Crazy loons

Sorry to shout, but BY DESIGN google CANNOT DO ANYTHING and SHOULD NOT
BE ABLE to do anything. He has NO relationship with google. The only
relationship here is that YOU CHOOSE to use a web browser to read his
posts indirectly via the google website!


Tom is right, there is nothing that Google (or anyone basically) can
do. The analogy that I give is like trying to blame your car radio
for receiving an offending "shock jock". You can't call up Ford and
tell them to block it as they have no control. Unfortunately you
can't even picket the radio station because Usenet news (which is what
you are reading) is broadcast from 1000's upong 1000's of "stations"
and the MI5 guy could be sending his message from any of them.

This basically is a never ending battle within all Usenet news
groups. There are two general solutions;

Simplest: Switch to a standalone Usenet news reader that can block
(filter, killfile) individual types of posts (by author, content,
subject, etc). Using a web based tool such as Google is great, but it
has its limitations.

Hardest: Make rec.aviation.soaring a moderated news group. This means
that one or more moderators decide what is posted and who can post.
While this cleans up the news group and keeps out the un-medicated, it
limits the content (both width, breath and speed). Bascially, we
don't want to go there.

Tom Gardner wrote:

192MB would be pushing it unless you have a very lean
X window manager.

It won't do it in that case - its a Thinkpad 560Z running Fedora Core 1
with Gnome.

256MB is OK, but 512MB is better.

I periodically wonder about extending it to 512 MB RAM but it is a 5 yr
old (866 MHz) NetVista so the RAM would need to be cheap. I expect to
replace the box sooner or later, but probably with something a lot more
energy-efficient such as a mini-ITX board in a fanless case.

Many thanks for your tips, though. I've filed them for future reference.

BTW, is it worth trying to run my gliding software (the EW Uploader, EW
View, TPSelect, FlexGPS etc.) under WINE or should I bite the bullet and
go for VMWare + Win 95? Currently all this stuff runs under Win95 on an
AMD K6/266. From what you say, adding an extra 256 MB to the NetVista
would let me move the W95 setup over to it and the old AMD box could die
gracefully.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

Tim Ward wrote:

Sure. OE isn't a great newsreader. But it's a common one. Since he's
reading through Google, it wouldn't have helped anyway.

I don't understand that. I thought you had to use a web browser to
access Google Groups.

How would he use OE? Does Google Groups provide both Web and NNTP
connections?


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

On Nov 20, 3:44 pm, Martin Gregorie
wrote:
Tom Gardner wrote:
I periodically wonder about extending it to 512 MB RAM but it is a 5 yr
old (866 MHz) NetVista so the RAM would need to be cheap.

From crucial or kingston, I guess it would be about £30.

BTW, is it worth trying to run my gliding software (the EW Uploader, EW
View, TPSelect, FlexGPS etc.) under WINE or should I bite the bullet and
go for VMWare + Win 95? Currently all this stuff runs under Win95 on an
AMD K6/266. From what you say, adding an extra 256 MB to the NetVista
would let me move the W95 setup over to it and the old AMD box could die
gracefully.

WINE seems to work, mostly, but requires a lot of tweaking.
VMWare just works, including browsers, audio and video playback.
Classic time vs cost tradeoff!
Have a look at the number/type of VMWare images that can be
downloaded from their website - it is clear that commercially
this is the way forward.

I strongly recommend you get a dual core machine. Currently many
apps presume a single CPU, so you'll still have a usable CPU
even when the other is 100% utilised. And it probably isn't worth
getting less than 2GB memory, even though linux will use most
of it as a disk cache

I'll check up tonight about my exact config.

On Nov 20, 7:48 am, Martin Gregorie
wrote:
Tim Ward wrote:

Sure. OE isn't a great newsreader. But it's a common one. Since he's
reading through Google, it wouldn't have helped anyway.

I don't understand that. I thought you had to use a web browser to
access Google Groups.

How would he use OE? Does Google Groups provide both Web and NNTP
connections?

--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

Your ISP likely has a news server. They also likely recommend a news
reader. Failing that google for "news server" or "nntp server" and
you'll find some that you can subscribe to, maybe for a small fee.

rec.aviation.soaring happens to feed into Google Groups. Please stop
thinking of it as a "Google Group". Google likely does not provide a
nntp/news server since they want to play you advertising as you read
news.

rec.aviation.soaring is a Usenet group, a wonderful distributed
collection of computer systems managing distribution of news traffic,
largely uncontrolled by anybody but works remarkably well. Usenet has
always relied primarily on client side kill files for handling abuse,
just make the !@#$heads invisible. There is no army of usenet police
who have time to track down annoying posts and deal with spammers.
ISPs can cut them off and post an occasional kill message but the
barrier to them just resigning up with another ISP is very low.
Bothering to report abuse to Google or other carriers is almost a
waste of time. And out MI5 friend has usually posted from outside
Google - but I don't see his posts so they don't bother me so I don't
know where he is posting from now. I would not know there was any spam
except for the threads discussing it. Even when reading
rec.aviation.soaring via Google groups I don't see the spam...

As I've posted before here. If you are using Mozilla Firefox then you
can use the greasemonkey plug in
and an available grease monkey script to add kill file type behavior
to the Google web based news reader. It is a kludge but it works. If
you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you have my sympathy, and
its time to upgrade to Mozilla Firefox.

Google for greasemonkey and install that extension to Mozilla. Then go
to http://www.penney.org/google-groups-...updated-2.html and
download the script, use Mozilla to browse to the script on your
filesystem and click on it, you should see greasemonkey then offer to
install it.

Darryl

On Nov 20, 4:23 pm, Tom Gardner wrote:
I'll check up tonight about my exact config.

My VMWare configs for the guest VM a
- guest recommended minimum 64MB
- VMWare minimum 256MB
- my setting 128MB, runs opera and xnews,
and can't think of much else to run!
So it ought to run in 256MB RAM

Win95 sees these virtual io devices:
- C: 1GB hard disk
- 2*cdrom (/dev/hd{cd})
- floppy
- Ethernet driver (plus emulated NAT bridge to the linux ethernet
driver)
- sound adaptor
- mouse
- no USB (but I haven't tried to get them working)

Tom Gardner wrote:
On Nov 20, 4:23 pm, Tom Gardner wrote:
I'll check up tonight about my exact config.

My VMWare configs for the guest VM a
- guest recommended minimum 64MB
- VMWare minimum 256MB
- my setting 128MB, runs opera and xnews,
and can't think of much else to run!
So it ought to run in 256MB RAM

Win95 sees these virtual io devices:
- C: 1GB hard disk
- 2*cdrom (/dev/hd{cd})
- floppy
- Ethernet driver (plus emulated NAT bridge to the linux ethernet
driver)
- sound adaptor
- mouse
- no USB (but I haven't tried to get them working)

Thanks for showing me that. Its most useful as I have little idea about
what VMWare can do for me. Now, apologies are due because I have a few
more questions.

What about printer and serial ports?

If VMWare can't see serial ports that would be a show stopper. I need
serial port access to download traces from my EW model D and to load
waypoints into my Garmin GPS II+.

I also need a printer for a Windows CAD package that I'd like to
continue to use. It has a dongle on the printer port as well as sending
output to a (networked) printer and an HP 7475 plotter on a serial port.

Can VMWare emulate a networked printer connection to talk to a local
copy of Samba?

Lastly, Can it access shared disks via a local copy of Samba? Using it
to access the Linux FS would be a neat way of escaping the 1GB emulated
disk limit and it would also provide a convenient way of loading stuff
from my old W95 box onto the virtual disk once VMWare is set up and
Win95 has been installed.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

The answer is YES to all your question. VMware Workstation is a great
product, but then I'm a little biased :-)

VMware has extensive online forums where you can find other info or
just download and try a copy of VMware Workstation before deciding to
purchase.

Darryl Ramm

On Nov 20, 1:30 pm, Martin Gregorie
wrote:
Tom Gardner wrote:
On Nov 20, 4:23 pm, Tom Gardner wrote:
I'll check up tonight about my exact config.

My VMWare configs for the guest VM a
- guest recommended minimum 64MB
- VMWare minimum 256MB
- my setting 128MB, runs opera and xnews,
and can't think of much else to run!
So it ought to run in 256MB RAM

Win95 sees these virtual io devices:
- C: 1GB hard disk
- 2*cdrom (/dev/hd{cd})
- floppy
- Ethernet driver (plus emulated NAT bridge to the linux ethernet
driver)
- sound adaptor
- mouse
- no USB (but I haven't tried to get them working)

Thanks for showing me that. Its most useful as I have little idea about
what VMWare can do for me. Now, apologies are due because I have a few
more questions.

What about printer and serial ports?

If VMWare can't see serial ports that would be a show stopper. I need
serial port access to download traces from my EW model D and to load
waypoints into my Garmin GPS II+.

I also need a printer for a Windows CAD package that I'd like to
continue to use. It has a dongle on the printer port as well as sending
output to a (networked) printer and an HP 7475 plotter on a serial port.

Can VMWare emulate a networked printer connection to talk to a local
copy of Samba?

Lastly, Can it access shared disks via a local copy of Samba? Using it
to access the Linux FS would be a neat way of escaping the 1GB emulated
disk limit and it would also provide a convenient way of loading stuff
from my old W95 box onto the virtual disk once VMWare is set up and
Win95 has been installed.

--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

n Nov 20, 9:30 pm, Martin Gregorie wrote:

The emulation is *seriously* good. The guest operating systems have
great difficulty determining that they are being emulated. Win98
doesn't
have a clue, but I suspect Vista might.

The completeness of the emulation poses some *very* interesting
new problems for anti-virus/trojan products: if the host operating
system is compromised then there is zero chance the anti-virus
product inside a virtual machine could detect it. Think of it as a
rootkit on steroids.

Thanks for showing me that. Its most useful as I have little idea about
what VMWare can do for me. Now, apologies are due because I have a few
more questions.

What about printer and serial ports?

It appears that the VMWare config allows you to attach
the guest serial port (com1) to the linux serial port, a
file or a pipe. I haven't tried it.

I also need a printer for a Windows CAD package that I'd like to
continue to use. It has a dongle on the printer port as well as sending
output to a (networked) printer and an HP 7475 plotter on a serial port.

Ditto parallel port or SCSI devices

Can VMWare emulate a networked printer connection to talk to a local
copy of Samba?

No. But that's the wrong question. Win98 sees an ethernet and if
you have Samba somewhere (e.g. on your linux box) then it can
see that.

Lastly, Can it access shared disks via a local copy of Samba?

The emulation of the ethernet segment and ethenet bridge is
really transparent. If you can do something on a real network,
then it can be done with VMWare. And that includes having
multiple Win98 emulated virtual machines simultaneously connected
to the same emulated network segment and same real network.
(That is of real practical use if you want to determine how a
cluster of machines will act when one fails without warning:
simply have a cluster of emulated machines and turn off
the power to one of them!)

My emulated linux box is 192.168.1.40
The emulated NATting bridge uses DHCP to assign the
Win98 ethernet virtual adaptor the address 172.16.27.128
If in a Win98 CMD shell I execute "tracert 192.168.1.40" the
response is

Tracing route to 192.168.1.40 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 172.16.27.2
2 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 192.168.1.40

Using it
to access the Linux FS would be a neat way of escaping the 1GB emulated
disk limit

No such limit; I used it as a tradeoff between enough space on
the virtual disk and having too large linux files. Win95/98 will be
the
limiting factor. (Nothing new there)

and it would also provide a convenient way of loading stuff
from my old W95 box onto the virtual disk once VMWare is set up and
Win95 has been installed.

Definitely. But might be easier to use the standard
Windows network neighbourhood techniques.

I suggest you download VMWare Server from
http://www.vmware.com/download/server/ and install it.
It is only 101MB.

Then restart your X server with the smallest nastiest window
manager (twm?) so as to minimise the pressure on ram.

Then start a VM and install Win98. You'll get 16colour
640x480 screen but VMware provide a Win98 device driver
that circumvents that limitation.

And do have a look at http://www.vmware.com/appliances/
marketplace.html
to see *many preconfigured OSs, software stacks and applications.
(e.g. http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/649

The only surprise you might have is that when running it you:
- use linux to open a VMWare console
- select the virtual image you wish to use (i.e. the disks etc being
emulated)
- turn on the power, and wait for Win98 to boot
If you then close the VMWare console, the Win98 machine is still
there
and running. If you re-open the console with the same virtual image,
it
reconnects to the already running Win98 instance - i.e. no reboot.

To remove the Win98 instance, do a standard Win98 shutdown, or use
the console to turn off the power, or to send a three fingered salute.

Tom Gardner wrote:

I suggest you download VMWare Server from
http://www.vmware.com/download/server/ and install it.
It is only 101MB.

I've got all your excellent advice noted for future reference. It
certainly looks as if virtualisation is the way to go.

I'll get to it soon, but in the meanwhile I have a fairly major Java
project in the works that I really have to finish before sorting out
this stuff. Its got side tracked more than enough recently.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |