[Coco] DriveWire 4 on Window 98

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 24 September 2013 06:03:36 David Ladd did opine:

> Aaron,
> 
> Thank you for following up on this and letting us know our options for
> the java versions and OS's.
> 
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:10 AM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
> > After investigating things, it seems there are 2 problems running DW4
> > on Win98.
> > 
> > The first is the JVM version required.  This I have solved, and DW4
> > now requires only version 1.5.  This will allow it to run on even
> > older Linux and Mac machines, and allows the server and "lite" UI to
> > run fine on Win 98 (the lite UI allows disks to be inserted/removed
> > and little else, similar to the DW3 software).
> > 
> > However, to run the full featured UI there is also a problem with the
> > native GUI library (SWT).  They dropped support for Win98 quite some
> > time ago.
> > 
> > In order to make the full DW4 UI run on Win98, I would have to use a
> > very old version of SWT, which would potentially impact the more
> > modern platforms negatively and limit the features we can use going
> > forward.

Rather than that, any machine with win98 on it should not be allowed a 
network connection without protection of some sort in the router.  It will 
be owned by some black hat and used to relay spam, typically in less than 
20 minutes.  It may also get key loggers installed to report your banking 
login and password details, sending that to someplace halfway around the 
planet if you do your banking on it.  So don't.

A Win98 machine is also an excellent candidate to put a recent linux on.  
You'll automatically get a version of java new enough to run drivewire in 
the bargain.  If its a low resource machine, with less than 512 megs of 
ram, that should be upgraded if possible, and the linux flavor chosen 
should e something with a simpler, uses less memory, gui.  The ubunbtu 
12.04 LTS is available with the xfce interface, called xubuntu.  The 12.04 
stands for the release date, April of 2012, and has the advantage of the 
'LTS' (Long Term Service) in that it will be supported for all security 
updates until April of 2017. The update manager will check about once a 
day, automatically, and ask you if it should install those updates that are 
related to what you actually have installed.  Generally, any security fixes 
are installed before the black hats even know about them.

I just installed that on an old ex-school system Dell for a friend and it 
works well.  But, I also sold her a yard sale router I had a $20 bill in, a 
Linksys WRT54GL that I had reflashed to DD-WRT, making her system as bullet 
proof against the attackers as there is.  I've been running DD-WRT here for 
several years, only one person has come through it and into this machine, 
and I had to give him the passwords on the phone before he could.


> > Given that Win98 is ~15 years old and unsupported by basically
> > everything these days, I think we will have to follow suit and support
> > only XP and above.  Note that even though Microsoft is dropping XP
> > support early next year, there should be no problem supporting XP with
> > DW4 for quite a long time, if ever.
> > 
> > You can still run the server on a Win98 machine and use either the
> > lite UI, the OS9 interface, the DW4Man program by Bill, or run the
> > standard GUI on another more modern computer to control it.
> > 
> > --
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> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
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> 
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Cheers, Gene
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