config file into the driverloader directory, and renamed it to dldr_wpa_supplicant. This gets the WPA to load along with the driverloader, so you have WPA at the start.

What Works, What Doesn’t

Well, I haven’t found much that doesn’t work. Wireless fine. All drives operate as required. My external NTFS firewire drive even mounts automatically when I turn it on. IR, ok, although I don’t have much use for it. Again, video is fine without the Nvidia updates, although I don’t play games, so I don’t know if 3D works. I am having some issues with getting PHP to access MySQL, but I suspect that is user error. Other than those points, it is a great production machine that draws me away from Windows roughly 50% of the time.

The fstab and config files follow. If you would like to know anything else, just let me know.
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VMWare creates a virtual drive on a machine to run other operating systems. Set up the drive, install the operating system of choice, launch, and run….easy. But can VMWare be used to run an operating system wholly contained on another fixed drive (meaning hard drive) installed on the same system?

If someone knows the answer to this, including how to do it, let me know. You can read about my dual operating system laptop under Open Source Love if you can’t understand why anyone would want to do this.

Want to give a bit of kudos to the Linux community, for making so many peoples lives a little better. I performed a nice clean install of FC3 (taken from fedora.redhat.com) on my Dell C840, and although I did a few unorthodox things with it (which I will explain in a moment), I am extremely happy with the way it stuck, and how it runs to this day. And this is despite having very high expectations for the platform from the start.

Nitty gritty after the jump.