Linux's worst enemy

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Karl Klammer
Posts: 193
Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2015 3:19 am
Location: Old Europe

Re: Linux's worst enemy

#31 Post by Karl Klammer »

The ToughMac video shows google earth on osx running with serial gps.
Not sure how they did it. Either it works out of the box, requires a loadable kernel module or is based on something like http://www.w7ay.net/site/Applications/Serial%20Tools/ .

Never really bothered with Wine ... more of a Parallels/VirtualBox/VMWare kind of guy.
I know you can pass through usb and serial ports to a VirtualBox guest, So I guess that should also work with Parallels.
Why Parallels? Because the OSX integration is very seamless. It even scans the Windows guests registry and extends these programs to be directly assigned to osx file types.
E.g. you click on foo.docx in OSX and the correct Windows tool starts in seamless window mode.

Running a serial NMEA GPS on Linux should not be much of an issue.
The lack of good GPS navigation software was more troublesome to me - now using MapFactor Navigator on Win7 (feels like a beta test version of OSMAnd).
Try gpscat /dev/ttyS2 or gpscat −s 4800N1 /dev/ttyS2 to view the NMEA output of COM3. The second command worked fine for my Leadtek LR9548S module.
Gpscat is part of the http://www.catb.org/gpsd/ toolsuite.
You may have to stop gpsd and/or use sudo in order to get proper access to the serial port, depending on the default /etc/init.d setup for gpsd and file permission/group memberships of your linux distribution.

BR,
Karl Klammer

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Shawn
Posts: 2960
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2013 11:35 am

Re: Linux's worst enemy

#32 Post by Shawn »

The GPS thing is a longer story and is in another thread here. http://www.toughbooktalk.com/posting.ph ... =39&t=2698
I don't want this thread to derail into a GPS thread..We can discuss GPS more "over there"


Parallels is a virtual machine setup with a full Windows install inside of OSX? That gives you all the security of OSX while running Windows, correct?
Is an internet connection on OSX using Parallels and Firefox more secure than a full Windows box using Firefox? I would think it is because it is NOT a dual boot machine. It still has all the BSD /Unix underpinnings.


Serial Tools sounds like a very interesting program. It "sounds" much better than Wine and softlinks etc..
I read that Wine will run on OSX also..I am curious if Wine runs better on OSX than it does on Linux.
Life will beat you into submission.

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Karl Klammer
Posts: 193
Joined: Tue Oct 13, 2015 3:19 am
Location: Old Europe

Re: Linux's worst enemy

#33 Post by Karl Klammer »

Yes, Parallels/VMWare/VirtualBox are running full blown Windowses inside the virtualization ring of an x64 processor.
Expect about 80% of native performance within a hardware-virtualized vm.
e.g. give it half of your cpu cores and you will get about 40% performance.

That security topic will be quite a long one, as there are many variables that come into play.
Main ones are your threat model (who is attacking what and why?), system config, usage scenarios and security philosophy.

On one hand, running software inside a VM will generally prevent it to access stuff outside the VM,
unless the VM hypervisor(e.g. osx + parallels + x64 virtualization ring) is exploited => Sandbox mindset.
On the other hand, it means that more code is available for exploitation,
as the attacker can now target Windows, OSX and Parallels/VMWare/... bugs => OpenBSD mindset.
Do you really care wether your Firefox saved passwords are stolen from a Windows or OSX system? ;-)


Also, running a VM will be a battery drain, at least with VirtualBox, didn't test with the others.
Running an idle Oracle11g directly on a Win7 host results in 5-10% cpu usage.
Running an idle Oracle11g inside an idle VM on a Win7 host results in 50%+ cpu usage and thus I would loose 20-30% battery runtime with the VM thingy.

The host OS plays a marginal part in Wine / HW-Virt functionality and performance.
Wine basically is a reverse engineered copy of the most common Windows API functions and should thus run about the same on any supported Linux/Unix system.
This also rings true for VirtualBox/VMWare/Parallels, altough for the exact opposite - hardware virtualization - reason ;-)

I'll have a look at the gps thread.

BR,
Karl Klammer

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