Welcome to Kirsle.net!

You can download everything from my MS-DOS page. I have some downloads for the following things:

• MS-DOS 6.22 Installer Floppy Images
• Windows 3.1 Installer Floppy Images
• Drivers:
  • CD-ROM Driver (Floppy Image)
  • DOSIDLE to make DOS not consume 100% CPU(Floppy Image)
  • WQGHLT to make Windows not consume 100% CPU (Floppy Image)
  • SoundBlaster 16 Drivers (CD Image)

Installation Notes:

Windows 3.1 can still be installed from these images, it will just require more disk juggling. When you get a "Can't read file" error, you'll usually swap in the next numbered disk and hit enter. Sometimes you'll have to go to the previous disk instead.

Update:

Another Update:

If you have issues with erratic mouse movement within Windows 3.1 on VirtualBox, some solutions are (from here):

• Start Windows in standard mode (win /s)
• Disable hardware virtualization (in the System/Acceleration tab in the VM settings)
• Find a video driver that supports more than 16 colors (more info here).

Update (5/16/16):

Links

• The Legacy PC Project -- guides for installing MS-DOS and Windows for Workgroups on old PCs.

The first virtual machine software I found in the last year or two was QEMU. It wasn't an easy virtual machine to work with, and I could scarcely get even Windows XP to function to my liking with it, let alone try running a dinosaur of an operating system that isn't up to speed with current hardware, like what QEMU emulates for its virtual machines.

I was able to install Windows 3.1 on top of the DOSBox emulator. It installed, and ran, and I was able to install Chip's Challenge from Microsoft's Best of Windows Entertainment Pack and play it, with sound effects and everything.

However, DOSBox wasn't made to run Windows. Windows uses a VGA graphics driver by default, which gives it an entire 16 colors to use with a 640x480 pixel desktop. If I wanted to upgrade it to, say, Super VGA and get 800x600 pixels, or even do something as crazy as to get 256 colors, DOSBox didn't handle it well. Sure, Windows would still run, however its color palette would be off (brown dirt blocks in Chip's Challenge would be teal, for instance), and many programs would cause DOSBox to entirely crash.

So, DOSBox isn't a very satisfactory emulator for running Windows 3.1 on.

So, after I discovered VirtualBox, it became my favorite virtual machine software. I use it all the time to do all kinds of mad scientist experiments with my operating systems. So, I tried installing Windows 3.1 on this. First, though, I needed to install a DOS-like operating system, since Windows 3.1 itself is not a real operating system (more of an elaborate DOS game).

FreeDOS

Cannot start Windows in Standard Mode.

Make sure you are not running other protected-mode software,
or try starting Windows in 386 Enhanced mode by typing win /3.

Cannot start Windows in enhanced mode with the currently installed
protected-mode software.

Quit the protected-mode software and try again.

I had to edit C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI, and under [386Enh] I had to add the line InDOSPolling=True. Furthermore, I had to boot Windows by using the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\DOSX.EXE program, instead of WIN.COM like normal.

C:\WINDOWS>SYSTEM\DOSX.EXE

The catch? You can't start another DOS shell on top of Windows again. So that "MS-DOS Prompt" shortcut, or the "IBM Professional Editor" couldn't be started from within Windows. Sort of defeats the purpose of having their icons there at all.

On the plus side, though, I was able to up the graphics support to Super VGA with no distortion of colors or general instability of the operating system. However, the SoundBlaster drivers wouldn't work, the networking wouldn't work, and I couldn't install a whole lot of actual software due to random odd error messages, which probably had to do with the unorthodox way that I needed to start Windows.

MS-DOS 6.22

But this time when I tried it, it was pretty easy. I just converted the Windows installers into disk images (not perfectly; the files for each disk wouldn't always fit in 1.44 MB and had to overflow to the following disk, so I ended up with 7 disk images for a 6 disk operating system). Windows didn't care, it would just give errors like "Read Error" and "Please insert disk #2", and I just had to do more disk juggling than usual until it got all the files it needed.

After getting a true MS-DOS installed with Windows 3.1, I was able to *gasp* start Windows in 386 Enhanced Mode, with no problems whatsoever. Then I installed a driver for the CD-ROM hardware, which made it easier to install SoundBlaster 16 drivers. Also I had to give it a couple of drivers (one for DOS and one for Windows) to stop them from consuming 100% of my CPU while running.

(I didn't upload another screenshot of Windows; it looks more or less the same as it did in FreeDOS!)

What works? Well...

• 386 Enhanced Mode (WIN.COM)
  • The SoundBlaster drivers work; Windows can play audio.
  • New DOS shells can not be started from within Windows. So, that "MS-DOS Prompt" shortcut is useless again.
• Standard Mode (WIN.COM /S)
  • SoundBlaster does NOT work.
  • New DOS shells CAN be started from within Windows.

Another interesting thing to note: before I installed the drivers for DOS and Windows that makes them stop consuming 100% CPU while idle, if I started a DOS shell on top of Windows, every key I pressed would be sent twice to the new shell. So this made it unusable. After installing those drivers though, the new shell works as it should.

This is definitely the best virtualization of Windows 3.1 I've gotten so far. It's at least 90% as "authentic" as running Windows on a real Tandy machine. I could nearly relive my computing childhood and install BOWEP and a handful of classic DOS games like Police Quest and Frederick Pohl's Gateway on it (not from within Windows, though!)

Or, I could just play it safe and use DOSBox for the games. :P

From my end it appears nothing has broken yet, but while stuff is getting sorted out this site may be unresolvable at times. If I notice a significant drop in my daily unique visitors over a few days I'll revert to my registrar's name servers. ;)

Unix-like systems do have small amounts of malware out there, but they're more commonly called "rootkits" and they tend to take the form of backdoors and trojans left behind after a hacker has already taken control of your system remotely. Thus they affect server systems more than client workstations. For instance if a server allows root login over SSH, and the root password is weak, a hacker could get into the server and once there installs some rootkits to guarantee further access in the future, even if the sysadmin changes the root password.

For desktop users, the following are commonly cited as to why we're generally safe from viruses:

1) Unix requires executable file permissions before files can be executed.

So for a user to get a virus via e-mail, they'd need to save the attachment to disk, then open its properties and change its permissions to be executable, and then double-click the file to run it (or, if they like the terminal, they'd need to cd to where they saved it, chmod it, and then execute it).

All of this eliminates the issue of accidentally executing e-mail attachments. If a user has to go through this much hassle to run a virus, they're more likely to think about it for a second and wonder how good of an idea it is.

2) Unix generally doesn't give users administrative rights.

Unix-like systems (including Mac) don't do this, and the user that you log on as for your day-to-day use doesn't have permission to do very much. You can download and modify things in your home directory and that's just about it. So, any programs you run are also stuck with these limited privileges. If you download an email attachment, give it executable permissions, and execute it, it's not gonna be allowed to do very much that you yourself aren't allowed.

Can it potentially get your saved passwords out of Firefox? Yes. So I wouldn't recommend trying to run things that are likely to be malicious. But can it affect your system as a whole? Can it get into other users' accounts and get their passwords? Can it infect your boot sector? No, no, no. They need root (administrative) privileges to do any such thing. If a normal user does run a malicious program, it's their own problem. Not like on Windows where it becomes everybody's problem because the system itself has become infected.

3) To do anything administrative, you need to have a password.

On Linux systems the user passwords are typically kept in the file /etc/shadow, and are encrypted using a one-way hashing algorithm. If a hacker has a hashed password, it makes it easier for them to crack it, because it takes out the element of having to go through another system to do so (for instance, brute force login attempts can be handled by the server locking out the account after enough failed attempts). If the hacker has the hash, they can do their own cracking "offline" and only bug the server again once they know the password for sure.

But /etc/shadow is owned and read-only for the root user. So, the regular limited user account that's executing a malicious program doesn't have permission to even read this file, so the program can't even get the hashed passwords out of it.

So to do anything administrative, a password is needed (either the user's password or, more commonly, the root password), and the malicious program couldn't possibly know what those passwords are, and if it were to try guessing, any decently configured system would start to get suspicious of it.

Thus it's highly difficult for a user-executed program to gain root privileges. Sometimes they're able to do it, but they usually need to think way outside the box and exploit security holes in running services to do so. But it's a major hamper in their ability to do any harm.

How Linux viruses could work:

I'm first going to talk about package management systems in Linux. Most mainstream distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, etc.) have package management systems that control installed software. The distribution's vendor maintains a default repository of available software. The majority of software a user would ever want is usually available in these repositories, from Firefox to OpenOffice all the way to development libraries like GTK+ and GStreamer.

This eliminates the user's need to surf the web and bounce from site to site downloading installers for everything. Most things are available in the software repository, and better yet, they're all cryptographically signed by the vendor, so you can be reasonably sure you're installing trusted, safe software.

But, not all Linux software is available in the repositories. For instance, Sun's VirtualBox. To get VirtualBox you go to its website and download an RPM or Debian package file and install it. To install it, you enter a password (yours, or root's). Then, at least on Redhat-based systems, RPM will complain that the package has not been cryptographically signed using a trusted key, and asks for a second password to be entered to verify that you seriously want to install this.

And this is the point I'm getting at: most Linux software that isn't directly located in one of your trusted software repositories, frankly, can't be trusted. Recent Redhat-based systems give you a second prompt if you attempt to install untrusted software.

So how can Linux viruses be downloaded? If the end user is apathetic and just types in their passwords whenever asked. They could download a package from some random website that appears legit, give their root password to install it, and at that point the package installer has administrative privileges to install that package however it wants.

The package could, for instance, install a binary somewhere, owned as root, and with permissions set in a way that, when executed, it runs with root privileges automatically, regardless of what user executed the binary. And in this way, if it were a virus, it would already have root access to the system, and could do whatever it wanted.

A malicious hacker could take an RPM package such as VirtualBox, replace the main binary with a "wrapper" program (which could launch a second "virus" program and then launch the legitimate VirtualBox binary), repackage it as a new RPM, and post it on a website promoting VirtualBox, saying the download is provided as a convenience to its users so that they don't need to go and download VirtualBox themselves. And since such a wrapper program would launch the legitimate VirtualBox app, most of its users would never know anything was amiss.

So long story short, computers are only as secure as their users are.

P.S. this could also happen to Mac OS X, but it requires less explanation; Mac doesn't have a central software repository full of cryptographically signed packages; they buy or download software the same as Windows users. But they still need a password for installation, so everything after that point still applies. Mac is still a Unix-like operating system.

(On that note, I'm working on researching stuff for a long article I wanna write concerning the sad state of Windows software and the philosophy behind it).

This is one of many cases where after getting into Linux and the open source world, I discovered some free/open source software that does things that I've always wanted to do. In this case, I discovered TiMidity, a MIDI to WAV converter.

TiMidity is used in Linux for support for the MIDI audio format. Rather than have actual hardware drivers to deal with MIDI directly (like Windows does), TiMidity just converts it into WAV format on-the-fly and sends it straight off to your audio hardware. This is its default behavior, anyway. Last night I was digging through its manpages and found out how to save the output as a WAV file instead of sending it directly to the speakers.

Thus, I finally was able to convert MIDI audio to WAV. For reference here's how to do it:

$ timidity -Ow -o output.wav input.mid

WAV files are big and bulky though, so that's where LAME comes in handy. Instead of saving the output to a file, we can pipe it into LAME and save it as an MP3 on the other side.

Thus, here's a one-liner for converting any MIDI file to an MP3:

$ timidity -Ow -o - input.mid | lame - output.mp3

There are Windows ports of these programs available too.

For now you can download it, or browse the source code and Javadocs, at /projects/Java/.

I started with Sun's tutorials, beginning with basic command-line apps to get the syntax down, then moving into the GUI tutorials with Swing. I'm not putting high priority on learning Java applet programming right at the moment, because nobody likes Java applets anymore.

And so now I'm at the point where I'm attempting to program my own things from scratch. A logical place to start was to create a Java class for the CyanChat protocol. The goal of it is to match the functionality of Net::CyanChat, and then one day I might even program a "Java CyanChat Client", to complement my current Perl CyanChat Client (and by Java CC Client, I don't mean an applet; the standard CyanChat client is an applet -- I mean a GUI application).

My CyanChat package is named org.kirsle.network.CyanChat for right now. Eventually I intend to program a RiveScript interpreter in Java, to open the door up to Java developers to get into the world of RiveScript (and because the only RiveScript interpreter currently in existence is written in Perl). Then, one of my goals in C++ is to compile a "RiveScript.dll" file, which can be dynamically linked with C/C++ programs or any other language that can dynamically link a DLL. :)

Since I'm serious about Java development, I made a nice lil avatar for Java-related blog posts, and spent more than 5 minutes creating it too.

Maybe they just want the links to be there for Google to see... to improve the page rank of their scam site so that it comes up higher in Google search results. They just want links from the forums they spam, not necessarily clicks.

Thus an interesting idea for web forum software: add a kind of restriction on link posting. Like how some forums require that you post 10 things that aren't spam before you're allowed to send private messages to other users, or other such arbitrary restrictions... what would be useful is one that goes: you can post links immediately after signing up, but every link you post will have rel="nofollow" attached to it, so that Google and other search spiders won't follow your link, and you won't get Pagerank credit for it. And then after posting enough on the forum, all your previous links and all future links will be linkable for search engines then.

Spam bots always seem to find ways to register and spam forums, but taking away their ability to get any Pagerank credit for their spamming would help fight back just a little bit.

/random thought of the day/

Scene I: The Wall War

[noahp ~]$
Broadcast message from matts (pts/45) (Thu Jul 17 15:45:02 2008):

stop putting crap on this box, we're at 100% usage

Broadcast message from gregc (pts/2) (Thu Jul 17 15:45:50 2008):

Your wall message, dirties my screen

Broadcast message from matts (pts/45) (Thu Jul 17 15:46:08 2008):

good

Broadcast message from joels (pts/37) (Thu Jul 17 15:47:01 2008):

is this how wall works?

Broadcast message from noahp (pts/55) (Thu Jul 17 15:47:23 2008):

People, use /usr/bin/sayto >.<

Broadcast message from benl (pts/72) (Thu Jul 17 15:47:37 2008):

STOP WALLING ME!!111one

Broadcast message from matts (pts/45) (Thu Jul 17 15:47:45 2008):

there is no '*' option in sayto

Broadcast message from noahp (pts/55) (Thu Jul 17 15:48:01 2008):

Where we're going we don't need *'s

Broadcast message from carlof (pts/49) (Thu Jul 17 15:48:12 2008):

looolloololoolllool

Broadcast message from carlof (pts/72) (Thu Jul 17 15:48:13 2008):

oh hai

From: Samy <samy@...>
To: everyone <...>
Date: Thu Jul 17 15:51 2008
Subject: wall

Each time you wall on web11, you're disrupting 12 developers from working and possibly systems team or QA. Don't do this.

[noahp ~]$ wall
Don't be a jerk


Use hud, email, a phone, don't fing use this

The most exciting thing about Fedora 10 for me is that my wireless card works now, just automatically. I installed it on my laptop, logged in, and before my GNOME panels even slid into view, the balloon from the network applet was already visible telling me there were wireless networks nearby. :-D So no longer do I have to fsck with the kernel or use MadWifi patches to get the wireless to work.

Also, Fedora 10 is just really pretty. I actually downloaded a leaked copy of the DVD image the day before it was officially released, to install it in a virtual machine and play around with it (I wanted to wait for it to be officially released so I could verify the sha1sum of the DVD image before installing it on any real PCs). On the virtual machine there was no graphical boot screen, only a text-mode one that had a text-mode progress bar at the bottom. But on my laptop the boot screen was pretty awesome. It had the supernova picture that's part of Fedora 10's theme and it had solar flare animations coming off it.

So, after installing it on my laptop, installing the OpenSolaris GTK+ theme, and tweaking some of my applets and panels the way I like 'em, here's a screenshot:

Current Mood: Excited like omg.