RLGaming.com

My answer is all of them :lol:

http://www.montleon.com/images/os.jpg

The sad part is this screenshot doesn't even depict BeOS or FreeBSD virtual machines I have burned to CD and don't even bother running anymore, not to mention my Sun Ultra 5 (Solaris think 9 is on it now, will be 10 01/06 when I get my hands on it) back in the states :shock:

Jeezus, Hudson! What the hell's the idea with all that? I mean what do you do with it all that necessitates them all being on your system at the same time? Me, I'm WinXP, and that's it. And I've never been anywhere near any other OS.

Purely hobby. It's a strange hobby, I know, but a hobby nonetheless. It stemmed from working in a couple of corporate environments where the interoperation of disparate OS'es (HP-UX and Windows Servers/Clients at one, Windows Servers/Clients, Netware, AIX, and Linux at another) was always a problem.

I sat with several machines many a night solving the questions I asked, and couldn't get a damned straight answer for. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) how many piss poor admins will use other peoples ignorance to secure their positions by simply keeping around unnecessary systems, so they can look important.

As a network/security admin/engineer, sick of getting one story from the Unix Admins, and another from the Windows Admins, as to why things HAD to be (F'ed up) the way they were, I took it upon myself to outclass the lot of them in the knowledge of their own subjects.

In the end my absurd hobby allowed me to reduce the number of servers at each company by MANY y straight up calling bullshit when people were spewing it. (I wasn't as bad as one coworker; she made a grown man cry in a meeting; that was funny.)

And then prompt the securing the system by having the admins install the (in some case several dozens of) patches their lazy asses neglected to even bother looking into, let alone actually install, disabling services like talkd and finger, replacing less secure services like telnet with SSH, and securing the open relay mail server at the first (all as examples of course.) I feel that I left both companies a 100 fold more secure than when I joined them, taking away the egg shell concept of security (strong on the outside, soft on the inside) where a simple (and in one case very misconfigured) firewall was considered enough, and replacing it with a strong very layered concept of security, that included hardening and patching each OS, firewall, and network device, adding IDS's, centralizing patch and virusscan administration, etc., etc., etc.

And knowing the people left behind at each, the security probably started going straight to hell again the minute I left.

I would note that not ALL of them are on my system as you say; the Windows 2003, Mac OS X, and Linux systems (along with the not so present Solaris system), are running on separate systems; just viewing the desktops remotely. The Windows Vista and Netware systems are Virtual Machines, along with the Windows XP "Bitch Box" for doing those things I wouldn't do on my real desktop.

Long story short, betas to see what's coming up in the near future (as in the case of Vista) and allowing my self to admin the others just so I can learn, and keep up with modern systems, of all sorts. :lol:

Oh, and for those interested, everyone in the industry rags on Windows Admins with their point and click skillz... I personally thought a brain washed Novell Admin who felt Netware in itself was security, and the HP-UX Admins I worked with took the cake. The AIX admins were good, and most Windows Server Admins were fair. In most cases once you educate a Windows Admin they have no problem pointing and clicking away... I mostly had no problem working with them.

Only nwish I was half as PC savvy as that. But I'm guessing I could get into all this sort of thing. I was going to have a go at Linux a few months back. Just messing with it all. But Steel suggested using a spare PC (which I had) then the wife sold it at the car boot sale. :shock:

he is a geek like some of the rest of us... ;)

if you want 10/01 I can probably get it for you... have you tried running a linux on your U5? I have a U1 and a U2 that I am about to retire from the data center (getting replaced with "more modern" linux boxes - dual athlon 1800+) and am going to try running one of the distros that have been compiled for SPARC.

have you tried CentOS? i am running that and Fedora Core 4 for production (Core 4 will be replaced by CentOS 4 as soon a I get a chance - more stability).

what have you done with Vista? tried any games yet?

yes - there are a lot of incompetents in this field. there are a lot of folks that gain a bit more knowledge that the average person and use that to advantage - even if it is just to act like they know more or get minor concessions or even to tell you that you are wrong. the OFF dev folks are like that. they have no clue about useability, and i called them on it. their resonse was that it was free, he had a life, falmily, blah, blah, blah - instead of just saying he might be wrong and would look at it. he is a stereotypical egocentric programmer that is offended when anything is said to be 'wrong'. much of this type of knowledge is hearsay or repeated 3rd party BS, and folks simply believe it and perpetuate it just because they do not know... ugh, i can go on and on...but you get the idea. it really pisses me off when these folks take your money though. that takes the cake.

I think I might have run Aurora Linux at one time or another. I know I gave a good hard look at it, but whether I ran it for certain I can not say. It was some time ago.

I haven't used CentOS yet. I've heard good things about it. Based on what I've seen from FC5T2 so far, I think your move may be a good one, very sad to say. It has been about as unstable and erratic as anything I've seen from Fedora/RedHat yet.

Not much with Vista yet. Right now, I only have it installed in a VMWare Virtual Machine and the very limited DirectX support available is not ideal for gaming. I've been exploring some of the new features, but nothing very exensive. Much of it is still broken (in the sense that it's not complete yet, versus actively crashing and such...)

One of the more interesting things I have installed and run is Debian for S/390 http://www.debian.org/ports/s390/ on an extremely bare Linux system with Hercules http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/. That one is a true sadists experience! But hey, at least I could say I have my own mainframe :lol:

Well you lost me back at 'linux' LOL! :lol: Having said that, I have made plans around doing some computer courses for my resettlement studies. I'm kinda having my cake and eating it -I am able to enter the world of aviation maintenance / repair etc., through ongoing study and qualification exams, thereby releasing valuable resettlement entitlement to do IT type studies for qualifications there. So, I should be able to get the best of both worlds. And to be honest I really don't mind the "school" environment you live in when studying during the evenings. It'll keep me quiet, and out of the wife's way!

OK this is a dumb as question but in that pic you have OS X running in the background there. Is that at all possible on a PC or better yet how did you get it to run??? I will definately be searching the web for that little bit of info.


DA

I had it running on a Mac-mini, and I was viewing the desktop with a program called VNC, used for remote control of a computer (say at home from work, or vice versa.)

http://www.realvnc.com

It is definately also possible to run Mac OS X on a PC though. I have done it with this program:

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

and this program to get networking going (on Windows):

http://openvpn.net/
(all you need to install is the TAP-Win32 Driver and properly configure it; there are plently of pearpc/openvpn HOWTO's out there http://os-emulation.net/pearpc/web/networkosx.html that explain the process)

It emulates a G3 or P4 PPC processor along with all the other peripherals. One of the things they need to get working, to make this program as cool as it could be, is audio. It is definately stable enough otherwise to get a good taste of Mac OS X, and while slower than a real Mac (the PPC to X86 processor emulation is a killer), it is still more than usable on a fairly modern PC.

Also, Apple has released MacIntels at last. The problem is that the Intel version of Mac OS X is made to specifically recognize and run on only Mac hardware. Windows does not run on MacIntel hardware (yet anyway) because the Mac's use a BIOS replacement called EFI, and the specific version of EFI on the Mac's does not support booting from UDF, only HFS+ (can be thought in simple terms as Windows Filesystem vs. Mac Filesystem)

Probably either someone will hack/crack/patch Windows to run and somehow boot off the Mac's, or (more likely) hack/crack/patch the EFI implementation to boot UDF and implement a BIOS compatibility layer (which is also supposed to be possible but not implemented in the Apple EFI implementation.)

I also forsee someone breaking Mac OS X for intel to run on PC hardware other than Mac's as well. But all of the Intel Mac hardware and software was just released this month, so no one who cares enough has probably had a long enough chance to come up with something.

I never thought one screenshot would elicit so much confusion. :lol:

Here's some more brain busters.

The same three VNC connections and a Solaris 10 01/06 X86 virtual machine viewing the Wings of Fury BB.
http://www.montleon.com/images/os1.jpg

Windows Vista Desktop
http://www.montleon.com/images/os2.jpg

Windows Vista viewing the Wings of Fury Web page
http://www.montleon.com/images/os3.jpg
(something got goofed up saving that, sorry)

Windows Vista with Windows Defender and Windows Defender Help
http://www.montleon.com/images/os4.jpg

Virtual Machine running Windows XP SP 2 logging into another Virtual Machine running Novell Netware 6.5 SP 5 and eDirectory 8.8
http://www.montleon.com/images/os5.jpg

Virtual Machine running Windows XP SP 2 (left) administrating another Virtual Machine running Novell Netware 6.5 SP 5 and eDirectory 8.8 (right) via ConsoleOne
http://www.montleon.com/images/os6.jpg

Virtual Machine running Windows XP SP 2 running xemacs via cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/)
http://www.montleon.com/images/os7.jpg

I should mention that all OS'es above (except Mac OS X 10.4 which I did buy...) as well as Cygwin are free as in beer, speach, and/or for educational, development, and or evaluation purposes.
Cygwin http://www.cygwin.com/
Fedora Linux http://fedora.redhat.com/
Solaris 10 http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/
Windows 2003 R2http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2 ... .mspx#EFAA
Novell Netware 6.5 http://www.novell.com/products/netware/eval.html

The only things I payed for are a license for VMWare, one copy of Windows XP (my old laptop that is now running Linux did not come with Windows XP, and I bought a copy way back when, that is now running in the Virtual Machine instead of on the laptop), and Mac OS X 10.4 (the mini came with 10.3). Basically no theft required for lots of fun, or at least what I consider fun...

Windows Vista I was able to access as part of the Microsoft Beta. I like applying for Microsoft Beta's as for my mostly trivial input I have received everything from an optical mouse way back when they were the hot new thing for beta testing Microsoft Host Integration Server (the fact I had access to a corporate Mainframe to test it with at the time is probably the only thing that got me in on the beta), to a Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition license and software worth something like $1,000. I would encourage anyone to apply to betas and see what new stuff is coming to computing . Getting or finding out about an invite and getting selected for the first one can be a pain in the ass and may take MANY tries; it seems that the more you take part in the more likely you are to be selected for each subsequent beta you apply for.
https://beta.microsoft.com

Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2.

Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2.

Yes, mate! That's all I have to say about it too!! :lol: :lol:

XP Pro here. Home is homely.

Currently, given my somewhat limited knowledge, and use of any special features in Win XP, I simply cannot justify purchase of the 'pro' version.

The majority of the differences come into play in a corporate environment. For instance Windows XP Home does not have the ability to be a part of a domain. Some of the management tools are also missing, but the OS is essentially identical otherwise, so you are, as a home user at least up to this point uninterested in such thing, missing nothing.

Bad money after good, in a sense, eh? :roll:

Yes, in theory that's all that's different.

In practice, however, I've found Home has issues that Pro doesn't. No idea why.

I feel the same way Jedi, but there is nothing that I can substantiate as being a problem, so it could just be illusion in my mind; I wouldn't be surprised if it was Microsoft's way of pribing money out of people to get the real deal full product; but that's just the paranoid side of me speaking; I have nothing technical to back that up.

Windows XP pro and I am on the long list to beta test MICROSOFT OFFICE LIVE.

I think mircrosoft did right by the consumers when they created HOME & PRO of course initially they did right by them, but as time has gone by they have proven that they are still there oldselves in some respects but in there defense they did somewhat give us a initial product that was on point and on target. Now what they do with this Longhorn character is another story all together.

DA

So what are we all thinking here? Is Longhorn the way forward for M$? Or are they truely barking up the wrong tree?