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Linspire CEO dispels Linspire Linux Myths
An anonymous reader writes "Chances are that you think Linspire lets you run Windows applications, that you have to run it as root, and that it's really not quite a proper Linux. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. At LinuxWorld in Boston this week, CEO Kevin Carmony explained what Linspire Linux is, and isn't all about. Carmony said that people are still getting these things wrong. Yes, in the beginning, Linspire had the goal of letting Linux users run Windows applications with WINE, but it dropped that theme years ago. As for requiring you to run as root, that was, Carmony said, only the case with an early alpha release that was never put in the public's hands. As for not being a real Linux, that's nonsense, too."
...By default. When you install Linspire, it sets you up as root by default. I know this because I supported it from Lindows 4 to Linspire Five-Oh. You have to go and manually add a user account, should you want one. That said, it is actually a lot more secure than people make out. There _is_ a lot of FUD about Linspire. For grannies and people who can't be bothered with technical things (including me, sometimes - I just want things that work) it's great.
Already exists :D
Check www.gobolinux.org
"(MS: If you sell machines with BeOS, you can't sell Windows machines anymore)"
... so anyone trying to move away from selling all their machines with windows (either selling blank machines, or selling machines with another OS installed) was instantly less competative on their windows machines, locking them in :-/
Well I think it was more like "If you only sell machines with Windows preinstalled, we'll give you a discount on the purchase price"
So yes in a way I guess it was like saying "you can't sell windows machines anymore", but more "we're gonna make it difficult to".
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Incorporated
"Ultimately the assets of the corporation were bought by Palm, Inc. for US$11 million in 2001, at which point the company entered dissolution. The company then initiated litigation against Microsoft for anti-competitive business practices, specifically the prohibition of OEM's to allow dual-boot systems containing both Microsoft and non-Microsoft operating systems. The suit was settled in September 2003 with a US$23.25 million payout to Be, Inc."
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Check out MacOS X sometime. If you use the Finder (the GUI), you see your drives (technically, a partition on a drive, but they are displayed with a drive icon). Clicking on the main one shows you four directories: Applications, Library, System, and Users. However, if you bring up the terminal and cd to the root directory, you see all the other Unixy directories, along with the four named above.
Thus, newbies who don't bring up the terminal never see the Unix directories, people who want to can still do it, and software don't have to be patched.
Technically it was a settlement, but it's rare that the plaintiff pays off the defendant in order to get out of a case.
In reality, no OS has achieved the status of so simple yet so useful that grandma/sister/computer-novice can use without assistance.
... sort of like dealing with Windows sometimes.
I have some experience being the family IT support guy and got so sick of cleaning our viruses, spyware and other junk from my sister's computer that I bough her a computer with Linspire 4 on it thinking that it was the easiest Linux for her to adapt to. In the end, I can't say that it was any better or worse than any other distro. The Click-N-Run concept is a good one but it is was very poorly executed. It certainly *did* encourage users to run as root and was a PITA to set up as a multi-user system.
However, when things went wrong (as they do with any OS/Distro/computerized thing), I found that Linspire did things differently enough that it was very difficult to troubleshoot the problem, find help online and you ended up fighting with a system that tried to second guess you with automated scripts
In the end I switched her to another distro (Ubuntu) and now have just as many problems but I don't have to pay a subscription fee and, if I don't know the answer myself, I can find answers online extremely quickly since it doesn't deviate too far from upstream.
So all the power to Linspire in achieving that "easy enough for a novice to use" status but since we're not there yet, I would stick with a more maintainable distro like Ubuntu or Fedora Core.
It was only a short time ago that Michael Robertson, CEO of Linspire said "I defy anybody to tell me why is it more secure to not run as root. Nobody really has a good answer. They say 'oh, yeah, it is!', but it really isn't."
The part where it REALLY is easy is software installation. They have a system called CNR (Click and Run) which costs $20/year, but it is well worth it. You get a icon on your desktop that you can click, then browse software categories. When you find something you like, just click the install button and voila, CNR downloads it, puts an entry in the Start menus and puts an icon on the desktop. No other distro that I know of does this with such ease.
Meh.
LOL! Ah, a blast from my programming past (a very short-lived past!). But...let's put this in perspective though...that code was written almost 25 years ago!!! There weren't even hard drives when I hacked that code. It was put together on the very original IBM PC with 64K of memory and floppy drives. So, yes, duh, of course it was written in Basic, about the only thing you could hack with on those original PC's. My degree is in Business, and the only formal training I ever had was DP 101 in college. I've never professed to be a coder. But, that code that I hacked was used by 25% of all video rental stores to check customers in and out in its day. I turned it into a very substantial business, which I later sold for a great deal, and that business is still around today, 20 plus years later! How many of you can say that? =) Kevin Carmony