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Lindows.com - Friend or Foe?

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

Lindows.com has been regarded with suspicion by the Linux community ever since the company and its LindowsOS distribution were announced in October 2001. Perhaps it's time that we extended an olive branch to Lindows.com and took its product for what it is - a Linux-based operating system for the general public.

Let's state one thing loud and clear: up until now, Lindows.com has made very little money out of its Linux venture. Depictions of the company's founder Michael Robertson being a ruthless vulture ready to pilfer other people's work for his own benefit are far too common on Linux forums. But if we take a look at some numbers, the picture is vastly different. Sales figures are hard to come by, nevertheless web sites where LindowsOS users congregate can give us some indication about its installed base. The unofficial Lindows forum at openlindows.com has fewer than 300 registered members. The official user forum does not provide numbers, but judging by the activity there, a few thousands of users might be a good estimate. Contrast this to the Gentoo forum, which has nearly 22,000 registered members! Judging by other similar examples, it is unlikely that LindowsOS has a market share of more than 1% of all desktop Linux installations. It is also unlikely at this point that Lindows.com is a profitable company.

Another important point to note is that there is nothing inherently wrong with LindowsOS. It is a Linux distribution like any other, it has a solid base in Debian GNU/Linux and all the power one would expect from a Debian-based system. Some readers will argue that running the operating system as root by default is a major security risk, but remember that the market segment the product is aimed at simply does not want to deal with any passwords. Yes, it would be more desirable to educate the population about the dangers of using the system as root. In an ideal world, this would work. Unfortunately, a picture of a Debian developer joyously conversing about file access permissions with Aunt Tillie is an unlikely sight. It goes without saying that LindowsOS does not prevent security conscious users from setting up user accounts and passwords.

What has Lindows.com achieved? If you take some time to visit the official forums of LindowsOS users and read through some of the posts, you will find examples of ecstatic users who are genuinely happy to have been able to switch to Linux. These simple stories of joy are perhaps the most liberating examples of success of Linux - not in noisy server rooms full of skilled system administrators with years of UNIX education and experience, but by ordinary folk. Many of these users don't know how to check the kernel version of their operating system and don't care about the name of the desktop environment they use daily. But the software enables them to get on the Internet, scan their precious photographs and write up important documents - and that's all that matters. Yes, the open source software programmers and Debian developers deserve most of the credit for this achievement. But if it wasn't for folks like those at Lindows.com (and numerous other distributors), we would probably never see a software installation program that can be operated with a mouse.

LindowsOS 4.0 was released earlier this week. The product appears to be a bug-fix and consolidation release, rather than a version full of exciting new features and cutting edge software. The versions of XFree86 and KDE, as well as most of the server software were left unchanged from LindowsOS 3.0. But a lot of work has gone into making the Click-N-Run software warehouse and installation infrastructure reliable, lack of which used to be a sore point with many reviewers in the past. The company is also shipping a Knoppix-like live evaluation CD called "LindowsCD", which should be available for free download within the next few weeks. The prices start at $49.95 for LindowsOS 4.0 digital delivery and this includes a 15-day free trial access to the Click-N-Run warehouse. A full one-year Click-N-Run membership retails at $49.95, but this excludes commercial applications, such as StarOffice or Bitstream Deluxe Fonts, which have to be purchased separately. First reviews of LindowsOS 4.0 have been written and both TuxReports and ExtremeTech were highly impressed by the product.

In short, we need each other. We need talented developers willing to spend most of their time in cryptic programming code, but at the same time, we also need people who are experts at doing usability studies, user interface design and market research. If we can work together without hostility and disrespect and if we can give credit where it is due, we can accelerate the success of Linux and get it accepted by a growing number of users, irrespective of how technically skilled they are. If Lindows.com becomes profitable and successful in the process, we will all benefit. Many Lindows.com critics find it hard to admit it, but the company has channeled some of their income back to open source software projects and will no doubt continue to do so.

Hungry and greedy vultures with little integrity have indeed been spotted in the free software world. Lindows.com is most certainly not one of them. No, the company is not perfect, and yes, it has made mistakes (who hasn't?). But it has a solid product and many happy users to prove that it deserves our respect.

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Distribution News

Lindows 4.0 released

Lindows.com has announced the release of Lindows 4.0. New features this time around include a bayesian spam filter, popup ad blocking (their "AdSafe" technology - why didn't anybody else think of that?), and a trial subscription for their censorware offering.

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Debootstrap/LVM with LNX-BBC 2.1

Here's an article about using LNX-BBC 2.1 (the latest version of this bootable business card distribution), to install Debian. "It's not the easiest way to install Debian; and I'm not even sure if the regular installer supports LVM these days. However, all of the tools you need are right on the BBC (except for the debootstrap package, which we fetch with wget; and the rest of Debian/Woody which debootstrap and apt-get fetch is for."

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Debian GNU/Linux

The June 24 issue of the Debian Weekly News is out; it looks at handling of security issues, KnoppiXMAME, the "condorcet/Clone proof SSD voting method general resolution" (passed 9:1), the upcoming European software patent vote, and several other topics.

Martin Michlmayr has posted some Bits from the DPL. This edition is mostly about traveling and the various conferences where Martin will be found over the next month, giving speeches about Debian.

LinuxQuestions.org has added a sub-forum for Debian. This marks the fourth Distribution specific sub-forum at LinuxQuestions.org. (Debian joins Slackware, LFS and Conectiva). For more information you can read the announcement or go right to the Debian forum.

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Gentoo Linux

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of June 23, 2003 is out. Topics this week include: Where is Gentoo Linux 1.4?, The Meta Package project, Two additional new source mirrors for North America, GWN looking for additional translators, and more.

Several people have pointed out that Gentoo Linux should be moved to a more prominent place in the LWN Distributions List. In fact it was slated to move to the 'Also Well-Known' category, but after seeing this press release from UltraDNS, we decided to move Gentoo up to 'Leading Distributions'. (The press release ranks Gentoo as "the fourth largest open source Linux distribution", though the source for that statement is not given.)

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Mandrake Linux

MandrakeSoft has released updated initscripts packages fixing a boot loader detection bug, available for Mandrake Linux 9.1.

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Red Hat Linux

Red Hat has fixed a number of bugs in the foomatic package used in Red Hat Linux 9.

Red Hat also has updated bash packages that fix several bugs, now available for RHL 8.0 and 9.

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Slackware Linux

Slackware Linux has a few items to the slackware-current changelog this week. Patches were added to bash, the /lib/modules/2.4.21/build was fixed, /usr/sbin/shadowconfig now chowns /etc/shadow and /etc/gshadow to the shadow group as it should, zsh has been upgraded, the new "slacktrack" utility is available in extras, and more. As usual look at the changelog for complete details.

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Yellow Dog Linux

Terra Soft is now accepting pre-orders for Apple G5 Power Macs, which will soon be supported by Yellow Dog Linux.

Terra Soft has fixed several bugs in foomatic and the httpd package has been updated to include new powered_by.gif and index.html files.

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New Distributions

KnoppiXMAME

KnoppiXMAME is a bootable arcade machine emulator with hardware detection and autoconfiguration. It works automatically on all modern and not-so-modern hardware, including gameports and joysticks. It is powered by Knoppix Debian GNU/Linux, X-MAME, and gxmame. Stable version 1.0 was released June 18, 2003.

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Minor distribution updates

Bonzai Linux

Debian Planet covers the release of Bonzai Linux 2.0. "The current boot-floppies have been rebuilt to use Kernel 2.4.21 instead. This kernel has been compiled with gcc-3.2 due to space restrictions." Apparently that kernel didn't work very well for them, so version 2.1 was released a couple of days later, reverting to 2.4.20.

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Coyote Linux

Coyote Linux has released development version 2.00-pre5 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: Changes to the firewall scripts and a switch from dhcpcd to udhcpc have been made to fix DHCP client timing problems for connections that have slow responding DHCP servers."

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floppyfw

floppyfw has released stable version 2.0.5 with minor security fixes. "Changes: Kernel version 2.4.21 was included, along with support for the pcnet32 NIC (which is used by VMware) and iptables 1.2.8."

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Rock Linux

Rock Linux has released 2.0.0-beta6 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Several updates and bugfixes were made to packages and the build scripts. ISOs were created for the PowerPC (Desktop target) and x86 (Minimal and Desktop targets)."

Desktop Rock Linux 2.0.0-beta6 is also available. "Changes: This release adds many package security fixes and updates (many package and core script bugs have been fixed) and better Linux 2.5 support and ROCK Plug integration. This is the last planned -beta release."

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SME Server

Mitel Networks has announced the release of the second public beta of the unsupported developer release of version 6.0 of the SME Server. (Thanks to Brock A. Frazier)

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Trustix Secure Linux

Trustix has announced the release of Trustix Secure Linux 2.0 release candidate 1 (Thunder). "We firmly believe this to be a suitable release candidate, but expect that some issues may discovered when more users commence testing, and testing grows in intensity. We have gotten very valuable response from the beta testing, and expect the response on this release to be equally esteemed."

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