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LinuxOne Plans Merger, But Shows Few Signs Of Life
An unnamed correspondent points to this NewsForge article by the esteemed Grant Gross about the ongoing saga of LinuxOne, the long-beleaguered and much-abused phantom Linux vendor. Anyone else have light to shed on this story? You may also be interested in reading earlier stories about LinuxOne.
It kind of blows my mind that you can for all intents and purposes publically plan fraud on a massive scale and keep the ball rolling with a shell company with no products or revenues for as long as they have without winding up in jail. It's like those pyramid schemes spams you get which always claim to be legal. I assume they consider legal "Not getting caught." So why hasn't this guy been caught?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I did a quick traceroute to france.linuxone.net (to see if I could guess where their server was, geographically).
It started with this:
bash-2.03$ traceroute france.linuxone.nettraceroute to ram.linuxopen.com (216.101.248.93)
("ram.linuxopen.com?" The whois entry for this says it's registered to LinuxOne, inc. - are they planning to change their name to confuse people?) It [the traceroute] ended with this:
12 core4-g2-0.snfc21.pbi.net (209.232.130.77) 39.969 ms 38.057 ms 37.433 ms
13 rback3-fe2-0.snfc21.pbi.net (206.171.134.134) 41.637 ms 49.016 ms 50.158 ms
14 * adsl-216-101-248-93.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net (216.101.248.93) 2559.41 ms 2972.05 ms
Is "snfc21" in San Francisco?
(Or does pacbell.net have adsl available somehwere in France?)
I was also under the vague impression (I could be wrong about this) that pacbell's Terms of Service for their adsl lines involved not running servers...Is LinuxOne busted? (That'd be pretty funny, after the hassle they gave the reporter about his Yahoo account Terms of Service...)
Well, I thought it was kind of funny, anyway...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I mean, you just can't get better comedy than this.
/home/httpd/htdocs/supported_devices.html
from their site:
list of device drivers supported by LinuxOne OS
[snip]
Enhanced IDE/MFM/RLL disk/cdrom/tape/floppy support
Old hard disk (MFM/RLL/IDE) driver
Include IDE/ATA-2 disk support
Include IDE/ATAPI cdrom support
Include IDE/ATAPI tape support
Include IDE/ATAPI floppy support
bwahhahahah.
i can just see it now.
root:/usr/src/linux# echo `yes|make config` >
and (one of) the really funny thing(s) is that they must've used something like kernel version 2.2.5 b/c it's missing some stuff that's been in 2.2 for a *long* time...
I think what this company is actually trying to merge with is annonymity..
It does exist - they've sent me a free sample about 1.5 years back.
They didnt do much, though - the distribution is an odd mix between packages from old Red Hat Linux and Mandrake releases.
The only code they apparently wrote themselves is a (proprietary) KDE 1.x based frontend to formatting floppy disks, looking almost exactly like KDE 2.0's kfloppy (I wonder if they bought a Qt license from Trolltech?).
Also, they're not very familiar with the way rpm works - they've occasionally changed the filenames of their RPMs to indicate a different version/release, but rpm -qpi still shows the real one.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Anyone who knows anything about Linux immediately associates "LinuxOne" with "Sleazy fly-by-night scam from Hong Kong".
You'd have to be nuts to merge with them and acquire the stench of scandal. The people that started this to begin with are stupid to think that anyone would fall for it after the Linux tulip bulb mania.
I never thought we would hear from them again. Does the LinuxOne distro even exist? If it does, it is anything more than RedHat with no changes other than the name? Does anybody run it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think referring to LinuxOne as a "Linux company" is a bit of a stretch. Of course, referring to it as a "company" is just about as far of a stretch.
This phone transcript is a hoot! Go checkt it out!
My favourite part (the caller asked about the set of applications that come with LinuxOne):
04:18 - LinuxOne: "Ummmm...There's a terminal emulator, a RPM manager called KPackage."
04:25 - Accipiter: "What is RPM?"
04:26 - LinuxOne: "RPM is uh, the program language that you program uh, within Linux."
04:33 - Accipiter: "Oh, so you can actually make programs with RPM?"
04:35 - LinuxOne: "Yes, it's a C++ programming, uh, programming tool."
04:38 - Accipiter: "Oh! Very cool..."
04:40 - LinuxOne: "Uhhmmm... A --"
04:42 - Accipiter: "Does that include a compiler so if I want to...if I write my - if I write my program in RPM, I can compile it with RPM too?"
04:49 - LinuxOne: "Yes."
04:49 - Accipiter: "Oh, Great!"
------------------
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You may like my a cappella music
Linuxone has hopefully trained their phone staff since then...
(there used to be an MP3 of the phone call somewhere...)
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Anyone seeking to know what good investigative reporting is about should read this article. I haven't seen stuff like this since, well, I did investigative reporting. I wasn't this good, but I didn't have Grant Gross's resources, either. [I was at a crappy radio station that just wanted local news...but I still did more hard reporting than our news director did.]
--
-- Geof F. Morris
Yes, I've seen their product and ordered my free CD because I am a member of the educational community. What I saw wasn't impressive, but at least they were real CDs and not CD-Rs. I didn't play around with it very much, realizing that it wasn't really anything special and wasn't really all that interesting. It was, in my opinion, poorly re-branded RedHat.
The only good thing about LinuxOne is their logo, and even that isn't that great.
I dunno.... any AI InfoBot that can not only discern the question the sender asked and answer it appropriately, but can also tell that they're violating the TOS from the sender's email account provider has *GOT* to be pretty amazing!
I know *I'd* buy from LinuxOne, based on their ability to create such a phenomenal bot alone!
-drin
I manage all the computers for the group of guys that are doing this deal. Linuxone isn't a shadow company at all. They do have some interesting developments, but I'm not sure if I'm supposed to go talking about them or not. They are doing work with embedded systems, at least last I heard. The company is going to split, with Dr. Cho (SP) keeping Linuxone, and the current CEO, Richard Krauss (SP again) splitting off into a new company with his toy, a device that lets you use USB over the Internet, which seems rather silly to me... I don't know what LinuxOne will do, but I'd assume something emdedded...I have no clue why they even bother having their distribution, which probably isn't maintained and was mad buggy. I had to play with it quite a bit to make it even run...
> Please, why give these jokers any
> kind of exposure? The only place I want to see the name "LinuxOne" is in the FuckedCompany Hall of Fame.
Well, I'd say all of those jokers probably agree with you 110%. Right now, the last thing anyone connected with LinuxOne wants is for someone to remember that stupid company: each of one of their corporate officers are trying hard to find a new job in a softening high-tech economy in order to pay the rent & buy groceries.
It's one thing to work for a company like Microsoft & not understand what Free Source Software is about (``Okay, I screwed up -- but I know where my next paycheck is coming from"), & another to try to make money off of Free Source Software, but not know what it's about (``Okay, I screwed up -- but lots of technically savvy people remember I made a fool of myself, won't hire me, & I don't know where my next paycheck is coming from.")
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Let's see:
Still no products that anyone uses.
Still no IPO.
Still no business plan.
Still no legitimacy.
This is an interesting article and all about a true fly-by-night company without a clue, but I'd forgotten about LinuxOne, and realized how happy I was about that fact when I saw the name "LinuxOne" on the front page. Please, why give these jokers any kind of exposure? The only place I want to see the name "LinuxOne" is in the FuckedCompany Hall of Fame.
I'd say the "AI Info Bot"'s reply to Gross' first e-mail says enough about how much attention this company really wants, or deserves.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
"If you are seeing this instead of the content you expected, please contact the administrator of the site involved. If you send mail about this to the authors of the Apache software or LinuxOne Inc., who almost certainly have nothing to do with this site, your message will be ignored."
Expectable i guess.
I like meat helmets.
The NewsForge article is definitely worth a read; it's an example of some very fine investigative reporting and is entertaining as well (particularly if you were following the earlier LinuxOne news over the last year and a half).
:-)
This ``Micrometix'' company which is supposedly planning a merger with LinuxOne seems rather shady itself, eh?