Due to the recent hype surrounding LindowsOS I decided to take it out on a test-drive. And despite some bumps in the road, it all went pretty smoothly. Here is my review:
The Background
I will not bore you with details, but the outcome of some unfortunate tinkering was losing the ability to log into any operation system, be it Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Red Hat Linux. My floppy does not work at the moment, so I was stranded, cold and alone with my unbootable box. But then, I remembered getting LindowsOS several days ago. I crossed my fingers as I turned on the computer and popped the CD in.
The Installation
Here I was, watching the setup program trying to detect my hardware before loading, expecting another tedious and complicated installation purpose. But oh, was I surprised.
After accepting their license agreement, I was given one of the only choices the LindowsOS Installation gives you: Whether I want to reformat my hard drive and install the OS, or install it on a partition. Lucky for me I had
an empty partition ready (don’t expect Disc Druid, there’s no partitioning function, just choose a ready-made one). Next it required me to provide a computer name and gave me the “option” of choosing the password for the root
account. The whole “option” thing threw me off a bit, but I recovered. Apparently, they don’t care much about your security. Anyway, as I was saying, I entered the computer name and root password, and proceeded to install. In 4 minutes flat, it was done, and got ready to reboot. I was in a slight shock, but I complied with the instruction. After the BIOS boot, and the nice IRQ table, I was greeted by an endless line of 0’s. How nice. So I put the CD back in, and installed it again. This time it worked.
The First Impressions
I was greeted by a nice LindowsOS branded, graphical, LILO boot loader. Apparently I had no choice in the matter, which was OK in my case. I hear the usually, LindowsOS auto-detects the others operation system, but it just
supplied me the following option: 1)LindowsOS 2)Safe Mode 3)Configure… (expert) 4)hda1 5)hdd1. I have not tried the Safe Mode, but Configure leads to the OS without loading X. Choices 4 and 5 are the two partitions which
contains my operation systems. I chose #1.
After a nice little while autodetecting my hardware, the impossible happened. Let me side track for a moment; through several importunate circumstances I came into the ownership of a USB NIC, supplied by my ISP. No
operating system I have ever used before (which includes Windows from NT SP4 up to XP, and several version of Red Hat Linux) was able to use the NIC without initial trouble of some sort, and RedHat wasn’t able to use it all!
However, LindowsOS detected it, configured my network settings, and proceeded to non-chalantly start X and load KDE. After putting in my password, it just as smoothly connect to the Click-N-Run database and download some system updates.
So here I was, my mouth hanging open, not blinking, my hand suspended over my mouse. Let me again take you aside for a moment: I am cursed. Nothing I have EVER installed did its job perfectly, no OS, program, or anything else.
So you can just imagine what I felt when LindowsOS booted up and loaded everything nicely.
It had a nice desktop, it mounted my drives, and my one FAT partition (it doesn’t support NTFS). KDE looked nice with the colorful Lindows icons and the Keramik theme. So here I was, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to begin my LindowsOS experience.
The Second Impressions
I began looking through the applications supplied, and found them a bit
lacking. Yes, xmms was there, Kate, too. Some basic games (about 5 of them).
And assorted thinga-magigs. Well, being on a small budget, I did not intend
to pay the $99 Click-N-Run yearly access fee, so I loaded it up anyway. I
was told I could access about 15 programs for free, most of which were
games, although Real Player and KWord (given the dubious name of Write Pro)
were included.
So I went to the Debian GNU/Linux upon which
LindowsOS is based (version 3.0 of Debian) and decided to get a start on
some packages. And there, I was stumped. Although many packages install just
fine, many have dependency issues. I spent three days hunting down
dependencies to install programs and increase functionality, even gcc is not
included with Lindows. Here was the secret of the four minute installation.
All these problems would not exist if you agree to pay $99 a year, which is
decidedly cheaper than buying MS Office.
The Performance
I would now like to take the time to acquaint you with my settings: an AMD
Athlon 1700+ XP, 512 MB, Matrox 15GB HD, IBM Deskstar 120 80GB HD, CATC
Netmate 2 USB NIC, Creative CD-RW Blaster, AOpen 52x CDRom, ATI Radeon
8500LE, and a Creative SoundBlaster sound card. Everything worked
perfectly.
The speed was a tad slower than WinXP, but only enough to feel it, not more.
Utilization of resources was ok as well. Nevertheless, LindowsOS did crash
once, it refused to close XMPS.
Except for this one annoyance, it all worked smoothly.
The Other Thoughts
Then I discovered www.lindowsdownload.com. This website
allows you to access software such as OpenOffice simply and easily through
apt-get. So I did. OpenOffice worked just fine. So did Xine.
LindowsOS has talented art team and the looks of the WM, and even the XMMS
skin, were all great.
The Final Verdict
Despite some minor setbacks LindowsOS is a decent operation system. However,
without the yearly Click-N-Run account, it really isn’t worth anything.
Basically without CNR its an extremely stripped down version of Debian
running KDE.
So here are the scores:
Desktop Replacement for Windows: 9.5/10
Representative of all Linux-kind to humanity: 6/10
Fun to use for the average user: 8/10
Geek-factor: 4/10
Cost: (compared to Windows) 7/10 (compared to other Linux distros) 2/10
Overall score: 7.5/10
The Post-Script
For me, LindowsOS was a temporary “rescue-OS”. Since then I’ve tried Knoppix
and it worked just great! It detected my dreadul USB NIC (which I will
replace in a short while) and had much more software, all on its bootable
LiveCD. Next on my list is Gentoo. I might write a review of Knoppix in the
immediate future. Or I might not, only the future may tell.
About the author
Being a high school student in the Metro Boston, Massachusetts area is fun
and all, but I have to amuse myself by watching a lot of Anime and
installing more operating systems than my poor machine can support. Look for
me in a few years at a good college taking Computer Science and using my
mysterious dark aura to crash computers and render them beyond repair! The
world will yet hear of Michael Katsevman!
//Being a high school student in the Metro Boston, Massachusetts area … //
Ouch. From his spelling and grammar, I can’t say I’m impressed with “Boston Public.”
As for the review … It was interesting that the “second install” made everything work. I question the quality of his hardware. Lindows installed on my system in about 10 minutes, and I had no such problems on the first reboot.
‘Course, it only *lasted* about 10 minutes on my system. Back to RedHat.
Nice review, clear concise, worded properly and fair didnt feed into lindows propaganda
Good Job
If you install Lindows and don’t write a review, did you ever really install it?
Nice review Michael – thanks!
I think that the news about LindowsOS, in this case, is well behind us. We don’t need any duplicate reviews, do we?
There are no “duplicate” reviews. A review is nothing but the experience of an individual with a product, written down. And while similar experiences might occur, people perceive experiences differently. Therefore, each review can be very different than another one.
Two words: Spell Checking.
I am so tired of reading poorly worded reviews. Come on people, the functionality is there.. use it.
I don’t know why you guys are complaining about spell checking. I just passed the document through AbiWord and it didn’t find anything that _really_ needs fixing.
You might mean better “grammar and syntax” (which I can’t verify for the author as I am not a native english speaker), but this article revealed nothing out of the ordinary regarding *spell checking*.
Mike, if you find typos or grammer erros please e-mail me or the other OSNews writers and we will try to fix it. That would be appreciated. However, please don’t sit here and complain about typos in the articles. That got really old a long time ago.
Instead, do something constructive. If you think you can write a better review, then feel free to do so. Send it along to us when your done if you want. Simply complaining about spelling and grammer does not accomplish anything.
a review of ArkLinux… Since it isn’t out yet I don’t expect them to say.. well X or Y doesn’t work, but I’de like a general look at how the user experience is and how well put together it is thus far.
I don’t mind Lindows reviews though. I get annoyed when people are supprised it installed SOOO quickly. That is because it installs almost no apps…
Regardless it’s nice to see more people trying Linux.
Well, I’ve made my share of typos and bad grammar, so i do not mean to pontificate. Eugenia has said many times that, to her, that stuff doesn’t matter as long as the substance comes across.
I have gone back and forth on this. Making posts on computer message boards lends itself to not being concerned about these things and, if it weren’t for my upbringing, I would just totally let it go. But, I, and I’m sure some others who come here about my age, had it drilled into our heads, pounded into our heads, that using bad spelling and bad grammar in any form of correspondence or other documents that would or could be read by the public, was considered a sign of ignorance. The same is true of using vulgarities and obscenities. When I say “ignorance”, the meaning, at that time, meant “lack of education”, not stupidity.
I actually still pretty much feel that way, but know, for one thing, English is not the native language of many who come here, and I respect them very much for their efforts. For others though, I feel that, just like with flaming, laziness in spelling and grammar tend to undermine what the person is trying to say. I try not to think that way, but it’s so engrained in me, I can’t help it really. All of us make typos because there is something about writing on a computer, that lends itslef to that. I think it would be nice if native English speakers would make an effort to improve in this area. I’ll have to count the typos I made in this post 🙂
I thought this was a good review. Deffinatly has value, and has moderatly affected my view of Lindows. When you consider that this person is not a ‘professional’ reviewer or writer however, I have to say Im impressed! I’ve seen many a pointless and valueless review from the so-called ‘professionals’, and this is nothing of the sort.
Keep it up man, you could have an osnews.com of your own one day.
Hmmm… It seems that many people are complaining about my spelling and grammar. I ran it through the Outlook Express spell checker, and if you found a grammar problem I’ll take you on it, despite not being a native english speaker (hebrew’s my game) I am taking a college level english course.
I re-read the review and found nothing more than the occasional omitted ‘s’ in a plural. There were no syntax or grammar problems. If any of you find anything substantial, tell me. I have my own writing style, which might bother you. If it does tell me how.
–Mike.
…and I like your rating system too. Instead of arbitrary ratings like ‘instalation’ and such, you told us exactly what we want to know: Is it a good windows replacment? A good geek OS? I like that. If you do any reviews in the future, keep that rating system around.
Spelling and grammer werent perfect but for the most part he got his point across. Lay off of him he is just a kid for petes sake. Overall I think it was a good review and yeah I liked his scoring layout.
future Linux users, looks very promising.
Michael, good job. I feel better knowing that someone else had many of the same experiences with Lindows, including the strange “double install” thing with the CD.
I also noticed that it is quite slow, which is weird. I know XP is “bloatware”, and yet XP on the same box is actually quite fast. (I speak from the UI perspective-I haven’t benchmarked either one) Any explanations, people?
A word on the “spelling and grammar” criticisms. If you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of folks on this site who feel it’s their duty to slam everyone and everything. Ignore ’em.
I have not installed Lindows but I have had experience with installing at least two dozen distros/versions on my home machine. I had a few instances (with both Mandrake and SuSE if I recall correctly) when the machine was rebooted right after install and I got a bunch of 8’s (not 0’s) scrolling forever. Rather than having to reinstall, I found that the solution for me was to just shut down the machine and rebot again. That usualy took care of it. Might be worth a try next time you see this.
Cheers.
Many of the Linux IDE drivers don’t turn on DMA by default. Using hdparm to turn this on can result in a ten-fold increase in disk speed. I believe this is fixed in the unstable LindowsOS preview.
Roberto, my post was directed to native speakers of English, not people like Michael who, as you said, did an excellent job.
This is an extremely childish review, so tipical for Linux’ users. Writing for the sake of writing without saying anything worthy.
This is an extremely childish review, so typical for Linux’ users. Writing for the sake of writing without saying anything worthy.
Keep a close eye on Lindows… according to a reputable source:
Lindows’ market share has been estimated by IDC to be just 2 percent of the desktop OS market, and it is not anticipated to grow beyond 5 percent through 200
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20591.html
http://www.idc.com
Now THAT’s OSNews…
😉
— “This is an extremely childish review, so tipical for Linux’ users. Writing for the sake of writing without saying anything worthy.”
The only things ‘childish’ around here are the comments making a big deal about non-existant spelling and grammer errors and your comment, quoted above. In fact, your post has just about the least amount of value here. Now, where are YOUR review articles? Id like to get a good idea of what you consider to be a review of worth. (I assume that by ‘worthy’ you meant ‘of worth’. If not, then you think even more highly of yourself then I had first assumed!)
Excellent Review!!!!!!
> This is an extremely childish review, so tipical for Linux’ users. Writing for the sake of writing without saying anything worthy.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>
After reading these comments regarding spelling — and up pops this comment — ROTFLOL.
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Thank you for the laugh.
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NOW – WRT the article – Michael, congratulations. It isn’t easy writing. My daughters are usually exhausted and tired after writing, editing, thinking about it, worrying about it, and then finally seeing it published that it is amazing when they decide to do it all over again.
<p>
Thank you for taking your time to write and share your thoughts and ideas. I’m looking forward to reading more about your experiences.
<p>
Go get em tiger!
<p>
LPH
http://www.tuxreports.com
Where Penguins Fly
Hmmm, do I need the < br > tag? LOL. And where is the preview? Drats.
Two features that I’d love to see in this area. What do you think ?
good review … heh try looking at Morphix (http://www.morphix.org/) base on Knoppix … downloaded the Morphix Base+Main-heavyGUI GNOME2.2-based (430MB) … much cleaner interface than Knoppix … XMMS .. xine … vlc
— “Two features that I’d love to see in this area. What do you think ?”
That would have to require some sort of registration, rather then the current voluntary registration. Frankly, I would preffer that the current simpler and more annonymous friendly comment system stayed around. I like the idea that anyone who likes can quickly and easily post a comment without having to register and such.
when i first looked at the lindows web site I thought the
click and run thing was like a manual version of suse’s
“yast2 you”. but now that I know that its a paid service
no thank you, but thankyou for pointing that out to the less enlightened.
I have, this past week, loaded Knoppix, Libranet, and, Lycoris, on PIII 550mhz, Celeron 600mhz, and AMD k6-550mhz systems, here.
All are quick to load, at about 30 minutes, including the hard drive partitioning. All came right up on my 100mbs LAN hubbed broadband connection.
I am very impressed with the ease of use, the full complement of FREE programs. The Lycoris distro did have dependancy issues in the automatic upgrade area. Libranet is worth the purchase. Lindows seems, for someone with my level of knowledge, to not be a complete resource, as all these other Debian based Linux OSes are more complete. I switched to GNU/Linux in 1997.
I also have dedicated systems running RedHat 7.3 (on a Celeron 600), and Red Hat 8.0 on my newer Duron1300 (very fast), and do much of my daily work there.
Suse, BearOps, Turbolinux, Storm, Gentoo, are all older Linux Distros that are installed on some other systems, for the fun of it. I have downloaded Slackware, and see that it is also very complete with tools and applications.
In my stable, there are many horses, each proven for a different task… And, so it is… I find answers at http://yolinux.com and,distros at http://distrowatch.com
Find your pot of gold, there at the rainbow’s end!
c’mon people this might have a nice idea but really the os and the idea is getting old the only thing they did with wine was try and integrate it and steal some code. besides who wants to emulate crap like windows? he he besides the fact that everything is run as root and they wherent motivated enough to go for full windows compatability. in a recent headline claining “emulating windows is hard” well no crap why do you think wine has been in development for 10 freaking years!
jezus crist when will people get off the idea that windows is not a gold standard for what a desktop _should_ be there are far more intuiitive and colorfull interfaces out there. . .
btw I use slackware 8.1 KDE 3.1
I have had 2 problems getting it to work and noticed on a few reviews they somehow never tried to use technical support, a large factor in deciding to buy an operating system.
My first problem was that I could not get on the net. Lindows would not open the driver files for the Nforce network card. I contacted them and was told, within 24 hours, that I was in a catch 22 situation and to contack the motherboard manufacturer. I am not sure if they wanted me to use Click And Run, but I found Alien myself later, a program that converts the files…
My second problem is unsolved. After 4 attempts to install, now on a MSI 6590 motherboard, it hangs each time on “configuring runtime system”. Locked solid. I submitted to technical support SIX days ago with no response. This was after reading all the FAQs and trying a few suggestions suggested to me by people in the forums. I also put in a complaint in their forums where they specifically ask for your opinions. As far as I can tell, these guys dont read their own forums much, either, I thought for sure, at the very least, some PR person would try and make me feel all warm and fuzzy
So, if your reading this and you review software that requires paying and offers technical support, to always check up on that technical support before completing your review. Many times, poor technical support can ruin an otherwise good piece of software.
Thanks for reading.