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LinuxOne Lite: First Looks
Sensei^ from LinuxNewbie sent us their
Review of LinuxOne. Basically, the distribution is "A Badly Repackaged Mandrake". Read this review: the list of problems is amusing, and it will cause your disgust of the corporate entity known as LinuxOne to climb to a new level.
So I'm of the opinion that there is no 'one true distro.' Each distro is targeted at a specific group. Debian is for the true blue gnu freaks, turbolinux offers excellent support of pacific rim languages, corel is for newbies etc...
So what market is linuxone targeting? I've wrestled with this question and come to a conclusion, it's for people who want the pentium optimized binaries of mandrake, but find the term 'mandrake' to be offensive. If this describes you, then you should check out this distro. If you do not find the term 'mandrake' offensive then you should probably take a sensitivity training course you sexist/speciesist/whatever bastard!
Yeah, it's not a serious post, but it's not like linuxone's a serious company/distro.
--Shoeboy
Q: Can I access the Internet?
:)
A: Certainly. To access the Internet, return to
Windows because the Lite version is built on
top of Windows. Another option is to use
LinuxOne OS.
Ummm...no, thanks. I'll stick to a regular distro for now
"We want to call Shenanigan on these people"
"Now, you know you can't just go around calling Shenanigans on people without good reason."
"But they sold me this Linux distribution and it won't even boot!"
"Well, we'll just have to see about that. Let's try it on my police laptop..." (Vendor deftly switches LinuxOne CD for Redhat 6.1) "Well, now, there you see, boys, it boots just fine!"
"But..But...it didn't work! They're crooks!"
...the list of problems is amusing...
I, for one, am not all that amused. How many new potential Linux users will install this (or try to) and fail miserably, then conclude that Linux is crap. How many of them will tell their friends about their misfortune? Will Big Bad Bill point to this and say "See, we told ya! It's hard to install and buggy. Come back to us and we'll hold your hand and make it all better."
We know that LinuxOne != Linux, but newbies may try to equate the two. This could end up alienating many converts to the light side. We are now between a rock and a hard place: we want LinuxOne to bite turf, but we don't want Linux itself to crash and burn with it.
In our advocacy of Linux, let's be sure to point people to some of the many fine distros that are available and steer folks away from LinuxOne.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Incidentally, VA Linux does not make hardware. They're a reseller for a small PC assembler in Fremont, CA. Read their SEC filing.
Historically, there are very few examples of companies that had huge price/revenue ratios and eventually grew up to generate enough profits to justify them. (Exercise for investors: name three.) But there are many examples of speculative bubbles.
The Linux stocks aren't the usual growth company situation. Usually, you have big revenue, big expenses, and small profits. The classic good example is Amazon.com. (The classic bad example is Buy.com, which has a business model of selling at a loss and making it up on volume.) But both Red Hat and VA Linux have small revenue, no profits, no valuable assets, and a huge market cap. That's not a growth company. It's something else, and it's not good.
The current market is running on what's called "greater fool theory", the hope that, even though you own something that's overpriced, there's some sucker out there who will buy it for even more money. As with all Ponzi schemes, eventually you run out of suckers.
There is going to be a bloodbath in these stocks. Probably this year.