I'm sure this will be news to most of you, but Lindows is giving away a free iso download to its Linspire OS. I discovered this tidbid o' info reading through Google news last night. You have to "buy" a download only copy of Linspire 4.5 in the online store and put it in your shopping cart, then once in your cart, click the "coupon code" option and type "lindows". It then deducts the full 49.99 price from your "purchase" and you get a free copy of Linspire for BitTorrent download. The press release said it will only be available "for a few days" so get your copy now. Sorry to offend, but I wanted to get my copy before I told a whole community of people, so Lindows doesn't cut the offer prematurely.
Anyway, I downloaded my copy, burnt it from the ISO, and installed it on a spare 3Gb drive that I crammed into my parents eMachine. The install was the easiest Linux distro install I've ever done (I've done and attempted many) Startup is really slow compared to XP or OSX, but the KDE interface is friendly, and it configured my internet during install, so I was rather pleased at how easy it is to boot and use when Windows gets on my nerves. I'd like to hear others' comments on Linspire if they get a chance to install it.
Didn't work for me.
Doc.
_________________________________________________________________
The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life.
Doesn't work.
Coupon LINDOWS is not intended for the product/service you are trying to apply it to.
Jeremy
http://www.linspire.com/btorder
Use that link to get the right copy, and use "lindows" as the coupon code. Do it quick though, I'm sure they have a limit in mind as to how many free copies they give out.
[b]Logan Tong[/b]
I'm not sure I'm down with Lindows/Linspire because of one flaw - they use persistent root privileges. By that I mean that by default you are using the root account as a user account. That's pretty dangerous considering root can do *anything* to the system.
When you are running as a lesser privileged account, random code can't destroy your machine without root's password first being entered.
It's just a fairly large security risk, as far as I'm concerned, and one of my big beefs with Windows, too.
I've just installed it on a spare computer. Way under their requirements, but it works.
You can actually add users and log in under them instead of root. Then you don't have the problems you mention that are associated with root. The Administrator account still shows in the list of users though.
My results:
#1: K6-2 500mhz, 128MB RAM, 10GB HD, 52x CD-ROM drive, Radeon 7000 AGP video, Crystal sound card, RealTek 8139 10/100 NIC
Doesn't recognize the sound card or the network card. The network card is recognized by Mandrake Linux and RedHat.
#2: Virtual PC 2004 running on an Athlon XP 2000, 256MB RAM, 80GB HD, built-in sound, Radeon 7500 AGP video, Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card, Zip100, Benq DVD+RW, Windows XP.
Emulates a P2-class processor, S3 PCI video, SB16 sound card, Digital 10/100 NIC, 96MB assigned.
Does not recognize the sound card (surprise, surprise), recognized the video (no acceleration), NIC.
I think I've only been able to get a sound card to work ONCE in Linux, and I can't remember what chipset it used.
I know you can add users that are less priviliged, but that isn't the default behavior, so newbs will just happily use the root account and never know the difference. Those are the people you have to worry about, and they are the target market for Linspire.
As to distros I enjoy, Debian flavored stuff is good. Mepis for example is a good distro in that it is basically Debian but much easier to install/use.