Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I don't think microsoft will be very happy with stallman for trying to call it gnu/Windows
Let's call it America's Open Library (AOL) and send it out in bulk mailings on cheap blue CDs. This has gotta be effective, right?
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
I've found that it's much easier to say to people 'hey, check out this software that runs on windows' than it is to say 'hey, ditch windows and use linux'. People are generally more responsive if they don't have to leave their comfort zone, then once they have a chance to use Free Software, see that they like it, that it's better, have used OpenOffice in windows, then say oh yea, Linux can do that, and more, and with more freedom. It's especially easy to nab programmers that way, because they get to see the source of what they're using.
I've been doing this for a while, building my own CDs and passing them out. First with Win32 software then a Linux distro. Knoppix was rad because it let me add another step to the conversion process. It's a step to change mindshare and for a lot of people OpenCD will be their first step towards computing freedom.
I leave a trail of little Linux users everywhere I go and this is the tactic I've been using for a long time. Now they've made my job easier.
I've been using Open Office on Windows for a few weeks, and it's just fantastic.
I think too many people focus on Linux when they talk about open-source software, when the beauty of this software is that it's portable and usable on so many platforms. When I have to use Windows, I love to be able to use The Gimp and OpenOffice, since I'm not locked into proprietary formats.
Microsoft's monopoly exists in their applications, which have always been much better than the easily available alternatives, until now.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Seems to me like there's gonna be a lot of unnecessary downloading of files you'll never use. How about just a floppy with the Program Browser on it, but links to download the file from the internet? Along with a comprehensive description of the program, users would only have to download what they want. And i don't think i'm being harsh in saying that anyone without an internet connection really needs to shape-up!
Everything sucks except musicandstuff
They should make an OpenGames CD with FreeCraft, FreeCiv, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Tux Racer, etc. etc. Kids would love it.
And there's lots more good stuff that directly answers your question. If you ever get ten minutes or so to spare, I recommend giving the article a read.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
Free OSes (Linux, BSDs,...) have a lot of values, _one_ of which is their large library of free applications.
By bundling those for windows, people will have less reasons to switch to one of those free OSes. Of course, there are still reasons, but there is one less.
People who don't matter for ideology behind free OSes won't bother switching. ANd I'm afraid this means a lot of users...
There is some momentum which is needed with free OSes to have the attention span of big companies, and convince them to throw resources at supporting their products under those OSes. Having less people switch to those means less momentum, and therefore less attention.
On the other end, using those tools under Windows will at least render much easier data exchanges, and is therefore a first step in breaking the dependency on those proprietary and more or less closed formats.
I'm not sure if this is ideologically good or not. It will for sure be usefull for those who have no possiblity to switch of OS (because of job requirements, or games,...).
My 2 cents...
-- No signature yet.
This is an admirable idea. Unfortunately, it will suffer the same fate that Linux suffers in most businesses; no drop-in replacement for MS-Access. I'd love to see an 'Open Office' product replace that bloated hog MS Office, but my employer lives on Access. It's used as both a front end, and as stand alone single user databases. --- Is it possible for Newsforge to use an even smaller font? I can barely read it now...
Blank cd's are cheap, so using them to distribute free software is a wonderful idea. If you can burn this, and give it to a few friends, co-workers, or family members who use windows, if they like it, most likely they'll burn it and pass it on (the probably already do this with other software anyway). This being legal, they'll actually feel good about redistributing it. The wider this gets spread, the less money goes into the pockets of people who head greedy corporations, and more money goes to the actual programmers. In my mind, if i'm getting all my software free, i'm more likely to be able to donate directly to the programmer(s) to keep the projects going, because i'm not wasting money on pretty boxes, or supporting company bureaucracy. Send copies of this or knoppix out with your christmas cards this year. Give people the gift of freedom. :)
"As you might expect, the headline acts on the CD are OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and Beonex"
Actually, I'm a bit surprised by Beonex's presence. I would have expected Mozilla and/or Phoenix in its place. Can someone fill me in what (if anything) makes Beonex a better choice? I've tried it out briefly, but don't remmeber any significant improvements over Mozilla itself and it seems to get updated much less frequently.
And yes, I do realize that Mozilla isn't intended to be for end users, but it works well for me so I'm hoping for answers that will actually help me to understand the difference in practical terms rather than based on intent.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
This needs to be done in conjunction with a robust support system (that corporations would pay for). The software can be free, but for businesses to adopt this kind of thing, there will need people who provide the operational support and integration sevices which can not be effecively done without money. The prime candidate for this job is IBM. Once people use this at work, they'll use it at home.
The faux pas isn't the target audience itself-- it's a bad misjudgment of how far "market penetration" (if I must wax Corporate for the moment) will go among said target audience.
Or, to put it more clearly-- this CD is targeted at bringing open-source software to people who otherwise would not use it, or maybe even have heard of it.
But how many of those people are going to have heard of OpenCD.org? Joe Beer and his wife Martha surely aren't reading SlashDot. Or Kuro5hin. Or $OTHER_GEEK_HANGOUT_SITE.
Not to be a fatalist, but I don't think this CD (which is an EXCELLENT idea in concept) will get very many users. Sure, here and there a rabid OSS person will show it to all of their friends, and that's a Good Thing. But one thing SlashDot readers (and posters) tend to underestimate is the colossal "mindshare" Windows and Microsoft products in general hold. People, realize-- to many people in this country, Bill Gates is a "great business leader", to some almost a hero. Many people aspire to be like him, and hardly anyone (excepting geeks) has anything against what he's doing. We at SlashDot aren't quite so complacent-- but the great masses of people in this country ARE!
Going against the MS monopoly with this nice OSS CD is like... well... To make an analogy to Star Control 2, it would be rather like going up against a fully-loaded Ur-Quan Dreadnought in a Shofixti Scout. With the Glory Device broken...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
They really have to catch up :) Go GNUWin team go!
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
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.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I like this. Easy to use software that is genuinely useful in a well presented form. Well done.
Many businesses are too smart to download and install warez versions of anything. It is illegal. Most businesses are too worried about liability issues arising from disgruntled ex-employees blowing the whistle on them for stealing software.
:-)
OSS versions make it possible for these companies to save money, not suffer lock-in, and not worry about being eaten by their own young.
MFG: "The system supports both the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) platforms."
Umm... can they do that?
I mean, since Mozilla is "free" can they place distribution conditions on it and deny people the ability to distribute it?
Knoppix has it, how does Klaus manage it?
KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.
It's really too bad Mozilla won't be included on the CD.
It deserves as much press time and attention as possible.
I thought this at first also, but then I realized that Mozilla still has a little ways to go to be usable for the Windows masses. This is not a troll about Mozilla; I use it myself all the time on my Linux box. But I have spoken to a few people that I had try out Mozilla on Windows, and they all reported little quirks here and there that people like me might ignore, since I'm used to that sort of thing in some OSS products, but for a windows user used to more or less smooth running of their apps, it is unacceptable.
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but Mozilla's newsgroup reader is atrocious (random hangs, no way to mark all read without clicking on article first, no yEnc decoding, etc etc etc) I just barely tolerate it myself.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Does anyone care about this? Surely anyone who is aware or interested in OSS would download this stuff themselves to get the latest version? Anyone who doesn't know how to do that is probably also incapable of installing these programs.
Did you read the article? Seriously, I'm not trying to troll here. The article states that they took a long, hard look at which apps to include. From the list that they picked, it appears that they chose ones that are easy to install. Remember that this is specifically targeted towards non-OSS users.
Case and point: try installing OpenOffice some time. I did it recently on my older RH 7.1 box after my wife got a brand new RH 8.0 laptop with it pre-installed so we'd have the same software on both machines. Took about 30 seconds to install. The experience was akin to installing a Windows app. If its this easy to install on Linux, I can't imagine it being much harder on Windows.
Naturally, if someone out there has had a negative experience, please correct me on this.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
I mean, since Mozilla is "free" can they place distribution conditions on it and deny people the ability to distribute it?
Well, no. They can't force people not to distriute Mozilla, but they can ask you nicely not to, since that's not what the binaries are intended for. I suppose the OpenCD people could have told mozilla.org to get lost, but since there are plenty of alternatives, and it's not like they don't have a good reason for the request, why not play nicely?
"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated"
CBCran a little feature on OpenOffice.org on Thursday in which columnist Jim Brey discissed, briefly, Open Source generally and Open Office specifically. You can listen to it here.
Given that this is MainStream media, this is a solid endorsement for Open Office.
In a ZDNet interview Microsoft's Jeff Raikes stated"We can say there's only about 10 percent or 20 percent of the features that we'll use, but your 10 percent is going to be different from my 10 percent."
With the majority of the "Real Work" being done with 10 percent (+/-) of the features, I'd say OOo has a good chance to make serious inroads into the market. I still use Star Office on one of my laptops but will be looking at Open Office very soon.
to have some people use Free software and see some of the benefits, than to have those people only use Free software if they switch away from Windows altogether?
A CD like this is helping users down a path, where you want them to climb a wall.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That is unfortunate. Mozilla is one of the best open source examples available in my opinion. It's something anyone can identify with, and (if installed and configured properly) can run Java, Flash, and everything the typical MSIE user needs (or thinks they need).
:)
OpenOffice is another great example, and I'm glad to see it on the list. But Mozilla is usually the first real-world example I give people when discussing open source. It's really easy to name reasons Mozilla is better than IE, and they are things the user understands (disabling popups for example). I can't think of many reasons to support OpenOffice aside from open standards, which the typical Win user won't care about...
Though the price difference between MS Office and OpenOffice is enough of a clincher in many cases
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
How many times have you Windows users had to download a shareware program that expires after 30 days? or have the program throw annoying popup windows after using it?
This is awsome for the Windows community. It brings a little bit of open source to a closed sourced world. Maybe we can convert a few?
Recently I sold someone a system that came with Windows XP. After debating if I should throw Linux on I decided that since the owner already paid for XP, they might as well use it... The problem was that they didn't have a word processor, they couldn't do graphics editing...they couldn't do anything... Whats the point of Windows without something to run on it?
I ended up downloading Mozilla (because as we know... we can't trust Microsoft), Gimp, and Open Office... Wouldn't it be great if someone kept things organized and put out one handy dandy ISO for it all?
If anything... This shows that the open source
world is not selfish... We are bringing our software to a system that wants nothing to do with open source.
See ya Bill Gates...
--
An active Open Source Advocate.
Beonex communicator is on the CD, which is a rebranded mozilla. I've never used it, but it looks pretty much the same as stock mozilla 1.0.1, but rebranded and maybe missing the debuggers, and chatzilla. It has mail, news, composer, and of course, the browser parts of mozilla.
you slashdot the website the cd images are stored on and you want us to review them? Basically you've set the project back almost 2 days until the story leaves the front page.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Is there somebody out there who is going to collect 1,000,000 of these and deliver them to Richard Stallman? If so, sign me up!!
The worst thing that could happen is newcomers using bugzilla as their "discusion forum". I do agree though that some kind of gecko based browser should be added to the CD. What about phoenix? their is a HUGE user support group and lot's of related pages.
(phoenix forum )
(phoenix help/themes/extensions/etc. )
As the developer's say;
1.- What can I do to help?
Why not include it?We need all the distribution we can get. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your coworkers. If you're a student, get it distributed at your college. Submit a story to Slashdot and other news sites about the release. Make some noise on your blog. Spread the word!
In the next month or so, I plan to build my own mozilla and phoenix and re-distribute it. Would anyone be interested?
From the What is TheOpenCD website:
I'm sorry, but what is exactly open source philosophy? Open source is about technical and economical advantages. Free software is about philosophy. Please do not flame me for saying the obvious. When Eric Raymond took Debian Free Software Guidelines and published them as Open Source Definition in 1998 he did it exactly because he wanted free software without the strong philosophy associated with the "free software" term since at least the announcement of the GNU Project in 1983.
I think that TheOpenCD project should not talk about philosophy if they want to promote the open source movement. But if they think that the philosophy is important, then they should promote the free software movement and change their name to TheFreeCD. Because the philosophy is exactly the difference between free software and open source movements. If they talk about "open source philosophy" they are being against the main priciples of both movements.
TheOpenCD project people should read these books:
Those books are not very long, but they provide enough background to let avoid using such unfortunate oxymorons like "open source philosophy." I strongly respect both free software and open source movements and I can not stay ignorant when people insult any of them, while the term "open source philosophy" insults both.
~Christopher Doopov
One of the criteria they have is that each application should have a professional-looking install process. Some applications have been rejected on the grounds that their installation processes weren't up to scratch. From what I read, it seems that the programs are installed individually, not as a group.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I think it's a good idea, because in one download I've got a whole bunch of Open Source software to check out, along with source code and docs.
Magazines have known about this for a long time - cover CDs can shift a lot of dead-tree publications if they've got good software on them. OK, so I got to burn my own CD, but that's not costing me much. Then I can find out what all the fuss is about - are The Gimp, OpenOffice, et al. really all that? - without having to tramp around the Internet.
As for 'but it's not the latest version!', well this is always a dilemma when compiling 'sampler' CDs, whether it's Open Source or not. Provided the version included on the CD is not really ancient, and is stable, then I see no problem.
And as for 'just get a warez copy', I'd rather take the free sample and stay honest, than be a thief, thank you very much...
-MT.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Again, as others have pointed out, it's just a troll, but the last time I checked one of the reasons people use Word in MS Office is as a glorified text editor. Writers write reviews in glorified text editors such as Word. Writers make money for what they do, therefore it's work. Writing is real work. Writing with Open Office is still real work.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I have a number of friends who are stuck with using NT at work. They say they have an approach that works pretty well. They note that Microsoft claims that NT is POSIX compliant. They take this at face value, and start downloading the source for all the usual POSIX-based tools from the online linux archives. They compile them, and they mostly work quite well.
There are problems with the things that just don't work right, of course. But a friend put this in an interesting perspective. Back in the early days of POSIX, the committee sent out requests for specs for a system called WEIRDNIX. This was defined as a system that was technically in compliance with the POSIX specs, but took advantage of every loophole and ambiguity to do things in the worst possible way. This was a technique of pre-emptively adjusting the wording so that vendors would have difficulty violating the spirit of POSIX.
The Microsoft version of the POSIX libraries can be viewed as an implementation of WEIRDNIX. This should give you a good idea of them problems that you will encounter.
But in general, the gnu and linux tools are widely reported to work pretty well on NT. Better than the NT tools, anyway.
--
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Does this mean some rich person is going to fund the mailing out of billions of Debian CDs to every person in the US on a weekly schedule competing with AOL? Instead of "1000 Hours Free!" it could read "Your Life: Free!".
All kidding aside, some kind of grassroots movement for that might be cool even without some rich person to fund it all. You'd go to a website and grab a copy of a standard CD label graphic, burn 20 CDs of some distro, package it up, and then send them out (maybe to a list of addresses provided by the website). A distributed effort to mimic the AOL campaign for OSS benefit, coordinated by some volunteer website.
Although CD-R blanks are practically free, where can you get empty DVD cases for super cheap?
Sorry about that. All the main hubbub happened during the summer when people weren't as busy with school. Selanit busted some major ass to get this out before finals came up and bit him.
Progress was very slow though at the start of the fall semester of school.
But we are still here.
A lot of these programs are cross platform.
A lot of linux users don't understand why anyone should spend the time to write/port windows software. The reason is that this sort of thing helps users transition at their own pace.
They have the ability to run open source software under the OS that their familiar and comfortable wth and the next time the license renewall comes up they can say, "hey, I can run this same software under a free OS instead of paying license fees!"
I've gotten a lot of Windows users to start using PuTTY, WinSCP2 and OpenOffice. I really think this is the first step to becoming comfortable with linux on a daily basis.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
From the article..
"Given that we now have this fast, secure, desktop-ready, free OS, why doesn't everyone switch?"
Hate to argue the third point, but until Linux has a single, consistant, easily understandable set of user interface guidelines that most people follow, I don't think we are there yet. One of the main rules of UI design is consistancy, but a user's experiences will differ vastly from one program to the next, often not allowing them to take what they've learned in one program and apply it to another. (for example, toolbars get located in different places, menu layouts work differently, widgets don't behave the same way, buttons on standard dialog boxes are placed differently, some support context menus, some don't, etc etc.) I'm not saying it's any better or worse on the Windows side, but in my eyes, that really is a major hurdle we need to work on as a community before we proclaim Linux a "desktop-ready" OS.
slashdot!=valid HTML
There's a real perception among most users that free==bad. For instance, I'm switching my college physics lab courses from Excel to OpenOffice for graphing. When I mentioned this to a colleague, his response was "yeah, it's probably good enough for a lot of stuff." The only way to dispel this misconception is to let people see for themselves some concrete examples of how OSS can be higher in quality.
Find free books.
For me personally, these programs have helped me become more and more comfortable with the idea of using linux on the desktop. I haven't switched yet, but I'm close enough to actually be dual booting now thanks to all the developers that released my favorite programs cross platform.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
How many times have you Windows users had to download a shareware program that expires after 30 days? or have the program throw annoying popup windows after using it?
Well, what I see happens is this:
1. www.google.com
2. serial "Program name"
3. enter serial
Maybe your grandma doesn't do that. But when her 15 grandson comes visit, poof goes the nags/expire dates. This has been around slashdot a few times, it's much more common than downloading huge warez or cracks. No "unknown" software downloaded from various sites, just copy-paste a key. Not trying to defend it, but it sure happens a lot.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Also, we didn't have anybody willing to take on that task. If you want to help us out with this, get in touch!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This means that I can download the CD and when I work on computers for people and they say, "dang it! Word is crashing every 12 minutes and giving me a blue screen of death!" I can say, "Hey, check out this free software I have that is compatible with word."
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
As somebody who (like many /.-ers) provides cheap and/or free tech support to family and friends, I make my own "distro" of software for Windows that gets installed as needed. Being a pragmatist, some of the software I have used is less than legally pure. I try to find free (beer) and free (GNU) software wherever I can, but sometimes a few serial numbers come in handy.
As has been pointed out, nobody is going to install Beonix on somebody else's computer. You're either going to update their IE and leave it at that, or you're going to give 'em Mozilla at best.
Also, I'm going to keep giving people WinAmp. No, it isn't free in the GNU sense, but lots of people use it... It's not some wierd product that nobody has ever heard of and can't figure out how to use. And I always keep an installer of Adobe Acrobat around. Sure, I'm probably violating the EULA, but what the hell? I hate going to somebody else's house and waiting for a dialup download and then charge these good people by the hour when I have already spent a lot of time ridding their computer of viruses and I have better things to do.
Probably, the biggest question I am asked about the super-anal-free-GNU software I install on other people's computers is "why?". Why, when Winamp exists and is supported, would I install FreeAmp or anything else? People don't want to hear about RMS and the GNU philosophy, they just want their shit to work, and as cheaply and easily as possible.
To summarize, my personal softare collection will
My biggest wish from the OSS community (and I am not a programmer, and I don't have the time to learn), is for a good Windows virus scanner. I have used (and still use) free (beer) virus scanners because people don't want to pay a ton of cash to make their computer usable. I more-or-less like the one I am using now (grisoft), but I have been burnt by "discontinued programs" before. Bait and switch. I suspect that the scanner itself wouldn't be too hard to write, but updating virus sigs on a regular basis would be.
What would probably be more useful to people like myself is a "virtual" CD.... A list of freely available (but not anally or unnecessarily GNU-ized) collection of download links to software ... and the total download size magically adds up to 650 MB or less.
I can't find the source on the page. Am I just another stupid Slashdotter, or are they missing something??
--j
Sorry if I was confusing.
What I'm saying is without programs like openoffice and putty and winscp and mozilla (all running on win) I wouldn't even consider running an open OS like linux on the desktop.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
OK, I go to the site and I find that it's a 'distro' of assorted open source windows software.
That doesn't matter though. OSS is the only thing that matters. What it is, what it does, how well it does it, NONE of this seems to matter any more--the dividing lines between any two sides of the coin have all faded, and now we're left looking at exactly one question: Is it OpenSource(tm), or EvilProprietary?
Open source as a methodology and a scheme for distributing software is excellent. OpenSource as a cult is exactly as bad as any other cult, and that seems to be the way the OSS world is going--straight to cult status. "You're either with US, or you're with the TERR'RISTS!!!" "My 'puter is L33t--I don't have any proprietary software on it!!!"
Honestly, tell us about new software projects. Tell us how they're licensed. But don't base the QUALITY or VALIDITY of a project on its license, and whether it's OSS.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
...but I offer my own Open Source Software CD to people at my school and recently on eBay. I used Slashdot's story a few months ago about what software for Windows to include on a CD-ROM to get about 666 MB worth of software.
First I gave out a few for free to friends. Then others that are in our computer science classes -- people I barely know -- started asking me for my "open" CD for the DJGPP compiler that's on it. My school uses the ancient Borland Turbo C++ 3.0, and DJGPP's IDE, RHIDE, emulates it very well -- a great alternative to paying $70 for the suite. So far a few tens of CDs were sold at my school and two online.
These CDs are quite popular.
The same can occur here, too. It's very difficult to get Word users to switch to Linux! But if the majority of word processor users (for example) used Open Office (or Abiword or KWord), then they'd find it essentially trivial to switch.
People don't buy operating systems. They buy applications, and then get the operating system to run it. If you want people to use your operating system, you need to get them to use the applications that run on your operating system.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I think open source software is not so much an alternative to proprietary software but rather an alternative to stolen proprietary software, aka warez. I personally use GPL software because I can't afford the proprietary "versions" and I'd rather not steal it. Linux tends to be the perfect platform to run software of this ilk so I use Caldera OpenLinux as my main and only os.
Open source is a lawful and creative answer to warez! Perhaps it's an angle distributers like OpenCD should look at.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Because installing one is theft and installing the other is not. You can rationalize it all you like.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I use Mozilla every day as my main browser on Windows. This is not to make a statement or because I feel sorrty for the Mozilla organization, but because it's a better browser, and I like it better. Just the popup control alone makes it worth switching. The only problems it ever has is when hitting pages designed exclusively for IE. I'll admit the Mail/News section isn't as elegant as OE, but it works fine, and even has some neat features that OE lacks (folder flexibility, Bayesian spam filtering). Unless you're a dedicated smut surfer, the News section works fine too. And the text editor in Mail/News actually works all the time, unlike OE's which is really buggy.
The ISO image is only 300MB, so more than half of the CD is empty. I would suggest filling it with some music. The empty space should be filled with about 100 songs. Free software is not the only Free data out there, there is also Free music.
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
The project needs hits... they probably don't really mind getting some. They're not getting setback 2 days, they're getting ahead a couple months by Slashdot users actually using it and giving them a good foundation.
So yeah, they should post mirrors, but this is better than no story at all, by a lot.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Sounds kind of like Phat Linux to me.
Somehow I hadn't heard of (or forgot about) TheOpenCD.
:^)
I'm vaguely familiar (as in, two of my apps are included in, and I just submitted many more to) the GNUWin II CD. It's the same idea. A CD of Open Source software we all use and love; just Windows versions of them.
I guess I'm going to have to find someone who runs Windows and have them nominate some of my ported games to TheOpenCD.