Microsoft MEDV - Heralding the demise of the botnet?

Hi everyone. I thought instead of the usual tip or trick, I'd use this post to talk about a new product Microsoft has been working on that they call MED-V, short for Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, and a hypothetical effect it could have on the current botnet threat facing many millions of PC users.

First, some background on Med-V. Aside from the terrifically imaginative name, which brings to mind for me some kind of messy and painful type of injection (Nurse, pass me the Med-V, this guy needs the full treatment) Med-V is an enterprise level product. This means it won't automatically be available bundled with Windows, certainly not the lower-end (home) versions. One would hope, if the product is a success, that this will change.

So what's the deal? What does it do and why should you, the reader, care? Med-V is a transparent virtualization product which builds on Microsoft Virtual PC to provide transparent virtualization for applications running on the Microsoft Desktop.

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Installing Linux Terminal Server Project on Fedora 10

Namaste, dear readers. Today's post is about LTSP, better known as the Linux Terminal Server Project. Installing this puppy was a breeze, so I'll try to keep the details short and refer to LTSP's own documentation wherever possible and necessary. I don't expect any major differences installing this on Fedora 11 either, so do go ahead and give it a try.

But first... Why would you want to install LTSP? Well, let's say you have a bucketload of old hardware lying around doing nothing. Or maybe you bought a nice diskless thin client at some computer event, thinking it would be a good idea at the time, but that is now steadfastly gathering dust in the corner of a cupboard somewhere. And let's say you want to make it possible for more than one person to log in to your home computer (running Fedora 10 or some other *nix) at a time. Well then a terminal server might be just what the doctor ordered.

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Update on the state of Dutch Tech

Here's a quick update:

1. We can't get the kindle DX
2. We can't get the kindle 2
3. We can't even get the original kindle yet
4. No mention of when the palm pre is going to get released here
5. Scottevest products *are* available, but shipping is outrageous
6. We're planning (and when I say "we", I mean certain politicians in the government) to levy a tax on Internet users to fund "old" media, like the newspaper industry. Even if this doesn't come to pass, to even *MENTION* it is wrong, wrong, wrong.
7. We can't buy Amazon MP3

There. I think that sums it up.

Tux lives

VMware Server 2.0.1 on linux 2.6.29

Good morning earthbound darlings! I ran into a problem recently after upgrading my kernel to 2.6.29. I run VMware server so that I can access an ancient Windows XP image that I turn to if ever I need Internet Explorer or some other arcane Windows program that simply will not run under Linux.

After my upgrade to 2.6.29 I found, to my horror, that VMware once again didn't work. I say "once again" because VMware often will not survive an upgrade to a higher kernel version. In the past, I always relied on the so-called "vmware-any-any" patch that a VMware guru would release which would fix the problem 9 times out of ten.

The VMware-any-any patch seems to have splintered a bit since I last used it, and there are different versions of it floating around the net with different names.

I figured I would just wait until VMware released a new version of their (free) server product, as that invariably fixes this type of kernel incompatibility problem as well.

The problem is, it's taking too long. And I needed to use my XP image. So I decided to do some Googling. Wouldn't you know it, there was an answer on the vmware boards that addressed a similar problem for VMware Workstation. I figured there couldn't be *that* much difference between the two products, and it turns out, there isn't. Well, not where fixing this problem is concerned anyway.

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Installing Fedora 11 on my Asus EEE 701 4g Surf

Don't you love my imaginative title? At least it leaves very little, if anything, to the imagination. I paid the early adopter's tax by buying an Asus 4G surf when it first came out. In doing so, I bought myself an - admittedly cute - gizmo that came with 512 Kb memory and 4Gb hard drive space and no easy way to upgrade. This is because the 4G Surf models do not have a panel that unscrews to expose the memory, which in these models is soldered onto the board anyway.

So, as I usually do when I get a new toy, I got bored of it pretty quickly and set it aside for a while. But then, last month, Windows 7 came out and I managed to install it on the internal drive. Windows 7, it turns out, runs really quite well on the Asus, even with only 512Kb memory. A huge improvement over Vista, which I think would have melted the processor had I even threatened to install it on the EEE.

And then, two weeks ago, Fedora 11 came out. So I thought...................... Why not give that a whirl?

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