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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."
now you get for free somethis you needed to go after
:-/
that's how i tried explaining it to my girlfriend, but just like these hard drives, she didn't buy it either
I'll save everyone some trouble, and get the obligatory usual comments over with now...
I, for one, welcome our new pre-installed overlords!
1. Have your OS pre-installed on HD's
2. ???
3. Profit!
Actually, click-n-run is probably their step 2. I wonder if it will work for them?
And yes, I know you can just add the debian sources and do an apt-get install packagename.
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.
There is a big chunk of people out there who aren't afraid to open up their own machines, but use Windows because they don't have enough Round Tuits to try Linux.
If Lindows is easy enough to give a go it might last for a few days before being scrubbed (doesn't play game X)... but then the idea that Linux systems can do things pretty well will stick in the back of the mind for the next time they have to assemble a 'second machine' for general use in the house.
Beep beep.
...their "fluoride" causes a fatal exception in h2o.dll, and causes lungs.exe to be closed.
I've finally got a fan! Now what do I feed him?
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
It will now be possible to go to a store, buy pieces and have a working computer when you get home with no other work necessary. That's a good thing!! Segate sells a lot of retail drives. If it works out even a little bit for them maybe others will follow suit. I've heard ATI has MMC for Linux in-house somewhere...but that's a big step to sell linux in the retail box. Most mice & keyboards work in linux. Most networking equipment works with linux [heck most home routers RUN linux!] This is a perfect path to getting Linux market share
It's too bad BeOS didn't think of this first! After all, Robertson is making an end-run around the infamous MS bootloader license. Shops can sell pre-tested barebones systems...then conveniantly slip you a pre-formated Linux drive. They are just selling "upgrade" pieces. And they aren't selling Linux at all...the Manufacture just adds that as a "test" feature. Very, very clever.
everything in moderation
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!
They had a nice selection of scantily clad ladies in Lindows outfits, who were giving out snackfood. On the snackfood package was a picture of an octopus punching Bill Gates in the nads with 8 arms. No I am not kidding. It tasted quite good. I picked up my Lindows show-bag as well.
In the booth they had Lindows on everything with "Lindows approved" stickers pasted over the "Made for Windows XP" ones.
Everyone was trying to rm -rf / the PCs, but were failing quite miserably.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
These are the tactics that we accused Microsoft of when they were trying to push other browsers like Netscape and other OSes like Linux out of the market. I'm pretty convinced they work.
:-) I'm a lazy guy!
Give people for free the stuff that you want them to at least try once. They they have to DO THINGS to get rid of it or change it. People are lazy, so at least some won't.
As to where will this end up? Well the small white-box assembly shops might be tempted to use the Lindows install on the drive to burn-in the computer. And leave it on if the customer didn't order a MicroSoft install. So the end users might end up seeing it. Great.
Some people buy a new HD, and will install it as the first drive, move the old one over. Bingo!
I installed two machines last week. They came with Seagate drives. Had a Debian based installation already been present, I'd just have upgraded that.
Right at the bottom there is a lovely disclaimer....
Lindows.com is not endorsed by or affiliated with Microsoft Corporation in any way - in fact, we don't even really like them because they are suing us.
James