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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.
Why would I want a perfectly good Linux machine to look like a Windows machine?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
User: What a pretty GUI you have.
YImf: All the better to confuse you with, my dear.
U: And what strange fonts you have.
Y: All the better to break your layouts with, my dear.
U: And what a lack of app support you have.
Y: All the better to irritate you with, my dear.
U: And what terrible hardware support you have.
Y: All the better to eat up your time with, my dear!
Just then the hunter entered the house and cut the YImf right down the belly.
Finally Linux gets a decent GUI!!! [ducks head]
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
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.
a cron job?
Now that "real" pirates are back on the world stage, maybe we can get rid of this dumb use of the word pirate? I, at least, was pretty confused for a couple of seconds as to why pirates would do any sort of software trickery.
rooooar
This is so perfect it isn't even funny. I can now replace the XP on my parent's computer with Linux and they won't know the difference. The "family support plan" just got a whole lot easier for me.
The Russians already did this: http://www.linux-xp.com/desktop/2010-release-notes/
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
The typical "open source" solution to a badly designed GUI is to make the GUI reconfigurable, with "skins" or "themes". This is an admission of failure.
Blender, the animation system, is about to do this. All 3D animation systems are complex, but Blender has an unusually confused GUI, with changes in each release and out of sync documentation. So, in the next release, 2.5, Blender will support "themes", plus some scheme for custom Python code to rework the GUI. Now the developers can blame the user.
The other classic vice of the Unix/Linux world is the one-way GUI. Input is graphical, but output is in a text window, because the GUI is wallpaper over some text-oriented application. This comes from a design flaw of UNIX - when you run a subprocess, you can pass in a list of arguments, but all you get back is an exit status and maybe a text stream. "exit" should have had "argc" and "argv" parameters via which the subprogram could return structured results to the caller.
For a painful example of this problem, make a wireless network connection with a Linux EeePC. All the GUI gives you is success or failure. Errors are hidden in a text window with incredibly confusing blither from about six programs used to set up the connection, several of which produce error messages in normal operation.
For better or worse, the Mac got this right back in 1984, and it's still worth reading the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines. Two rules often forgotten: "You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows", and "An alert box consists of a sentence explaining the problem, and a sentence suggesting what to do about it." The idea that you should never have to tell the computer something it already knows means that it's not acceptable to make the user copy information from one place to another. The Linux community does not get this at all, and the Windows community sometimes forgets it.
Make WinXP look like KDE http://www.tech-atom.com/windows/ultimate-linux-transformation-pack-for-windows-xp.html
Make GNOME look like WinXP http://ubuntu.online02.com/xpgnome
Make WinXP look likeUbuntu http://pc-hacks.blogspot.com/2007/10/make-up-over-your-windows-look-like.html
Make WinXP look like Enlightenment http://www.litestep.net/
Make Linux look like Win95 http://fvwm.org/
It all makes my head hurt.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
"The other classic vice of the Unix/Linux world is the one-way GUI. Input is graphical, but output is in a text window, because the GUI is wallpaper over some text-oriented application. This comes from a design flaw of UNIX - when you run a subprocess, you can pass in a list of arguments, but all you get back is an exit status and maybe a text stream. "exit" should have had "argc" and "argv" parameters via which the subprogram could return structured results to the caller. "
From what century are you writing this? 18-th or maybe 19-th, I wager?
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
Why would I want a perfectly good Linux machine to look like a Windows machine?
Don't you get it? In China, 2010 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
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.
all you get back is [...] a text stream. [...] could return structured results to the caller.
Parsers. 'Nuff said.
Two rules often forgotten: "You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows"
I'd like to extrapolate that: you should never have to tell the computer the same thing twice. You should be able to make the computer act on general rules.
I really hate that with Network Manager, I can't tell it "whenever you see one of the essids [home, work], connect automatically". Why the hell do I have to spend my precious time clicking stuff when I already know what I'm going to click on?
(Linux lets me express general rules about what my computer should do, in the language of shell scripts etc.; for that, I love it. Thanks also to wpa_supplicant's roaming mode.)
The Linux community does not get this at all, and the Windows community sometimes forgets it.
On this front, the Linux experience is worlds better than the Windows one. My biggest frustration when trying to sort out problems on other people's Windows boxes is the frequency with which one gets an error message which amounts to "Something went wrong, but we're not telling you what." The big mistake which the Windows developers make is hiding information from the user so even if you are capable of understanding the technical aspects of the problem, you're not allowed to see them.
It's true that the average user either ignores technical information in an error message, or goes into a panic when it appears, but there should always be *some* way of getting at it. Windows is dreadful in this respect.
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.
It appears that the screenshot was taken from the real Windows XP, and Ylmf OS does not look much like XP, but rather exactly like Gnome.
Here's a screenshot taken from someone who installed the ISO in VMWare and changed the locale to English: http://i50.tinypic.com/2lar9s0.jpg