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Lycoris - Linux for the Masses?
Dejected @Work writes "MSNBC.com, a definitely sketchy source of Linux information, just came out with an article "Linux for the Masses" about the ease of installing Lycoris(formerly Redmond Linux) on the desktop. The author even concluded you can 'fall in love with an ever-easier-to-use operating system.' It sounds like great news but am I missing something?" Several favorable reviews of this distro recently. It looks like all you have to do to get the reviewers on your side is to let them play solitaire during the install. :) Update: 04/13 14:53 GMT by T : Eric Krout also suggests the two-part review (part one and part two) over on monolinux.
The Lycoris home page and screen shot gallery.
I found it difficult to do anything with beyond whatever is installed with the OS.
Yeah, a lot of stuff is easy to use out of the box, but I couldn't add ANYTHING very easily at all.
Lycoris, like most modern distos have every driver in the world build as a module so you will never have to do this.
/etc/modules that will make it load on boot.
If their hardware probe didn't find something, find out the name of the driver and do a 'modprobe drivername' and then submit a bug report to them saying that it did not install it automatically.
Keep in mind that they don't have the manpower or money to test this on all possible hardware. But if you tell them, they can fix the autodection for other people with your soundcard and they will probably give you some line that you can add to
Solaris 8 gives you a web browser during the install (after network setup), which I think is fucking brilliant...
If it works well enough to be a Windows replacement, I would be more than willing to get it. However, I'll hold off until a few more reviews of it come out. It certainly beats having to pay Microsoft anywhere from $100-300 just for the operating system.
This
Lindows has alot of money, Michael Robertson is a billionare, and he has support from others, Lindows isnt going anywhere,
Its $99? $99 will be for access to warehouse and what not, remember Lindows is GPL which means they MUST release the code, just let your friend burn you a CD, You wont be able to log into the warehouse without your friends password but you'll have Lindows.
Who in their right mind (talking consumer, not geek here) would throw out a perfectly good copy and replace it with a pay Linux? No one. Linux will always appeal exclusively to geeks, no matter if anyone on
Word of mouth, the fact that while Lindows isnt free, by using it you get access to thousands of free programs which costs money to use under Windows,
Also add the fact that your windows programs will work in Lindows.
Lindows is a good OS with a good plan and if they market it correctly they can be as successful as redhat, right now it depends on how they market it.
Lindows is set to make their money on services like warehouse and click n run, I dont think they can stop people from distributing Lindows for cheaper or getting ISOs from friends.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I bought my wife an IBM NetVista and Redmond Linux was the ONLY distro that detected the video card w/ the Flat screen monitor. (Mandrake 8.1 only had it in 800x600 with tweaking)
It's a VERY easy distro to use. It's NOT for power users. You are very limited in what you can do. They make it very hard to fuck up your system. It has a customized version of KDE (which is VERY good in my opinion). It's near impossible to add Gnome to the desktop. It uses Caldera RPM's so you can just grab them off of Caldera's site.The install was so easy, she did it herself. (She is not tech savvy). She did it while I was in the shower. I had to redo it so I could see for myself. I think it's an excellent distro for mom & dad. However, power Linux users will get frustrated by it's lack of choices. There are no servers installed (except sshd). Not even an ftp server, or Apache. (which is by design...Mom isn't supposed to be running a webserver on the machine she does her taxes on, ya know?) All in All, I give it 9 out of 10 for newbies, 4 out of 10 for veterans.
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Next time search for a good review that's thorough rather than linking to some half-baked MSNBC article.
n ame=News&file=article&sid=670&mode=thread&order=0& thold=0 n ame=News&file=article&sid=667&mode=thread&order=0& thold=0 4 -12-014-26-RV-DT 4 -12-005-26-NW-DT l e=article&sid=1856 l e=article&sid=1848 / 12/1740252 / 11/1459213
The best review out there isn't exactly a top-secret either, as is apparent below.
1] http://www.tuxreports.com/modules.php?op=modload&
2] http://www.tuxreports.com/modules.php?op=modload&
3] http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-0
4] http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-0
5] http://pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&fi
6] http://pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&fi
7] http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/04
8] http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/04
9] http://www.distrowatch.com/index.php
Thanks.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Easy to use often is "looks exactly like windows" when you consider the ease of use of any system is directly related to the amount of experience you have with it. Since most Joe Six-Pack users have had experience with Windows, that is what they know. If they can take that body of knowledge and apply it to a new system then they will like it better. Why is Ctrl-V paste and Ctrl-X cut? Wordstar. People knew those shortcuts from the old system, and since the software makers wanted to make it "easier to use" for new users, they kept the same bindings. How many people use Emacs key bindings in non-Emacs editors? It is the same principle. People like what they already know and hence look at it as "easier." Is QWERTY the best keyboard layout? When you think about it not really. But since we all know it most of us view it as the easiest, when it would actually be much easier to put all of the most common letters on the home row.
What's this I hear about a Kernel recompile? /etc/lilo.conf to add your new kernel, don't replace your old one, you may need it. If you're using grub you'll see an error at the end of the make install, it's meaningless, just means that the LILO bit failed.
Eegads! One of the VERY first things I had to learn how to do was a kernel config and compile. This was back in the day of RedHat 5.2 (My first distro), and I was getting it to use the 2.2 kernels. I NEEDED to do a compile for it to work my onboard sound and a few other things as I recall.
Plenty of people have written up little HOWTOs on the subject. With Xconfig it's really NOT hard at all. A little time consuming to read all the helps for the things you don't know if you need or not, but not difficult.
The stable Linux kernel is one of the best written pieces of software around, based on the occurences of warnngs I see during compile time.
I recommend a vanilla kernel from the stable branch, unzip it and go on in. Type make xconfig and off you go. when you're done a make dep ; make clean ; make bzImage ; make modules ; make modules_install will do most of the work.
Then there's the bit about getting things where they belong. An easy make install does the trick. If you're using LILO edit the
This is VERY brief, but I'm just trying to say to people that a kernel recompile is NOT to be feared. Look for instructions on Google, I'm sure they're out there.
Jonathan
Aqua Human Interface Guidelines (who also have to convince people that it does not have to look like Windows to be easy to use).
The main point I see there is to have the interface react as close as possible to the real world counterpart, if there is one. That's how Apple (or Xerox in the beginning) invented the GUI. So there's really no point in copying Windows, because then you only make life easier for some. But if we could go back and think about how we would work on a wooden desktop with paper documents and a real, ringing phone... There's lots of nice GUI ideas out there, just stop staring at this computer screen here for a moment.
The weakness with Linux today isn't ease of install - hell, Redhat has been trivial to install for at least a couple of versions now, even on the weirdest hardware Joe "Dude, You're Gettin' a Dell" Sixpack is likely to have.
Installation is ALREADY pretty brain dead, even to the most clueless newbie. At most, they're looking at a 5 minute call to their vendor / friend / LUG / 7-year old neighbor.
The trouble comes when they want to run the stupid elf bowling program some cow orker sends to them. Or when they want to free up some drive space. Or when they want to install a game. Or install ANY new software via four to six clicks of a mouse button.
Put the creative energy in the right direction, and Linux WILL win. This isn't it. This is the road more travelled.
-l
Wouldn't take all that much, when you're dealing with high quality stuff. At 1200 DPI (which most decent scanners and printers these days can handle), it would only take 11 x 11 inches of true colour would give you just under 700MB of uncompressed image data.
Hell, my scanner, which is like 6 years old, can do 4800 DPI (interpolated). At 4800 DPI, it would only take a 2.8 inch square scan to take up 700MB. Mind you, that's pretty insane resolution.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
700MB TIFF => NSA ?!?
.
Stop smokin the grass.
ONE (1) RGB aerial photo taken in a standard 6 monthly air survey is about this size.
When producing a mosaic for that boring local Govt Land Admin dept of a single urban area,
several hundred of these are mosaiced together to create a (typically) approx 32 GB image
that is generally compressed to about 8GB or so.
NSA, hrmmpt, they'd want something better . .
i dont really consider lycoris to be production quality.
when i installed it, i selected my monitor model and 1200x1024 (i think) resolution. after the install finished and kde started, i had a dark line running down the left side of my screen. i had to reinstall and select a generic monitor to get it to look right.
once i got it installed, it was pretty slick but a bit quirky..
when you put a cd in, it pops up konqueror and lets your browse the cd.. rock on.. i love that. but that started goofing up after i left the computer on for 2 or 3 days.. (i think i mounted a cd at the command-line.. perhaps that's what did it) everything was very easy.. the task-oriented menus rocked. all the mime types were set up correctly.. very cool.
i switched to mandrake 8.2 after a week because i had to reboot my computer a few times (windows syndrome) to fix a few problems i was having (like the cd automounting).. sure, i could have spent a few days tracking the problems down and fixing them without rebooting, but i'm too lazy to learn the lycoris way of doing things..
i didnt have much luck with the built-in smb stuff, either.. i mean, sure, it browsed my windows computers easily enough, but try to drag and drop 10 or 11 mp3s at a time from your remote windows box to a folder on your linux box.. no dice (at least, *i* had bad luck with it).. but perhaps that's just a problem with kde..
i'd like to switch back to lycoris once it becomes more reliable and functional. the ISOs on their ftp site are beta quality in my opinion..
When I first read the first review here about the ease to use of Lycoris I got very interested to implement it on my job.
:) So the installation was done nicely and quick. Looked nice, except for the problem of not being able to choose the packages. But then there was the final thing about it.. When finished the installation it didn't reboot, but rather show me a login screen on KDE. I logged on try one of the apps, crashed, try a couple more, crashed both...
:)
The first thing I did was try to intall it on an old PII 266 64MB RAM, the installation was easy but long, then when I try it it was easy, I like the Network Neighborhood-like thing... but in general, my experience was a really slow system... and plus, I would have like to chose the packages that I want to install... Everytime I opened Konqueror was a damn slow thing and had to wait for about a minute for it to be usable (then another 30 secs. to go to a directory)
I thought it might have been the computer was an old one taken from a lab (I work on a University) so I try to install it on a newer one but I had trouble to boot the cd on that one.. I try on another one of the same configuration, same problem, so I thought it might be some wired problems with the bios or something (didn't went any deep on that).
So finally I tried on my box at home (It had to work on that one
And that was the end of me using lycoris, shut it down and got back to Debian. From my experience I would say that is a distribution that has a nice interface, but seems like needs to mature a lot still. It makes easy for the average user to work with it, but estability problems on its apps are still needing a lot of work.
I wouldn't recomend it for production yet, development is needed on it, so I guess as testers we could give a hand to the people at Redmon. I guess that ease of use sometimes sacrifies other powerfull features on a system... but what the hell, let's work on it