SherLok Merfy wrote:
On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 gnome@hawaii.rr.com wrote:
See - Windows XP is STILL just a GUI running on top of DOS! ;-)
(...) So? The internet is STILL just Transfer Control Protocol flowing over Internet Protocol (Packets). What bothers me is that when I boot with XP in 98, then PCTOOLS can't read my File Allocation Tables (even on the floppy).
But...Linux doesn't complain about them with the current version of DOS, so I'm not risking whatever M$ calls an upgrade...and I'm crossing my fingers that I'm not missing evidence of a boot sector virus.
I suspect that a boot sector virus would do little more than freeze the system once a protected mode OS kicked the processor into protected mode. At least the boot sector viruses I used to know worked by hooking themselves into the system's interrupt table, which was a small hunk of low real-mode memory. The moment a true protected mode OS (like OS/2, Linus or UNIX) switched to protected mode, those pointers were pointing into undefined memory, and hardware interrupt processing went into Lala Land. Also, a boot sector virus that could run under Windows would be expecting a different memory architecture than Linux uses, so it's own internal jumps and system calls wouldn't be going anywhere meaningful. We use a product here called Win4Lin - it literally runs real Windows98 under Linux. It runs it very well. It runs it so well that Win4Lin can run and be infected by Windows viruses - but only the Win4Lin session. They cannot infect the Linux system itself. WINE, on the other hand, probably could not run a Windows virus or worm at all, but then it can be rather fun getting a Windows app to work reliably under WINE. I wonder which one would fare better at running Windows fractal apps like UltraFractal, ChaosPro, or any of the others that are out there? Still, I do look for XFractint to someday match the full functionality of DOS Fractint ... -- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com