Is There An OS On My Hard Drive?

stm2 writes "Thanks to an agreement between Lindows and Seagate, from October you will be able to choose a hard drive with or without Lindows. Michael Robertson, in his usual marketing speak, compares this to adding "Fluoride in the water", because now you get for free something you used to need to go after (people used to go to dentist to get their Fluoride). According to the PR, the OS can autodetect and configure itself on the host machine."

Lindows and other KDE based distributions

[Professor Chaos]

while i applaud lindows and seagate for this, I personally use Ark Linux arklinux.com [arklinux.com] which does the auto-login thing that lindows does but in a safer way. Plus the fact that arklinux is community based is a big plus as well. the way lindows runs as root is just wrong, arklinux created a program called kapabilities that makes it simple to give a user access to certain configuration things. plus its one of the few linux distros thats apt-rpm based. its really hard for me to weigh in on lindows. sometimes they seem like a smart and helpful company and sometimes they seem SCO/Caldera like. still, anything that gets more people using linux on the desktop is great to see.

Lindows and Flouride

[Urantian]

Michael Robertson compared Lindows to Flouride in the water??? He should have used a better comparison, if he was looking for positive impact. Flouride in the water is viewed as a severe health risk [crosswinds.net]. He should do his homework before using analogies to make his point.

Windows

[cdagobah]

How long do you think it'll take Microsoft to entrap hard drive manufacturers to bundle Windows preinstalled and then force end users to pay for a $200 license. (damnit I knew 80 cents a gig was too good to be true!)

RTFA

[powera]

RTFA. It says they offer two versions, both the same price. Lindows is giving it away to increase their market share.

Lindows allows non-root users

[steveha]

the way lindows runs as root is just wrong

It is possible to set up user accounts in Lindows. KUser, the KDE user manager tool, is available (renamed to "User Manager") and you can create users.

It doesn't work perfectly out of the box: you will need to manually add each user to the "dialout" and "dip" groups if you want Kppp to work, and the "Click-N-Run Installer" will ask for the root password each time a user logs in. (The solution to the latter problem is to disable the C-N-R Installer from auto-running).

Once you have created a non-root user, the KDE login manager will run and prompt for user name and password.

The above applies to Lindows 4.0 at least; I haven't really looked at other versions. (I wrote a review of Lindows 4 for Linux Journal.)

steveha

Re:Fluoride...

[ScottKin]

David Icke? You must be joking.

Mr. Icke is a psychotic, raving lunatic who preys on people's naivete`, and makes money on it with his particular brand of "bovine fecal excrement" stuffed into books.

Sources say that Mr. Icke's major source of information for his books can be found in the alt.conspiracy newsgroups.

ScottKin

Debian inside

[steveha]

The good news is that Lindows is built on Debian. And even better news is that the Lindows.com guys didn't rip out the APT tools. Lindows doesn't use them (they use their "Click-N-Run" stuff) but the tools are there.

It is actually possible to upgrade (or "side-grade" if you prefer the term) Lindows to just plain Debian.

Basically, you just edit sources.list to point to a Debian mirror near you. (Lindows has it pointing to the main Debian server; be a good net citizen and change that.) Then "apt-get update". Then blow away all packages that have "lindows" or "xandros" in the name, if you want that pure free-software feeling... or don't bother, if you don't mind a few Lindows packages floating around. "apt-get dist-upgrade", handle any conflicts APT can't suss on its own, and install anything you are missing. If you blow away the lindows* packages and xandros* packages, you will lose LILO and the kernel, so you will need to replace those.

Lindows by default sets up three partitions: a small /boot, a 256 MB swap partition, and the whole rest of the drive as a big ReiserFS partition, mounted as the root partition. I have not yet been able to build a kernel that can deal with the root ReiserFS; I keep getting the error "Unable to open initial console." I believe the problem is that it's trying to mount DevFS while the root partition is still mounted read-only, and I think the solution is to use an initrd (initial ramdisk). The 2.4.20 kernel that comes with Lindows 4 uses an initrd, and it of course works. I need to try building an initrd kernel soon.

There will be an article about this on the Linux Journal website sometime soon... I'm not sure exactly when. I took a Lindows MobilePC and upgraded it to full Debian unstable; it now boots with GRUB and has a GNOME desktop, because that's what I prefer.

steveha

Re:Fluoride...

[AftanGustur]

Flouride as a preventative measure against cavities was first discovered by the dentists.

True, but it's highly toxic.. Have you seen the space-suits the fluor-handling employees of the toothpaste companies have to wear ?

You're not supposed to eat toothpaste, and there are good reasons for that. One is that fluor builds up in your bones and can cause deformations in high levels.

There realy are reasonable doubts about putting fluor in drinking water.

Yes, bad analogy

[Gordonjcp]

In Europe and the UK, there is a lot of discussion over adding fluoride to water. In Scotland, they've pretty much stopped adding it in most places. It's poisonous, and too much fluoride (like if you have fluoride in the water and use a toothpaste with fluoride, ie. nearly all of them) it will cause horrible damage to your teeth.

Also, some people are highly sensitive to fluoride. You can get non-fluoride toothpaste, but can you imagine the hassle it must be, having to use bottled water for things like brushing your teeth, making tea or coffee, and in fact damn near anything else where you might ingest some of the water?

Re:Lindows allows non-root users

[Arker]

That's all very nice, but Lindows is explicitly aimed at the folk that couldn't do that if you walked them through it. People that would figure all this out (or know that they needed to make a proper account in the first place, for that matter) aren't going to be using Lindows and are not the target audience for Lindows. They should ship it so that it runs with a user account and works properly that way out of the box.

Re:Fluoride...

[elodan]

Take anything David Icke writes with a pinch of salt. He's a loony ex-footballer who believes that the world is controlled by a cartel of alien lizards . Google for "David Icke" and see what you get.

Re:Fluoride kills

[stray]

yo...

this is quite a good explanation: [howstuffworks.com]
Is it harmful to breathe 100-percent oxygen?

Re:Yes, bad analogy

[Dogtanian]

In Scotland, they've pretty much stopped adding it in most places.

My understanding is that it was declared illegal in Scotland after Strathclyde Regional Council were taken to court and defeated in the early 1980s. This doesn't apply to the rest of the UK (separate legal systems).

Personally, I think Michael Robertson needs his head looked at, and fast, because regardless of what you think of fluoridation (I think it sucks), it's a controversial issue and a good way to (pointlessly) alienate a large proportion of your audience.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey there, it's "Somebody set up us the Operating System." Yes, "set up us," not "set us up." Your grammar is reflexively too good.

Re:HUH?

[Sevn]

gazorninplat - Something unknown, a thingy, a whatchamacall it of sorts.

e.g., I cant finish this model, I lost the gazorninplat that came with it.

That is from Pseudodictionary.com [pseudodictionary.com]

But I picked it up from an old ass episode of Garfield and Friends.

Re:Lindows and Flouride

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

If some Vegan on a glacially slow Crosswinds account that can't even proofread his site inbetween making childish MS Paint illustrations say it's true, then it quite simply must be! +5 Informative!

Well, even a blind hen... But you needn't take the word of some vegan on the supposed problems of water fluoridation if you don't want to, take the word [fluoridealert.org] of Nobel laureate Arvid Carlsson instead.

Re:Fluoride...

[mckayc]

Actually, you're quite uninformed. Fluoride is allegedly only good for you if taken outside the body (i.e. just on your teeth.) There is no evidence that swallowing fluoride is good for you in any dose. In fact, it can cause fluorosis which causes teeth to become discolored and eroded.

One of the biggest misconceptions the public has is that fluoride is "good" for you when in fact it's just one way for Alcoa and other companies that produce large quantities of fluoride as byproduct of their processes to dump in somewhere and make money of it. Before fluoride became "good" for you, it was classified as toxic waste and had to be treated as such.

Furthermore, shouldn't people have the choice as to whether or not they want the "enhancement" of fluoride in their water supply?

Re:Yes, bad analogy

[spike hay]

The UK government is planning to force everyone to have it added to their water, which pretty much means I'll have to start buying gallons of non-flouridated water at inflated prices (my wife has a stomach condition and things like that are almost guaranteed to put her in hospital).

Uh, I really can't believe that. Flouride is perfectly fine in resonable quantities and prevents tooth decay. Larger quantities and you get problems like mottled teeth. Flouride is a common, common thing in the crust and is naturally found in many water supplies. Heck, the tap water I drink happens to be naturally flouridated, as it is in many areas. And obviously the animals aren't dropping over dead.

Re:Yes, bad analogy

[p4k]

if you boil water with it it leaves a residue that is apparently more toxic than cyanide, so you have to scrub the kettle clean after each cup

ROFLMAO, if you get a residue left in your kettle it's limescale, which is completely harmless. Whoever told you that must have been killing themselves laughing at the thought of you obsessively scrubbing your kettle out!

Re:Reality Distortion Field growing...

[lrucker]

6.7 deciJobs is .67 Jobs. You're thinking deka. Still too large, though.

As to whether a Jobs can be exceeded - it's a field, so what's being measured is the extent of that field. Jobs' RDF is large, but you can get out of it. I know someone with a smaller one that extends only a few yards - when you're within it, you believe Smalltalk is still viable and ParcPlace still exists (Hi Eliot!).