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Lindows Webstation
dr.karl.b writes "Lindows.com has announced the WebStation, a hard-disk-less pc that boots from a CD, similar to the now dead ThinkNIC, for $169 (no monitor). Different versions are available from 2 vendors, TigerDirect and iDOTpc.com. The TigerDirect version has a 1.1GHz Duron, 256MB PC2100 DDR, 56X CD-ROM, 10/100Mbps NIC, floppy, modem, keyboard and mouse. The iDOTpc.com version has a 800MHz C3, 256MB PC133 SDRAM, 56X CD-ROM, 10/100Mbps NIC, but without a floppy, modem, keyboard or mouse. The TigerDirect looks like a better deal, at least now ($169 = $189 - $20 rebate). The 2 different versions seem to have confused the authors at C/Net and The Register, who only report the specs of the iDOTpc.com version."
How exactly does this work?
I've ran CD based distros before but I've had a hard drive also..
How do you play games on it (as the feature list says), or download MP3s, or read email, etc if there is no where to save the data?
Ok so maybe it uses a virtual drive..what happens when you reboot?
I'm confused, am I missing something??
How do you use it without a hard disk?
Simple, their workstations, they access a file server for storage and retrival of data/information.
TruePunk | Games
Why not stick a 2gb drive or something small in there just for the OS? That way the CD drive would be free for people to play music CDs, etc.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Can you add a hard disk after purchase?
I think college campuses and libraries could really use this, its a good idea it just needs some marketing.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
it's a fat, thin client. They are just offloading some of the server work.
----
In Soviet Russia, the overlords welcome you!
If it works with Lindows, then it should also be possible to stick in a Knoppix CD. In fact, it's surprising that nobody else is marketing cheap PCs using Knoppix or a similar distribution.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I think people are confusing these machines with systems you would have at your house. The main benefit would be to companys that do not want workers using their machines for non work related issues.
A good example would be a telemarketing center, where only data is passed to the system, a little input from the end-user, and then stored on another system.
This would work well with a POS system as well.
Or, an MP3 player in your house where the system just pulls music off your file server.
Get the idea now?
TruePunk | Games
Could someone explain to me, please, why it's impossible to manufacture a slow, low-capacity hard drive for $10 per unit? What makes a hard drive so much more difficult to build than a CD drive? Is it because the write head has to be so close to the medium?
And when a critical security flaw is discovered, what then? Stay offline while you wait for an updated CD to arrive in the mail? I'm skeptical about this...
(I know, it's lame to reply to my own post)
I understand the main point is not to have an OS on the hard disk to screw up... but I would think even having a HD for a swap partition would speed up performance considerably.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
First of all, it can store data in a RAM drive, which is basically what it uses to store the OS as well. The "RAM drive" acts like a very small (but fast) hard drive using the system's RAM.
It's a nice solution because a similarly equipped and more proprietary thin client (a Wyse terminal, for example) is much more expensive and most of the thin clients have Windows XP Embedded on them.
Kudos to the Linux world for lowering costs again!
Down with legacy!
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
It says it handles POP email accounts and comes with OpenOffice to edit MS Word files...
That really implies a Hard Drive, huh? Maybe the HD is an option that allows these "features"?
It also seems that advertising a 56X CDROM drive that you can't use without removing your OS might be a little misleading as well.
I've ordered several things from iDOT and never been disappointed. In fact, when I first ordered from them, someone noticed that I lived only 15 miles away from their warehouse. So they offered to refund my shipping costs and hold the parts for me to personally pick up! Even more surprising, they noticed that I had separately ordered the parts for a more-than-barebones system, and offered to assemble the hardware at no extra charge.
So consider this customer satisfied. If you're going to order one of these diskless PCs, you certainly won't have any reseller problems if you order from iDOT.
4-star general in a one-man army.
What happens if there is a security hole in these? Do they ship new CDs to everybody? Of course, one can get any hacker out by rebooting but what happens if somebody runs a script that roots it every time it shows up on the network? Or what about computer labs where one just roots every computer?
The cost of the complete system is a bit less than the going rate for the protection money err single user license that SCO sells.
keeps chopping away at the bottom of the PC market, there may not be anything MS can do about it. One thing i would be interested in, and didnt see, is some sort of card reader so that users would have means to save at least their documents. At any rate, heres the obligatory comment on how the OEM XP Pro costs more than the machine AND the Operating system.
Once again, we have a product that comes out that Elmer Fudd would actually, amazingly enough, pronounce the name of just like a normal person would.
I wonder what lifetime a system that's CD-only (and with a fast CD drive) will have - lifetime of an average CD drive is about a week without break and at full speed and only thanks to stopping frequently and lowering read speed, plus working rarely more than several minutes a day at full speed, they survive more than a year. But replacing HDD with CD...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
This is just an incarnation of the "NC" (Network computer) buzz back in the 90s where single-use computers, less flexible than a PC, would be sold for ridiculously low prices ($200) and would specialise in doing just one or two things - surfing the web, storing data, etc. etc. The trend kind of petered out but I suppose this is one of its aftereffects. More power to them for trying to introduce such a machine! It's all well and good having bagloads of functionality but I'm sure a single-purpose computer would be easier to use, cheaper and more stable.
Bash script for FP whores
The perfect slashdot geek system. Impress your friends with your new ugly web terminal, complete with crappy looking keyboard and no monitor! Only $169 after mail-in *cough*ripoff*cough* rebate!
In short this is only useful to people running NFS or SMB servers in their basement/home office/garage to allow the thing to be useful. No hard drive means no long term cache. You can't save files off of it meaning either run to your normal PC to download the file or connect to previously mentioned network share to save.
It certainly seems like these web terminals are destined to the same fate as the ThinkNIC and various other web terminals. Useful to ten whole people.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
just plug it into a broadband Internet connection and you're ready to surf the Internet, send and receive email
If this thing has no hard-drive, wouldn't that make email a little difficult? Unless they mean web-based email or an IMAP client then people are gonna lose a lot of there email.
Downloading files would be a little tricky to...
Am I the only one who saw an imaginary 'i' in there?
Now, I understand the concept, but this sucker loads the OS into a RAM disk, meaning it eats a bit of RAM to begin with, then what if you're checking out lots of websites, I guess it stores the caches and cookies on a file server, or RAM disk. All on 256MB RAM?
This is a nifty idea, but only if you have a network file server, and can deal with all your HD-less boxen being offline, when you upgrade the NFS, or when it breaks down.
And then there's network traffic......
Error 407 - No creative sig found
What I've been looking for (for a while now) would be a cheap box, preferably a PC than can run linux, has a network card, looks decent and is quiet enough for the living room, and has tv out, so that I can use it as my own "media center". As far as I'm concerned, using it as an mp3 player and photo viewer would already be nice, with the added ability to check mail and surf the web.
Is there anything out there that would come close to this?
How many journalists have ever had their cameras confiscated by the cops because the events they had photographed were not supposed to be shown?
Imagine you have this camera, take pictures of JFK playing curling with Henry Kissinger at Princess Diana's garden party, and get caught by the cops before you escape. They can confiscate your camera, which can be insured, but they can't stop the world from discovering the great conpiracy because you already uploaded the pictures to your website and a couple of mirrors.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
It'd be just as easy to avoid the Lindows crap by putting together a similar workstation and use Knoppix. Heck, you can use compact flash storage to keep your Knoppix config files in a persistant home directory, so that would seem like the better alternative.
Why not stick a 2gb drive or something small in there just for the OS?
Can you tell me where one would find such a creature?
Duron 1.1GHz: $30
256MB PC2100: $30
56x CD-ROM: $20
1.44MB Floppy Drive: $10
Mouse And Keyboard: $10
KT266A Mobo w/lan,audio,modem,video: $40
Case w/300W PSU: $25
Knoppix: Free
Total: $~170
This is pretty much what they have done.
You can also throw in a 20GB HDD for ~$40.
Actually, "that ain't not bad." I'd like to try lindows but I'm not gonna pay even $50 for it without knowing what I'm getting. But if I can get a barebones PC thrown in with the deal, it don't seem like much of a risk at all. Hell, stick an old 40GB drive in the box, sell it, and make a profit on the deal...
I received 4 wyse55 terminals for free from a local amusement park. Add a Linux box with 4 serial ports and you're set.
I've been wondering for a while why no one has tried to sell dual-headed displays with two keyboards and mice. It could lower the fratricide/soricide rates among families with only one computer.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It comes with a floppy and an external cd (I didn't check if the external cd was w or r/w thought).
So, FTFL (Follow the Freaking Links) first next time.
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Take a look at the images on the innards of the TigerDirect box... It seems that there is a hard drive pictured (gasp!) Scott
For a tiny moment I read that as iD1OTpc..
But then again, that would be far too fitting to be !true.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
Could you put a linux distro on a large smart media card, so as to reduce boot times? Surely that would be better than a slow CD loader.
I think everyone has tubgirl.com in their hosts file at 127.0.0.1 along with goatse by now.
Maybe you need to try something new?
There are actually some stats regarding this exact question over at tubgirl tech archive
Am I the only one who misses the days when trolls (tubgirl is similar to goatsex in terms of disgust) actually read the questions, instead of just writing "some stats regarding this exact question?"
~sigh~
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
If a = b, then why have two letters?
They should get a license to distribute Knoppix with these -- it's already a network-aware OS that comes with an office suit, chat programs like AIM, a few web browsers, etc.
It'd be perfect on this type of thing.
These systems would work well with the USB keychain drives that are out. They're fairly expensive (right now), but the memory sticks would be an ideal way to store files and configurations. The average user and Joe Sixpack will probably going to have less than 256 MB in C:\My_Documents. When keychain drives' price drops enough for one to be bundled with these systems, they could make this arrangement useful for Joe Sixpack wanting a cheap PC.
The Tiger system has pretty decent specs -- with more memory (adding 256 or 512 MB) it would fly running Knoppix. PC2100 RAM is fairly cheap now; I've even seen hard drives for under $40 (after MIR). If I weren't concerned about the warranty or power supply, I'd get one for my parents.
Should we be surprised at Microsoft's dominance?
What killed the ThinkNIC anyway?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I don't think I've ever seen a recently-made hard drive being sold for less than $100. I think the precision of the components requires a certain minimum manufacturing expense. If you can get a used hard drive for $10, remember that at one time it was sold for (or available for sale for) at least $100. Sadly, it doesn't seem that any manufacturers make routine use of old-technology hard drives in today's computers - doing so would keep the prices lower.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
it works, it rocks. mmmmmmmmmmm.... debian...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Just make a modified boot cdrom, with custom config files for nis+nfs setup and you have a very cheap and perfectly usable machine. I'll prolly buy one of these and hook it into my home network. Thats where the Solaris box will come in handy, its an excellent nfs server.
:)
Just google for "nfs+nis howto", I'm feeling too lazy....
but it's still Lindows ;p
Jerry Fletcher,
Privacy Protection By:
http://www.cotse.net/servicedetails.html
The iOpener was a much better piece of industrial design. Maybe it was just too early.
The CD is read only. The live filesystem is most likely not.
So when you reboot, you get a fresh start.. but otherwise, it's still a running machine, and you can infect and do what you want with it until it restarts.
God damn it! Could somebody do me a favor and burn my eyes? That image will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Joe gear and Jill SewingCircle don't need "a few" web browsers any more than they need a multitude of speedometers on their new car. They don't need "a few" chat programs, or "a few" mail programs - they need ONE that works, reliably and in a sane and familiar manner.
Who really needs it? Another example of a geeky, trendy solution - to a problem that doesn't exist.
Bah, even if I wanted such a limited system, or wanted to set up a friend or relative for simple web-surfing/email, this is that last route I'd take. There are plenty of cheap used PC's floating around that would serve the purpose as well or better. And forgive me, but I'd rather have them on a real Windows box than a trendy *nix alternative.
Look at the part number on the tiger page it is M810L11L. I would surmise a guess of PC Chips M810 (sis based socket A). Lets do the math with approximate retail prices. Good deal at $169?
M810LMR $35
56X CD-ROM $18
Duron 1.1 $30
256 DDR $30
Floppy $ 5
Case $20
Keyboard $ 5
Mouse $ 5
---------------
TOTAL $148
if they are making them out of stock pc components, they'd be better off to add a harddrive. if it was some cool embedded version of lindows it'd be one thing, but this is basically a stock pc just without a harddrive.
Now all we need is for someone to come out with a mod chip so we can run Linux on it.
In the early days of personal computing, people would try to make up examples of computer use in the home, such as keeping recipies in the kitchen etc.
I think we're finally coming to it slowly. I do it with an old surplus laptop, which sits in the kitchen. It runs a slide show when doing nothing else, has a sheetfed scanner for all the receipts and house paperwork, and is a web browsing station (including recipies from epicurious!) for when I'm in the kitchen.
Plus it can play music and web radio station streaming feeds.
I have 802.11b on it, and generally have the disk in it spin down, working instead with samba over 802.11.
You can add this to the lindows computer but it is usually cheaper to build in, so I think that's the next step. People in homes don't want wires, so I recommend that this be upgraded a bit to add 802.11 and even expect to use a remote network disk for its disk operations. It should be whisper quiet, with as silent a fan as possible.
Another cheap thing to add is an FM transmitter on the sound outputs. Let it send FM to your stereo so again no wires are needed, or even any hookup.
It seems a lot of people are confused about the purpose of these machines. They are built for companies/organizations that don't want people messing with computers they leave open to the public. Where I work we just purchased 3 new Dells at god-knows what cost just to have sitting in a room where somewhere will fill out an ASP application for employment. We could've saved a good deal of money by purchasing a machine such these. Although being that these particular ones are a brand new product, I'm sure we would've have right away. But the point is, these are NOT home meant to be home PCs. (even if some of these distros advertise them as so)
Low end processor and no HD mean LESS HEAT. So why did they put this stuff in a big empty box? I'd think a web terminal type pc would do a lot better packaged into something like this with a cheap LCD.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
And, unlike the iopener, this thing even has a NIC. Imagine that! A fast network connection in an "internet appliance!"
Lindows gave you the CD to create the LindowsCD OS for the computer. Think about how incredibly useful that would be!
You run a program on the CD to customize an installation of LindowsCD. You pick the home page, maybe the network share where files are saved, bookmarks, etc. It already knows the hardware so no config necessary.
You click a button and out of your burner pops a LindowsCD perfectly configured for your environment. You stick it in the machine, and deploy.
I can think of a thousand uses for this. You could rig a kiosk in the lobby that would only let people view the company webpage. You could rig some workstations that would allow visitors to view files you have made available in a public share but they can't save anything there or locally. You could rig that perfect PC so grandma could check her e-mail and thats all it does.
With no data kept locally, and no possibility of OS corruption, your only support requirements are to tell people to reboot. Or have the machine reboot once a day, etc. If you ever need to change anyting, reburn a disc with new settings. If the CD ever goes belly up, put in the backup. If it still won't work, you can be sure it's a hardware issue.
Lindows, SO CLOSE. Please (or Knoppix) someone take the OS-on-CD to the next level. Yes having Knoppix and LindowsCD is great, but no one wants to have to setup their mail settings each and every time the system reboots. Give us the tools to create our own custom task-oriented OS CD.
As an alternative...flashram? A CF reader and a 32MB card cost what, $25 on the street? More than enough to keep mail settings, bookmarks, etc.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
its making a comeback. now that the hardware for a very good thin client (today's term for network computer) is el-cheapo there is once again a point.
keep all systems needing administration in an easy to manage rack somewhere else and put what amount to uber-terminals on people's desks.
try it in your large organization. you'll be happy.
(and with microsoft gearing up to sell tons more Windows CE licenses on top of the XP licenses for the machine room systems they drool at the prospect as well).
i wouldn't even bother with a CD-ROM for a real thin client. boot over the network.
There are actually some stats regarding this exact question over at the goatse tech archive.
For those who use dedicated WinCE powered thin clients to connect to a terminal server, this is a much cheaper product. Most dedicated thin clients from major vendors are in the $400 to $500 range.
Put together a bootable CD to connect automatically to the terminal server, and you've got a dirt-cheap thin client.
save it for the banners please.
That thing is a bit huge for just booting it of the cd. I think if it had a CD drive form factor like some PCs have would make it more popular.
The spaces could come in useful for adding a hard drive though. (assuming there is sufficent ide slots on this thing).
This seems like a good excuse to mention my new Web site: Kevin Savetz' Guide To Buying a Ridiculously Cheap PC delivers specs, reviews, and news about computers that cost less than $300. Nine manufacturers are listed there so far, although I haven't added the Lindows Webstations specs yet.
Now have they edited the source of every program to save settings files to whatever mountpoint I use for my usb keychain thingy or Samba / NFS mount? Like for instance...bookmarks, tetris high scores, toolbar layouts, etc...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Back then most people laughed. And described like that it still sounds laughable, doesn't it? Why would you pay money for an SDK and then sign a license for X$/install to sell a linux distro when you can put one together, based on debian (as lindows is) or redhat, for free?
Well, now look: lindows has a reasonable amount of brand recognition and press. You can put together a distro of redhat and try to get your compu-idiot clients to use it, or you can offer the same thing with a distro that is being sold at wal-mart and gets favorable press in all sorts of consumer press. Which do you think offers the better marketing opportunity when it comes to the technically challenged?
The Hymn of the Soviet Union
Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics,
Great Russia has welded forever to stand.
Created in struggle by will of the people,
United and mighty, our Soviet land!
Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!
Through tempests the sunrays of freedom have cheered us,
Along the new path where great Lenin did lead.
To a righteous cause he raised up the peoples,
Inspired them to labor and valorous deed.
[Or, the old way:
Be true to the people, thus Stalin has reared us,
Inspire us to labor and valorous deed!]
Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!
In the vict'ry of Communism's deathless ideal,
We see the future of our dear land.
And to her fluttering scarlet banner,
Selflessly true we always shall stand!
Should it not be a law that all diskless workstations be required to have front USB ports? I mean if they populate all the libraries and kiosks around the world with these things - it would be nice to plug my USB keychain into the front. The form factor of this thing is a joke. Could the case get any bigger and uglier....
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Tiger Direct even "suggests" a $39.95 128MB keychain storage dongle. That's a decent amount of storage to carry in your pocket or, if you don't need portability, spend the same 40 bucks on a 40gb refurb hard drive.
Why not just get a xbox with a modchip and install linux on it (gentoo, slack, mandrake... etc). A xbox running linux has many uses.
Mp3.com founder introduces rebranded LindowsTV Web service
I think I've got this one figured out. He's just running down the gamut. After the market is thoroughly wrung out he'll get into...something else equally quaint.
I don't know, I guess you have to have some respect for the fact that he's trying.
Many Thanks,
Luke
This reminds me of the java stations Sun was trying to sell for a while. Except for a demo unit, I don't think I ever saw anyone using one. In an enterprise situation, why would I buy a severely limited box when I can get something much more flexible for another $50? What if the CEO comes down, tells me he is looking to acquire a new company, and we need to run some additional application on the clients until it's integrated?
No hard drive. No user data stored. Nothing of interest on the CD (easy enough to get a copy of it without hacking into you). No place except memory to store an exploit, and that is lost after reboot. No writeable files to infect.
There certainly will be OS updates, or alternate OS's like Knoppix that you can use. They certainly have no need to send you a CD, but you could likely download and burn one (on another system, clearly not on this box). By the way, found out the hard way that you can't download large files under Knoppix even with a hard drive, it must make a copy in memory first, will bomb on too large of a file.
More to the point, is there a link to a bootable image that we can download and try out? I certainly hope the software will be downloadable, as there will sure be a need for this as it continues to evolve. I love Knoppix, but would like to give this a try.
Users without a way to store stuff will find this does get old pretty quick though; having to set up all of your internet access information every time you use it, having to configure your e-mail and having no good way to save either incoming e-mail or even an address book, and so on. Why they are even bothering with Lindows is a mystery to me; it's not like Windows compatability gets you much if you can't even open your CD drive to read a Windows game! Might as well just run a Knoppix system and have good Linux tools and a handful of Linux games rather than Windows compatability but no good way to use it (unless you have a local file server, but if you do is there really much incentive to run the few windows programs that will run without an install on this thing?)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
128K? in ma day that were luxury.and int marnin for our breakfast wed eat a handful of cold gravel and mother used to come in and slice us in two wit breadknife.....an we were lucky
The thinkNIC was a small foot print terminal. While true they also booted off CD.. that is where any similarity stops.
While they did go under due to a combination of falling PC prices and bad marketing, they were a great proudct, a bit ahead of their time.
These things in the story are just a PC with no harddrive.. big F-ing deal..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
(Never thought I'd say this...)
Ha-Ha! Thank goodness for the corporate web filter!
Just pop a knoppix cd in and boot with the option to let it know to look for the USB Pen Drive for the user configuration files.
/drive/dos
Though, the lindows live cd also automatically finds the USB pen drives and mounts under
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I was really depressed when I found out that ThinkNIC went under. Despite what a lot of people say about thin clients, those machines had a lot of potential. They built a really clean interface that ran through the browser, making it easy to use for almost everyone. On the other side of things, if you knew what you were doing, you could make a new cd image so that it could do anything you wanted.
I contracted with the company for a while, specifically to make a hardware testing platform for new ThinkNICs after they went off the assembly line. I played around with it afterwards, and managed to set it up to do quite a few neat things.
Just one word of advice if you find one somewhere. Do not reboot your computer with the ThinkNIC cd in your cdrom drive. I managed to wipe out my root partition that way. Twice.
[insert witty quote here]
It is official -- The UN is now confirming: The USA is dying
.9 of a Euro. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that The American Economy is in a recession, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The USA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
,it can clearly be seen that the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did.
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered American economy when x-rates.com confirmed that the American Dollar has dropped yet again, now down to
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the USA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: The USA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the USA because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, the US continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The IT industry is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IT jobs to India only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The American IT Industry is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft Encarta states that there are 291,065,636 people in America. What is the US's national debt? Let's see. According to the The Debt clock the USA's National Debt is 6,465,271,811,559.14. Therefore each American is $22,212.42 in debt. In fact, the USA's national debt has continued to increase an average of $992 million per day since September 30, 2002. Indeed
Due to the troubles of American Meddling, a Capitalist Gorvernment and so on, South Vietnam was attacked was taken over by North Vietnam who sell another a more compassionate government. Now Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over to feed the US media.
All major surveys show that the USA has steadily declined in the world economy. America is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the USA is to survive at all it will be among a broken collection of warring factions. America continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the United States of America is dead.
Fact: The USA is dying
I tried the LindowsCD 0S with a USB pen drive, and it finds it automatically and mounts it in /disks/dos. It doesn't make an icon on the Desktop like Knoppix, but that is still very straight forward.
You can get 64mb USB Flash drive for about $10. That is good enough to save a moderate amount of personal files. Don't think "only web" here, though. It comes with Open Office (or just use a knoppix flavor for whatever software you are into), which will, say, let kids write a word document, save it on the USB drive, and print at school. Definitely has potential as an "offline" tool(think "lower income").
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
..I'd be tempted to just dig up an old 40 MB disk. It would still take me a long time to type in 40 MB worth of web bookmarks and letters to my aunt.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I think this would be great to replace all the Gateway's in my sons school. I have been looking into setting up a K12LTSP network, but really havent found a supply of good, cheap "dumb" terminals. This looks like a match made in heaven.
:)
Now, all I have to do is figure out how to get the LTSP stuff to run on this terminal instead of the server.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
On a CD-ROM based system? I think Tiger is being a bit agressive on their claims for this thing (as well as clearly showing a hard drive in the box when they are selling it without a hard drive).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This is me while i fight against Lindows.
I've been wanting to have a Linux firewall that boots from CD (with no HD) for security reasons... script it to reboot every night a 3am, and you could be pretty confident in it not being cracked.
Any idea if the Lindows version has anything special to enable it to run 100% from CD? Is the entire CD GPL'd?
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
What about the ones that like to write to the BIOS?
I once bought something from them that was supposed to come with a $20 rebate coupon. Product arrives, no rebate coupon. I call, they say sorry, we're out of coupons, but we'll give you $20 credit toward a future purchase. Later, when I try to order something from them and use my credit, they suddenly have no record of it. Ripoff!
For being an internet appliance without a hard disk, I expected it to be a lot smaller, but that's a barebone tower pc with a cdrom drive added.
You keep your files & stuff on a usb drive (like one of those pen-sized drives), which you must buy seperately.
So what happens if an exploit is found in the OS or an application on the CD? How long will it take to get a new CD shipped to you? (assuming they offer such a program)
Compared to the rock bottom eMachines which includes WinXP home, a hard drive, speakers, keyboard, mouse, 6USB ports, CDRW this iDot doesn't look so good. That is if you want a complete PC. If you're just for an upgrader and you're planning on dumping your HD, CDRW and all your other gorp into this then it's a pretty good deal in so far as it's a complete MoBo, CPU, cabinet and power supply upgrade. But compared to what? It's pretty low powered and doesn't offer more than what you probably already run. Of course I'm a cheap ass so it looks way more powerful than my 8 year old boxes at home. But I think I'm the exception not the rule. I'd still rather go with a preassembled eMachines box since my time is worth more than the 70 bucks or so (actually it's more expensive once you add WinXP yourself) you might save.
I'm getting to the point where I think that low end computers should have a "No customer servicable parts inside" sticker on them. For the coupla hundred bucks they're almost disposable.
They'll have me sold -- and my customers sold -- when they are able to take an aftermarket, older laptop and build one of these Lindows (or Knoppix, or whatever) "Webstations" for the same price.
I can think of several people who want that right now.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
The TigerDirect box is pretty ugly... I think these kinds of boxes should be much smaller and have a non-PC design.
They should add an inexpensive UPS to the package - maybe even internally - then the CDROM could be used even less frequently...
(assuming the user didn't turn it off after every use - like my parents still do even now that they have DSL - ARGH. Remember how long a Power Computing Mac with 5+ SCSI devices including RAID takes to spin up? jeesh.)
...since the price difference between a CD-ROM and a CD-Writer is squat. Wouldn't work so well standalone, but a server could pull an image of the original CD, unpack it, apply a patch and republish it so the workstations could rewrite their boot CDs at an opportune moment.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
At my camp, they provided NICs for staff to use for email/web surfing. They seem like a good idea for thos e kind of appications. Except NICs sucked. First the hardware was way too slow. It took forever to do anything. Second, and most important, they kept dying. Some vidcard bug or something. And third, the crippled version of netscape 4 is a little out of date. And the mice never worked right. But a decent version of this would be nice. The os on a CD means it won't get corrupted and people won't fill up the com with junk. I hope these are decent as there's a good cance the camp'll but these to replace the dead NICs.
why does everyone want cheap shit, what happened to buying quality products. damn u people are cheap fucks!
www.smoothwall.org has a bullet-proof firewall that boots from CD. GPL.
So, if you boot from CD, that means your home directory is read-only, right? And if your home directory is read-only, where do you save your browser preferences, email settings, etc.?
Is this like Knoppix where the home directory is on a ram disk?
In either case, any settings you try to save will be lost on reboot. Not even cookies will survive a reboot.
Has anyone tried this? Is there any way to set up your home directory on a remote drive?
Pretty tough for your local copyquick dude to install a keylogger too.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
...the up-front price (USD$189) is AUD$285.40 at today's rates.
Visiting a random local wholesaler and using their one-off retail prices: AllInOne Mobo $99.00 (choice of 3), CPU $104.40 (Athlon 1800+, or $130.80 for a Celeron 2GHz), RAM $54.00, CDROM $32.40 (writer $58.80 AOpen 48x, DVD $70.80 BenQ 16x), case $58.50 (midi tower, 300W PSU), total AUD$365.10. Their website is buggered again as usual because they derive it from an Excel spreadsheet and the code to do it sucks so badly that I completely eclipsed it with 90 minutes' worth of effort using gawk and oocalc to turn the spreadsheet into a PostgreSQL database and PHP to display it.
Options: 128MB USB thumb $66.00.
Treating another random wholesaler similarly gives $99, $118 (2000+, identical Celeron), $66.00, $50.00 (writer, no reader avail; cheapest DVD at $118.00 includes CD writer), case $40.00 total AUD$373.00.
USB thumb for $69.00.
Add roughly $15 for a keyboard and mouse, $20 for a modem (or $35 for a hardware modem, which I'd recommend for reliability), so $400.10 and $408.00, respectively. For $100 extra you'd get twice the CPU and in one case a burner on top of a reader, lose the floppy (or pay $17), and I'm guessing that either shop would bundle the collection for AUD$389 or less, especially if they expected to sell lots of them.
And guess what? The price of MS-Windows XP Home OEM is AUD$189, and MS-Office XP OEM is AUD$429 - more than the cost of either machine, and a combined total of half as much again as the hardware, just to do word-processing. Mandrake Linux 9.1 PowerPack edition is AUD$99.95 inc GST and includes two good office suites plus extras (and of course the ingrates amongst us can download it for free).
There are no slow low-capacity hard drives left. They'd cost nearly as much to make as a fast, high-capacity drive (similar materials, similar plant) and nobody's going to bother putting together a plant to build drives that won't sell. Put it this way, if you had a choice of a 5GB drive for AUD$75, a 10GB drive for AUD$80 or a 40GB drive for AUD$95, which would you buy? If you can get 128MB of Flash for AUD$69 and (with a compressed FS) that's enough to run your system, why would you want a bulky, noisy, unreliable hard drive? The Cyrix-based motherboards are only selling well for niche markets, and I suspect that low-capacity hard drives would be the same. Make one small, slow, low-power, low-heat, long-life and you might find a market - until Flash gets that cheap too.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That would make for a pretty cheap RH or SuSE linux box.
lifetime of an average CD drive is about a week without break and at full speed and only thanks to stopping frequently and lowering read speed,
;^)
Interesting stats at tubegirl nonwithstanding (ack!), I find the claim of a week tops for a CD drive incredibly low. I mean, I've got the thing running tunes from mp3 and straight audio CDs pretty much 8+ hours a day at work, and have left the blamed things on overnight more than once. And my home tower used the same 4x CD drive for years until I finally shelled out for a CD-R a few months ago. Admittedly, mp3 & audio CDs aren't full-speed affairs, but a week just sounds way too low.
Also wonder how much space the OS really needs. If you've got a CD worth of 0s and 1s, that's less than a gig we're talking about, so you could, in theory, keep it all in RAM with just a quick upgrade.
At any rate, as long as they didn't completely cheese out buying crappy drives, I'd imagine it'd last a while after all, and it's hard to get much more secure than that. Hacked? Hrm, for the time being, just reset power!
(Fwiw, I have heard pretty bad stories about some CD-R drives going bad overly quickly when they're used as your main/only drive and running at high speeds. Perhaps you were referring to that?)
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Imagine a public computer lab that was filled with these thin clients (for the lack of a better term). People would have to buy specially made USB memory keychains that would be programmed with their user information, and then they could plug it into a terminal to use it and save their data to it. That would be both secure for the user, as they literally can't leave anything behind, and more convinent for the maintanance of the lab, as there is nothing that the user can do short of physically bashing the computer to actually damage it.
Add a hard drive to get a complete PC. BTW, tigerdirect.com is a really bad company with a very bad reputation (see the better business bureau website http://www.bbbsoutheastflorida.org/nis/newsearch2. asp?ID=1&strBCode=06330000&ComID=0633000027000 500 ).
I nominate this for Post of the month
--the AC
...he'd graduated from writing them in 4K of RAM on an 8-bit AIM-65; if he was lucky, he got started wire-wrapping up his own three-chip 4040 4-bit CPU chipset with a terrifyingly expensive 256x4 static RAM chip or bewilderingly complicated set of 1024x1 dynamic RAM chips and associated board-full of logic to keep them refreshed without contention. Video? Hah! We had two-digit 7-segment displays and a hex keypad (on the luxury version, else you programmed it with DIP switches or built your own keyboard out of bits of brass). If you plugged in a better monitor ROM and a UART chip, you could hook it up to something wonderful like the EME2 terminals or a scrounged ASR-33. Your keyboard has more memory than that entire system did, and runs a few orders of magnitude faster. (-: Hands up any of you young whipper-snappers who think I'm kidding? :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...because you think this ain't likely. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Make a wireless mesh network out of these. Remove the 56K modem form the Tiger Direct version and replace with an 802.11 card, then use the bootable ISO image from here to create a mesh metworked access point. The iDOT version may actually be better for this application due to lower power requirements. But I can't tell if it the case has the space for the singel PCI slot. Could be taken a step further and the CDROM removed and booted from compact flash, either with IDE to compact flash adapter?
At $400 for a MeshAP vs $169 + $50= $219 for an 802.11b card, I'll take the Lindows PC.
Dastardly
But seriously, how would these do for putting together a low cost OpenMosix cluster?
Not true. Their are many POS systems right now that load up the main application, and then gather the required menus, prices, employee times, etc from a "master" filesystem, and then all transactions that take place are passed to and from the master filesystem.
The biggest drawback to these systems are the hard drive crapping out every few years (Ive had to replace 3 hard drives in 6 months where I work).
A diskless solutions would be great in these enviorments as long as you had enuff ram for a ramdisk and to store the software application and transactions long enuff to send to the fileserver.
TruePunk | Games
Strange things happens, consoles (X-Box for now) starts to have hard-disks, but PC:s are removing them.
Surely hand in hand with a cheap web station would be something small and reasonably inoffensive to look at, to go with the reduced functionality? Top marks for making such a low cost, linux based "appliance". Zero marks for styling and design - you'd need to put it in a corner with a cloth over it.
Its basically the home version of this: http://wwws.sun.com/hw/sunray/sunray100/index.html
I dont know if this was mentioned before but this could possibly stop key loggers like the one at kinkos. This could help assure people that they are using a safe terminal in a public place.
At Lindows.com they state that Lindows support many high-end games like Quake 2, Doom and Unreal Tournament. Where have these guys been? LOL
It's amazing that after decades on computer manufacturing that supply and demand has had the effect it seems it should have had earlier. This is ideal for so many applications and the demand has been there for years. Only now are we getting the components, and only those components, for an affordable price.