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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.
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
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!
If you look at the pictures on the Tiger Direct link, a hard drive is installed. As long as it has an IDE controller for the cd-rom, which it does, yes, you should be able to add a hard drive, as long as the BIOS in this thing supports one. Or, you could add a SCSI, SerialATA, or another IDE controller to the system via the PCI slot.
C:\>
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.
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.
My bet is that you can, but there is a very good reason for being cd only. Its much more difficult to screw up a os on a cd than it is to screw up an os on a hdd. When a 12 year old skript kiddie hax0rz your library machine and inverts the mouse buttons, the techno-challenged librarians just need to know how to hit the reset button. No worries about fscks/scandisks, or actually having to undo the switch.
Yes, the above can all be accomplished with some weird write protection on the hdd, but compare costs here. A cheap cdrom can cost under $20. Try and find a hdd in the same price bracket. Then add the cost of all the magic necessary to make it kiddie-proof*.
[*] does not include said kiddies removing cdrom and coating with strawberry jam. But that's what backups are for.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
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
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?
Both iDOT and TigerPC allow you to add a HD before purchase. The base model is HD-free, though.
4-star general in a one-man army.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to write a security exploit that would work on a computer with a readonly file system?
-a
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.
NFS is not needed here, because all of the programs and data live on either the CDROM or in RAM.
You are obviously mistaking this for LTSP.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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."
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
when they start selling those guys for $10 then I agree - we have a changed world. just think what that technology will do to the RIAA - i'll start carrying my MP3s everywhere i go and sharing them with random people on the subway.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Back then most people laughed. And described like that it still sounds laughable, doesn't it? Why would you pay money for an SDK and then sign a license for X$/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?
Sadly, even at $169, this system is overpriced for the hardware that you get.
Just for the hell of it, I went to mwave.com, and priced out their absolute cheapest pre-assembled barebones system. I was able to get a system with a faster processsor and a better motherboard for $153, or $165 with a cheap keyboard and mouse included.
Add a 50 cent burned Knoppix CD to the system, and you just got yourself a better system for $3.50 cheaper, and with no rebate hassles.
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.
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'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.
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.
I worked for TigerDirect. They encourage employees to lie to make a sell and lie to avoid giving any kind of support. I'd especially never buy a system from TigerDirect because their policy is to never accept a return (even if it's a totally broken product) and the extra warranty they sell is practically never honored.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
But that's what backups are for
No that's what super glue is for.
...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
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.