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Chinese Pirates Launch Ubuntu That Looks Like XP
An anonymous reader writes "Ylmf, famous for pirating Windows XP, have just released a version of Ubuntu that looks just like Windows XP. Really, really similar. Apparently because Microsoft were cracking down on the actual Windows XP pirating — though I think they will still suffer for ripping off the GUI exactly." Of course, if that's the sort of look you like for your desktop, you need not risk any download cooties or language barriers; a reader in the Ubuntu Forums suggests this instructional video for giving Gnome the XP treatment.
I don't read Chinese, and I'm not about to download that--but is the point supposed to be that pirating windows is illegal and repainting Ubuntu is not?
Here's the thing: based on the screenshots, it's virtually certain that they used the copyrighted graphics that come with Windows to make this. Depending on how thorough they are, they may have used a fair amount of copyrighted text, as well.
As such, they are still "pirates". Why not just keep pirating Windows? What does this accomplish for them, exactly?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Think of it as the linux version of the Mojave experiment.
People were told KDE4 was Windows 7
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
This would mean people who were earlier using Windows would be a bit more comfortable using ylmf's ubuntu rather than the regular one.
I don't see why it would make a difference. If you drive a Volkswagen and then go and drive a Toyota, the indicator and wiper switches are the opposite way round on the steering column, and the instrument panel looks different. If you're really lucky, reverse gear is in a different place on the gate, too. You don't get people whining about how they need to make the Toyota look exactly like a Volkswagen before they can drive it - they just accidentally wash the windows instead of indicating a few times for the first hour behind the wheel. Then they get used to it.
Having never used Windows before it took me about two hours to get my head round XP, mostly due to having to learn how to solve complicated GUI puzzles to find setting that I'd normally use the command line for (like "Start -> Control Panel -> Network -> Connection -> TCP/IP -> Advanced -> set IP address" rather than "ifconfig eth0:0 192.168.1.100" to alias an ethernet port - the exact path through the GUI may be wrong). If you can't learn to live with the differences you probably have some underlying psychological condition that needs addressed.
You are almost right, partly. :)
I have an EeePC and I know *precisely* what you are talking about. I agree it is bad, but I disagree with your solution entirely. This problem is amenable to a much simpler solution, there is no need for any drastic architectural changes. The basic architecture here is sound, there is no reason why the GUI-box should not just report success or failure and leave the actual diagnostic output to another box that the user only has cause to invoke if there is a problem. The real problem here is that errors are reported even when nothing is wrong. The best I can see this is due quite simply to the fact that no one is willing to pay one or two employees (they dont have to be highly skilled, just computer literate enough to track down scripts and edit them) to finish the job when they make a distribution. In this case, there are error on the EeePC that are normal all over the place, not just in this one box, but bloody everywhere. They are caused by using generic scripts, designed to work on an extraordinarily broad range of different installations, with no customisation. It is a relatively tiny amount of work to go through these scripts, figure out which lines are actually unneeded and inappropriate on *this* distribution, and remove them. Simple as that.
Now, when I fire up a newly installed white-box, I see a lot of similar spurious error messages scroll by. This is to be expected - I am using a general purpose distribution and it makes sense for the default scripts to have this result and to expect the person installing it to go ahead and take a few minutes to customise the scripts and get rid of the spurious commands, either by deletion or simply commenting them out. The only complaint I have in that setting is that it does, on occasion, seem unreasonably difficult to track down the scripts in question, as if the builders of the distro never even thought of anyone wanting to clean the thing up post-install. This attitude, or my perception of it, grates the nerves, it is just shoddy engineering. Error messages should NOT be normal, and an OS installation cannot be said to be complete until they are all cleaned up. When the user sees an error message they should be able to have confidence it is a real error. Instead they learn that it is 'normal' to have spurious error messages all over the place, they learn to ignore them, and then when there is a real error message that does need attention - it is ignored too.
On the EeePC, however, it is not excusable at all. This is a very specialised distribution created *specifically* for this hardware. There is no excuse whatsoever for these scripts not to have been cleaned up so that they produce no error messages on their intended hardware before the image was burned, period.
Another very annoying feature of that particular Operating System is that it does not support swap partitions. This really boils down to the same problem - the company producing it obviously couldnt be bothered to budget just a handful of hours with someone familiar with linux for this thing! More specifically, it appears that Asus was told by the manufacturer of the SSD used that it should absolutely never be used for virtual memory. This advice could only have come with someone that is familiar with Windows, but not with computers in general and certainly not with linux specifically. SSDs do have a limited number of read/write cycles, you see, and Windows WILL thrash virtual memory whenever given it, without rhyme or reason, it just insists on rewriting it fairly often. Allowing Windows to use an SSD for virtual memory is a very bad idea. But Linux does
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
So a friend who's working on the Incognito LiveCD project have got news from people being beaten and jailed by police in china. And how did they got discovered? Well, they used the LiveCD at a internet café and the owner realized that that's not windows and called the police.
Having linux looking like windows could be a privacy feature.
The problem is not the people, it is how they are educated. For example, they are taught from school onwards that a "PC" has windows on it, with MS office, and that a "Mac" exists that is not a PC, and looks totally different, but does a similar task.
This is why most people I know will sit in front of a Mac and accept that it is not going to work like windows, and are even more tolerant of kinks, quirks and differences.
To do a car analogy, it's like someone being taught that a Honda is a "car", and there is this other thing called a "motorbike" that looks different and is used by fewer people. This Honda has a unique interface like no other car (but may be similar to them). If people drive Honda's all their lives, then they get into another car, they will freak out and get confused, because in their mind All cars should work like the Honda. If they were to get on a motorbike, they would realise "yes, I was told, different to cars" and will actually expect the unexpected, they will be aware that it's different and they will engage and try to learn how to operate it.
I've see this with people. My former gf's mum was like this. My former gf tried to switch her to Ubuntu, but her mum freaked out at the different buttons, the different "look" and the different order of her icons. After a couple of days she flat our refused to use Ubuntu. This same person would then go on to get a Mac, and spend 4 months trying to learn how to use it. The Mac's interface was more alien to her than Ubuntu's, but in her mind Macs were supposed to work differently to PC's, so this was ok and she just needed to learn. To her Ubuntu was still a "PC" and therefore must look and act exactly like Windows unless something is badly wrong.
My brother was in the same boat, at school they were teaching him this PC=="MS Win & Office" thing, and he would always have trouble when he borrowed my machine. So I went and taught him how to use an OS, Word processing and other office software, in general. NOT Windows, Word and he rest of MS Office. Now he is comfortable using pretty much any OS, in fact he prefers Ubuntu now, only booting windows in a VM for his "e-textbooks", that only work on IE with windows, and he isn't interested in computers (being a humanities student).