Linspire Archive

The Linux community has been buzzing about LindowsOS since its original announcement over a year ago. With Michael Robertson, founder of mp3.com, at the helm, it was heralded as a Linux that could seamlessly run all of your Windows applications. As details became available, the skepticism of the community grew and with the LindowsOS general release only months away, no one is quite sure what to make of Lindows.com and their product, LindowsOS. We tested Lindows 2.0 and we today present the most in-depth review ever written for this much-talked OS, accompanied by a number of shots.

Lindows.com, Inc., maker of the low-cost, Linux-based operating system LindowsOS , announced today the release of LindowsOS 2.0 available now to Lindows.com Insiders. Michael Robertson also writes about it in his column. LindowOS 2.0 uses the Keramik KDE theme (and possibly KDE 3.x), and it includes many new tools like wireless configuration, laptop support, printer network scanning and more.

"A Lindows system—or any Linux system—engineered with this in mind would be hard to make into a Windows XP machine without someone developing a Windows XP personality module. Whatever the case, I believe the $199 computer will be a hot commodity and could become even hotter if Wal-Mart actually decides to carry it in stores and not just on the Web." Read Dvorak's column at PCMagazine.

Lindows has extended the membership of all Insiders to a two year period starting at the general release. The price still remains at $99 dollars but now it is extended for two years. After the general release the price for the distribution and the subscription will be $129 dollars. The insider program will go up to $299 for a year. New ISO Build Updated to Xfree86 4.2 and added nVIDIA Detonator Driver 1.0-2960. Read the rest at PCLinuxOnline.

Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows.com, was the guest speaker of an IRC meeting with the Lindows Insiders on July 12, 2002. As you can read in the chat transcript, Mr Robertson is making very clear that the Lindows market is not the Linux users, but people who have never used Linux before. As Lycoris also does, Lindows does not care much about competing with other Linux distributions, as much as they care competing with Windows itself. Their marketing plan is to de-emphasize from showing off GNU/Linux and the broader open source movement as a selling point, and instead to create a hybrid between a commercial and a somewhat open environment: "The audience we're going for has never heard of linux, so it's more of a distraction when talking about our system to mention linux." he said.

This is the second Lindows/Wal-Mart review coming out in a short while, and this one, is truly a must read. The author is a journalist that have used Windows, but he is not a Unix user. Trying to test Lindows he got into similar trouble as David Coursey did two weeks ago, when he tried Red Hat Linux. While Mike Langberg of San Jose Mercury News used a supposedly "desktop-oriented" Linux distribution, Lindows, as opposed to the server-oriented and marketed Red Hat, he still found it very unfriendly for common tasks like changing the refresh rates of a monitor.