TheOpenCD Launches First Edition

Emil fra Loeneberg writes with welcome news from TheOpenCD. "This article on NewsForge describes a project which plans to distribute Open Source Software (OSS) widely to Windows users. You can download a CD image from a mirror site and start spreading the OSS message. It's basically an OSS distro for Windows. This project was also mentioned on Slashdot back in April and now they are ready with a first release. Any first reviews?"

Comments

Re:NT, as in Not Today

[Anonymous Coward]

But openoffice already HAS Access functionality, and it's relatively painless to setup.

it requires an external database, anything that can be used via odbc, basically. unfortunately, i don't think it handles access files themselves *yet*.
see here: on linuxmafia for more information on this topic.

ashridah

How about GNUWin???

[Artemis3]

This looks like yet another GNUWin...

They really have to catch up :) Go GNUWin team go!

Re:nozilla!

[Monoman]

Read their FAQ ... or just the appropriate text pasted below.

Q. Why didn't you include Mozilla?
A. We were contacted by a developer in the Mozilla project, who asked us not to include Mozilla. The Mozilla.org project provides binaries for testing purposes only, as anyone who has read this page knows -- scroll down to the very bottom, and you will find a notice to that effect. In short, they do not want to wind up providing end-user support to people, and so they ask people not to re-distribute Mozilla unless it has been customized to make it clear that Mozilla.org did not provide the binary and will not support it.

Unfortunately, it is not at all clear what requirements we need to meet in order to be able to re-distribute Mozilla, or what level of customization would be needed to do so. Also, we didn't have anybody willing to take on that task. If you want to help us out with this, get in touch! Beonex is a fine product, but we tend to think that Mozilla is better, especially since it is updated much more often.

Re:Beonex

[Aanallein]

Can someone fill me in what (if anything) makes Beonex a better choice?

Although like any other distribution based on Mozilla (like Netscape), Beonex is running behind in features on the regular Mozilla releases, it does actually have a few things that it does better than Mozilla.
If I'm not mistaken (*actually bothers to check the website - ...I'm not) Beonex 0.8.1 is still based on Mozilla 1.0.1, so it's got all that stability, yet it does offer a few features from the trunk, such as the option to view HTML mail as plain text.
Another feature from Beonex which isn't found in Mozilla at all (yet?) are options to set the HTTP_REFERER; I think you can opt to never send it, to only send it within the same domain, to always fake it to somethign else (not sure about this one), or to just send it always.
Where Mozilla preferences are set in such a way that they don't provide optimal security and/or privacy, Beonex has changed those defaults so they do. (Improved privacy & security are the main focus of Beonex as I see it.)
Beonex also comes with a spell checker by default, something which the latest version of Mozilla is still lacking. (Yes, the Netscape 7 spellchecker is currently once more working on linux builds, but not on windows.)

Of course, now I'm comparing Beonex with Mozilla, while what I should do is compare Beonex with Netscape 7. There you trade in integrated AIM/ICQ for popup blocking (though that's finally coming in Netscape 7.01 - even with whitelisting options), image blocking, better default preferences, and general lack of AOL clutter.

Basically, Beonex would be the ideal distribution for any geek if it wasn't for Mozilla itself appealing more.