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Talk With Michael Robertson
Lindows CEO Michael Robertson is vilified by many Linux advocates. At the same time, he is probably drawing more attention to desktop Linux than anyone else in the world. Is he evil? Or is he just a typical American businessman trying to make it big (for the second time; before Lindows, he founded -- and later sold -- MP3.com)? One thing is for sure: Unlike many CEOs, he'll give a plain-talk answer to a straight question. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions submitted here by Slashdot readers to Robertson tomorrow, and run his answers, unedited, as soon as he gets them back to us.
Linux does have viruses, and Lindows in particular runs the desktop as root by default. Lindows is much more likely to become infected by a virus than a Linux system configured with limited user accounts.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
The GPL states that the source code be available to anyone who receives a binary copy of the source, not the general public as a whole. If you buy Lindows, you can get the source code from their "my.lindows.com" page.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Bzzt. Wrong. Nobody has ever given "millions of dollars to KDE". In fact IBM has certainly had more tangible contributions to the project.
I'm not anti-Lindows or anti-Michael, but this is a gross overstatement. To the best of my knowledge a few thousand dollars were given to the KDE League; this is a far cry from "millions". We of course appreciate the contribution, but it's important to keep things in perspective. KDE has never had a donation of anywhere close to a million dollars from any party.
(And yes, I am a KDE developer.)
Your question suggests an attitude of Linux is impervious to viruses. This thought is VERY common amongst Linux enthusiasts. However this thinking, that Linux is impervious to viruses, could very well be the biggest problem that Linux has ever seen.
The fact is that viruses come in many forms. The more common ones today are of the worm variety and they usually target Outlook because it is the most pervasive mail client out there. But, because Linux has not yet seen a powerful worm or virus does NOT mean that it is impervious to them.
As more and more functionality is added to Linux mail clients the risk of a worm increases. Further, the Linux community is starting to standardize on fewer clients. Right now it is likely that 90% of the Linux users are using one of three mail clients Kmail, Evolution, or Mozilla Mail. This means that there is an increasing number of users for each/any of these clients and as the number grows it increases the likelyhood that one will be targeted for a worm.
Another misconception is that Linux users are restricted to user space, meaning that a virus or worm would not have systemwide access(theoretically). But, plenty of damage could be done from user space alone.
Here is a worm concept that could do great damage to Linux: The worm would spread via email. It could be a complex ELF or a java script or even a BASH script. The subject would be something like "Hey I can't get this script to work, can you help me? What Linux junkie could pass that up? You know full well that most are likely to open it. Once opened it then runs mailing itself to all your Linux friends. It then deletes all your files; rm -rf * Sure this wouldn't hurt the system as a whole but, you would certainly be inconvenienced if you were to lose all your files, no? And all this from user space, no root required.
Now, I'm sure that there will be many responses to this post explaining why this couldn't possibly happen but, the fact is that it is only a matter of time before it does. Now think of how devastating it would be to Linux if the equivalent of Melissa or Slammer were to be unleased on all those systems NOT running antivirus software.
My point is that Linux users need to get beyond the thought that Linux is impervious to viruses and worms and they need to start using antivirus software. There are numerous ones available for Linux including packages from the big Windows antivirus vendors.
This is just wrong. Please don't waste a question on this. Do your research.
You don't understand the GPL, which says nothing about using the internet to distribute source code. Lindows.com is perfectly within the GPL - they distribute the source code to those that pay for the compiled binaries and choose to download it, which satisfies all the GPL requires. You just can't hold your source for ransom.
We don't need to bother Robertson with this crap, you can get the answers yourself at http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/copyleft.html or http://www.lindows.com.
You can get the source to all the apps included with Lindows here
-- Wibble
I can't speak for the older versions, but 3.0.5 OEM runs as root the first time it boots up, to take you through a configuration wizard. It lets you set a root password, set up user accounts, and all that good stuff. IIRC it even points out that you shouldn't run as root unless you're using Click N' Run to install some software or if you're changing a setting.