Many readers have submitted the latest news about Lindows.com. “Lindows is now also known as Lin—s (pronounced Lin-dash)” wrote Nick Stuart. The name swap, which effects only Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg, is a response to the court ruling that specified that Lindows was infriging upon the Windows trademark. The Reg is one of myriad sites reporting.
Lindows.com, aka Lin—s
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Adam Scheinberg
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You gotta admit the Lindows’ guys have great sense of humor.
Victor.
Seriously theres a fine line between “sticking it to bill” and professinal sucide.
I actually like the name Lin-s more than lindows lol. Great publicity stunt
I figured it would be a mirror of their real site. nope.
This is the sort of response i would expect from a single person running a small site, not a company. The name Lindows was stupid anyway, im sure apple wouldn’t like Nac OS X, LAC OS X and Redhat wouldn’t like Blue Hat with the Gedora Core. This is one of the reasons why i stuck with redhat and SUSE as they want to make linux a create product on it’s own and not as a weapon to use against microsoft.
What about Sweden?
Call his Distro Lindows PX.
He sure knows how to get the press.
This guy is clever, that’s for true.
Guess you have to speak English everyday for the term windows to be generic.
IIRC there used to be a guy on these boards nicknamed gill bates
Childish, yes.. but worth it for a laugh! and good side twister at that!
…in designing a new car with me? We could call it Phord or Bercedes-Menz
>> Phord
No! Phr0d!
And I really don’t know what to think about this Lin-dash.. perhaps they should have renamed it to Lin<peep>s instead…
I finally got to try out my (free, thanks to the CEO’s offer to OSNews readers) copy of Lindows Developer Edition over the weekend.
It installed ok.
It booted up to the OS choices screen ok.
And there it would freeze solid. No amount of key hitting, curse words, or threats would get it past this point. In fact the computer had to be reset everytime it got to this point.
So Lindows is officially the 1st Linux distro. to not run on this particular computer (I’ve had over a dozen different distro’s on it at one time or another).
I can’t offer an opinion on the OS itself since I never got to a usable state thanks for the freeze-ups, but I did have a few opinions I can share:
1. The Graphics for the Lindows installer truly suck! I don’t know what size they’re optimized for, but they looked all blocky & pixelized during the install process to me.
2. The boot manager itself, which I’m guessing is Lilo based, but am not sure since I wasn’t given any choices during the install, is amateurish at best. Information isn’t well explained (I have XP as one of the bootable OS’s on this machine, and this is the ONLY version of Windows installed, so why did Lindows’ boot manager give me the options to run “Windows”, or “Windows XP”?), and the presentation as a whole appears to be a “work in progress”.
4. The install process itself was rather scary since as the user, you’re only given 2 options: Install to a hard drive (deleting everything that’s on that drive), or install to a partition of the drive.
A partition’s cool. In fact I had 3 sitting there from a previous Linux install that I wanted to use: /boot, / (root), and Swap.
But Lindows doesn’t let me delete or resize existing partitions. Thus my choice was either to re-partition the drive in another OS, or to choose the biggest of my 3 aforementioned partitions, and hope that Lindows saw the Swapspace and so on.
Since I wasn’t able to boot, I’ve no idea of how Lindows handled it, but my guess is that it took Swap and /boot partition space out of the partition I gave it, leaving the old partitions as unused space on the drive. But again, that’s just a guess as it didn’t work at all when all was said and done. 8(
So, while the interview with Lindows CEO gave me that warm “Aww… I’ll give them another try” type of feeling, the facts speak for themselves:
It was a “white-knuckle” install, meaning that I hoped I understood what little information Lindows was giving me, and wasn’t inadvertantly deleting data I wanted to save (My non-Linux partitions, for example)
And after looking at the amateurish install images, I ended up with an unusable Linux install. Much like the last time I gave Lindows a look, it still fails to impress, and comes across as much more an anti-Microsoft product then a legitimate, professional Linux distribution.
True, I didn’t have a dedicated computer that I was willing to commit entirely to Lindows, and if I would have, I’m guessing my experience would have been similar to many of your experiences, but I also don’t have a system from hell, at least from a hardware standpoint. Lindows failed where every other Linux distro I’ve tried has succeeded (From Ark to Yoper, and everything in between).
Regrettably, I must give it “two thumbs down”. I hope that you-all have a better experience with it than I did.
Mr. Banned I had the same problem of Lindows freezing up on me until I turn lan that’s built onto my motherboard “on” in my bios and the freezing went away. So if you have lan turn off in your bios turn it on and see if it works.
Mr. Banned I had the same problem of Lindows freezing up on me until I turn lan that’s built onto my motherboard “on” in my bios and the freezing went away. So if you have lan turn off in your bios turn it on and see if it works.
Nope – My lan card’s external to the motherboard, so I can’t disable it.
Thanks for the suggestion though!
I’d say the best answer to this mess would be MS calling their next version of Windows ‘Winux’ (instead of the pathetic ‘Longhorn’)!
Windex. Long ago I used to rename a copy of format.exe to windex.exe as a solution for those pesky UAEs (Unexplained Application Errors).
Microsoft try and force a company to not use a word that is a play on an english word that for long before Microsoft were in existence and even longer before Windows OS was in existence was a standard computing term.
That is anti competitive. This seems like a pretty reasonable thumbing of the nose at them. They could spend the money to fight it and not be getting any money in while doing so, or do this, make their point and keep the money coming in.
Seems like a damned good idea to me.
>> Phord
>No! Phr0d!
Isn’t that Fnord?
Hmm well according to the court ruling i should not be able to surf on http://www.lindows.com yet i can. I see a notice above the site just like everyone else but unfortunetely it is in such a little font i can’t read it
my point is actually, shouldn’t i be unable to access the site given the court ruling ordered so, or is this comforming that ruling?
“What about Sweden?”
And Finland?
PS: it’s officially “Microsoft Windows”, not “Windows”. Now we see the importance of that…
Only it can be: “The OS formerly known as Lindows”
I just installed LindowsOS (YAY! I finally got the uncorrupted .ISO hehe), and wasn’t even getting that far, until I went into my BIOS and disabled the option asking if I had a Plug & Play BIOS (changed from “yes” to “no”). Worked like a charm after…
Just my $.015….
>So Lindows is officially the 1st Linux distro. to not run on this particular computer
You should try Lin—s then!
Lin–s sounds much better than lindows.
Sense of humour? Perhaps? I had a giggle or two there. But the site has a underlining political message against Benelux’s court systems and trademark laws, which IMHO, a big NO-NO. What I don’t understand is why Lindows doesn’t just change the name.
Certainly, Michael Robertson is enjoying the press caused by Microsoft lawsuit (a stupid idea, to begin with. without it, Lindows wouldn’t be anymore famous with the likes of Transgaming, Lycoris, etc). But how much longer till he looses money in litigation costs? What happens if more and more countries start preventing Lindows to use “Lindows.com” and “LindowsOS”? (Netherlands has the most liberal trademark and patent laws in Benelux and many would say, in Europe)
And lets go back to Lindows’ main reason for using the name. When Lindows splashed out, they promised the ability to run Windows applications on Lindows. After spending millions and wasting people’s time, they finally changed their focus unto CNR (nothing technically that unique). In the end, Lindows did choose the name as a play on “Windows”. And now, they are as related to Windows as any other operating system, why keep the name?
Besides, on the marketing standpoint, playing on someone’s established brand name (everybody knows what you’re talking about when you mention Windows) is bad in the long term, unless you prefer to always live under the shadow of Windows. Getting a catchy brand name and using the money used for litigation for marketing and advertisement – I think Lindows would go further.
Well, all you naysayers could think that the next MS target would be OpenOffice, since it uses the word ‘Office’, which happens to be one of the most sucessful MS products on the market. Bring it on! How many bucks would it take to patent and copyright every word in Oxford dictionary anyway? I guess Microsoft has enough.
II think OpenOffice is more afraid of a suite from the real owners of OpenOffice’s trademarks (thus, OpenOffice.org). Besides, Microsoft doesn’t have a case. OpenOffice.org was named after StarOffice, which was named after WordStar (well, considering the similarities in the product designs before StarOffice 6). StarOffice didn’t come on the scene promising to be a Office clone; unlike Lindows. And certainly, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org isn’t/wasn’t using their names as a marketing tool.
Besides, if you search through USPTO, you would find a lot of trademarks that is technology-related and have the word Office in it. Some are older trademarks than Microsoft’s too, most of them expired. Take for example trademark 78345709 by Recosoft PDF2Office, which implies directly to Office as a product.
To add on, Microsoft have little reason to sue OpenOffice.org. Their competitive strength isn’t changed if they renamed OpenWorks, or OpenProductivity or the sorts. However initially, especially when Microsoft filled the lawsuits, Lindows was using its name obviously lifted from Windows as a marketing tool. Besides, in all Office related trademarks Microsoft filled has the word “Microsoft” infront, and OpenOffice.org’s direct competitor is registered as “Microsoft Office XP” not “Office”.
Heck, the only trademark they could use against Sun was the now-dead “Microsoft Office Compatible” trademark.