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20100718.144024
website is now in archive mode. visit blog.subnova.com for information.
20080730.144615
i added amazon context links... just because i can... if they're not too obtrusive... i'll leave them
20080114.231544
enabled mod_deflate on andromeda. the site is now seeing an estimated 80% reduction in overall size for clients to download
20080109.022443
added an rss 2.0 feed for the news at http://www.subnova.com/news/rss/. it will show the 14 most recent posts
20070823.031056
updated cq calculations so that if a member doesn't login to the website in the past 77 days, the contribution points start vanishing in a hurry... tanking the irank
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While I applaud the cooperation of Lindows and Walmart to create cheap PCs without Windows and sell them to the audience looking for Windows PCs, I have several major complaints with Lindows. First, in order to download more content from Lindows, you have to be a subscriber to "Click-n-Run", their service. Second, a lot of the standard Linux functionality is needlessly broken. Third, security problems are almost everywhere.
While attempting to help my father set up his copy of Oracle on his new Lindows machine, I attempted to install the free editor Vim, an enhanced version of vi, in order to make my life easier while configuring bashrc files. I went, downloaded the source code, and proceeded to try to install it. First, I was informed that I lacked the "make" utility. This brought me to a very sudden halt, so I attempted to backtrack, just read the bash manpage, and use a different text editor, after creating the user.
Lo and behold, the graphical "User Manager" program was broken, and refused to create home folders for the users. I proceeded to manually create the /home/oracle folder, and had to copy the files from /etc/skel. From there, I went back to trying to pull up the man page and edit the bashrc file. To my great surprise, Lindows has no man pages, nor the 'man' command. I proceeded to randomly toss in a few lines into the bashrc file. In order to completely test out the shell, and ensure that I wasn't screwing anything up, I decided I'd just SSH into the box, from itself, to ensure a clean sesion. SSH was not installed, so that idea got quickly shot down. I then settled with closing and relaunching the console window.
At this point in time, I was getting very upset, but figured that there might be a harmless explanation, perhaps some free download on the website that my father had neglected, and that he could use that to install all of the missing UNIX applications/utilities. I loaded up the Lindows "Click-n-Run" program (similar to apt-get, or an RPM manager, only with an HTML interface, accessing the Lindows servers, to display all of their packages).
I figured that if I installed make, I should be able to compile on my own just about everything else I needed. I went to the search function, typed in make, and found just what I was looking for. One quick click of the "Download" button, and I was redirected to a new webpage. To my dismay, the webpage informed me that this download was only available to subscription members, and that to subscribe, I'd have to purchase an account for USD$100. At this point in time, I told my dad I was unable to help him, and walked off, thoroughly frustrated.
My last final note, however, was that the default "user" for Lindows is root. Yes, you're handing the root account (not even another account with su/sudo privs, but root itself) to hordes of clueless users. Even OSX handles better than that, in terms of seperating users.
Overall, I did like the look of Lindows, it had a pretty sweet GUI, a customized version of KDE, it looked like (though I use Fluxbox on my personal machine). Despite that, I would not recommend Lindows to anyone at all. If you're going to go to the trouble of setting up a UNIX-based machine to give to someone, there's no point at all in removing all of the UNIX utilities, as if the individual who owns the machine feels curious and wants to learn more, they won't be able to. Don't use Lindows unless you absolutely cannot or will not pay for anything more expensive. |
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No articles have been posted in the last month.
Slackers.
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