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Is There An OS On My Hard Drive?
stm2 writes "Thanks to an agreement between Lindows and Seagate, from October you will be able to choose a hard drive with or without Lindows. Michael Robertson, in his usual marketing speak, compares this to adding "Fluoride in the water", because now you get for free something you used to need to go after (people used to go to dentist to get their Fluoride). According to the PR, the OS can autodetect and configure itself on the host machine."
while i applaud lindows and seagate for this, I personally use Ark Linux arklinux.com which does the auto-login thing that lindows does but in a safer way. Plus the fact that arklinux is community based is a big plus as well. the way lindows runs as root is just wrong, arklinux created a program called kapabilities that makes it simple to give a user access to certain configuration things. plus its one of the few linux distros thats apt-rpm based. its really hard for me to weigh in on lindows. sometimes they seem like a smart and helpful company and sometimes they seem SCO/Caldera like. still, anything that gets more people using linux on the desktop is great to see.
the way lindows runs as root is just wrong
It is possible to set up user accounts in Lindows. KUser, the KDE user manager tool, is available (renamed to "User Manager") and you can create users.
It doesn't work perfectly out of the box: you will need to manually add each user to the "dialout" and "dip" groups if you want Kppp to work, and the "Click-N-Run Installer" will ask for the root password each time a user logs in. (The solution to the latter problem is to disable the C-N-R Installer from auto-running).
Once you have created a non-root user, the KDE login manager will run and prompt for user name and password.
The above applies to Lindows 4.0 at least; I haven't really looked at other versions. (I wrote a review of Lindows 4 for Linux Journal.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
David Icke? You must be joking.
Mr. Icke is a psychotic, raving lunatic who preys on people's naivete`, and makes money on it with his particular brand of "bovine fecal excrement" stuffed into books.
Sources say that Mr. Icke's major source of information for his books can be found in the alt.conspiracy newsgroups.
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
The good news is that Lindows is built on Debian. And even better news is that the Lindows.com guys didn't rip out the APT tools. Lindows doesn't use them (they use their "Click-N-Run" stuff) but the tools are there.
/boot, a 256 MB swap partition, and the whole rest of the drive as a big ReiserFS partition, mounted as the root partition. I have not yet been able to build a kernel that can deal with the root ReiserFS; I keep getting the error "Unable to open initial console." I believe the problem is that it's trying to mount DevFS while the root partition is still mounted read-only, and I think the solution is to use an initrd (initial ramdisk). The 2.4.20 kernel that comes with Lindows 4 uses an initrd, and it of course works. I need to try building an initrd kernel soon.
It is actually possible to upgrade (or "side-grade" if you prefer the term) Lindows to just plain Debian.
Basically, you just edit sources.list to point to a Debian mirror near you. (Lindows has it pointing to the main Debian server; be a good net citizen and change that.) Then "apt-get update". Then blow away all packages that have "lindows" or "xandros" in the name, if you want that pure free-software feeling... or don't bother, if you don't mind a few Lindows packages floating around. "apt-get dist-upgrade", handle any conflicts APT can't suss on its own, and install anything you are missing. If you blow away the lindows* packages and xandros* packages, you will lose LILO and the kernel, so you will need to replace those.
Lindows by default sets up three partitions: a small
There will be an article about this on the Linux Journal website sometime soon... I'm not sure exactly when. I took a Lindows MobilePC and upgraded it to full Debian unstable; it now boots with GRUB and has a GNOME desktop, because that's what I prefer.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Flouride as a preventative measure against cavities was first discovered by the dentists.
True, but it's highly toxic.. Have you seen the space-suits the fluor-handling employees of the toothpaste companies have to wear ?
You're not supposed to eat toothpaste, and there are good reasons for that. One is that fluor builds up in your bones and can cause deformations in high levels.
There realy are reasonable doubts about putting fluor in drinking water.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
In Europe and the UK, there is a lot of discussion over adding fluoride to water. In Scotland, they've pretty much stopped adding it in most places. It's poisonous, and too much fluoride (like if you have fluoride in the water and use a toothpaste with fluoride, ie. nearly all of them) it will cause horrible damage to your teeth.
Also, some people are highly sensitive to fluoride. You can get non-fluoride toothpaste, but can you imagine the hassle it must be, having to use bottled water for things like brushing your teeth, making tea or coffee, and in fact damn near anything else where you might ingest some of the water?