Choosing a Distribution, Part VIII

Choosing a Distribution, Part VIII

Since Lindows was such a brat to me, I encouraged people to write
in with their Lindows experiences in order to balance out the
coverage. I got a few responses, so I’ll include them in this
space. First, Carl writes:

“Just a quick comment on your note on Lindows. I’m
not sure exactly what you were doing to have such a difficult
time. Two of my students in my basic (and I do mean basic)
IFSM class - total, complete newbies to Lindows and Linux, decided
to try it out. It is/was available at the PX here on base
(Iwakuni, Japan). They wanted to upgrade from the Windows 98 SE
they were running, and liked what they saw of Open-Office, etc.,
that they could easily download. It installed easily on both of
their old (2-3 years old) desktop systems, and within 30 minutes -
with no input from them other than setting the date/time zone and
the basic registration information - they were up and running and
hooked up to the Internet. The next day, they told me in class
that they basically liked it, and that when they got new machines
for themselves and passed the current ones on to their kids, they
would probably stay with some flavor of Linux and would keep
Lindows on the machines when they passed them on to their kids.

“Other very newbie students had a similar experience with both the
latest release of Red Hat Professional 9.0, and Mandrake 9.1
(Bamboo) standard. Their hardware is not particularly new - all 1-2 years old, all arrived with Windows of some flavor on it (ME, or
XP Home or Windows 2000). They had only used Windows as a simple
consumer before - running the preinstalled software packages
provided by Dell, Compaq, or HP when they originally purchased
their machines. All were finding some problems with or limitations
of the older Windows OSes they were using. They downloaded the
latest distros of the two Linux OSes they wanted to try over a
fast line on base, burned it on to a CD (in one case, had one of
the techs burn it onto a CD because they didn’t want to mess it
up), took it home, followed the instructions, and installed it.
All have found the latest (and I stress latest) versions of Linux
as easy to install, and put on the basic programs they need, as
Windows. In fact, the students who tried Lindows said the
installation was actually quicker and easier than with their older
Windows OSes.

“Maybe you overdid the ‘newbie’ thing a bit.”

Dee-Ann responds: I don’t think that I overdid it.
Simple things like not properly recognizing hardware can cause
major problems. What likely happened is that the hardware I have
just doesn’t get along with Lindows. Sometimes a computer will
handle one distribution just fine, but won’t handle another at
all. Just one of those things… usually a direct result of what
hardware the beta testers were and weren’t using.

Joel writes:

“I read your article on Lindows 4 and
thought I’d give you my scoop. I threw together a computer with an
old Soyo 6xv7 motherboard with an 800mhz PIII CPU, 256MB RAM, and
a random assortment of cards I had lying around.

“I put in the Lindows disk and let it go. I was expecting it to go
belly up or not find some of the hardware, as ALL other flavors of
Linux have done (I have a stack of Linux CDs six inches high). It
completed the install, and I entered in the obligatory setup
items. All looked good at this point. I then checked to see what
messed up. Couldn’t find anything wrong. I opened the browser and
it dialed up the modem (through my USRobotics 8022 AP/switch/print
server w/serial port) and connected to Lindows.com.

“Everything worked 1st time - EVERYTHING! I haven’t had this much
luck or ease of install on ANY Microsoft product, let alone a
Linux-based one. I expect there are computers (especially laptops)
that won’t have it as easy as mine. The only glitch was I couldn’t
print through the AP print server because USRobotics does not
support Linux on this device (but I already knew this, so no
surprise). If you or anyone out there in the open-source world has
developed a Linux printer server driver for the USR8022, PLEASE
let me know.”

Dee-Ann responds: I’m sure if anyone has seen one,
they’ll write in!

Monte writes:

“It’s funny…. I had quite a similar adventure installing
Lindows. The main difference, I think, between my newbieness and
yours is that I’m new to Linux, and it will probably will take
quite some time before I can say I’m not. I have two machines
side-by-side - my older one has two drives, and before installing
Lindows, I had 98 on one drive (I made a switch so I could
‘exchange master and slave’) and the other had XP Upgrade (its an
AMD550k62). I purchased Lindows 3.0 for $60, which included a
full-year membership to ‘Click and Die’ (I mean ‘Run’). I mainly
purchased it thinking I could get into Linux and possibly quit
supporting that Bill dude.

“My install actually went well and suprised me. I have my ‘puters
linked by a crossover cable, and it read it and actually made my
second ‘puter dial-up a connection. I was on CNR 15 minutes after
the mail came… five minutes to open the box, ten for the
install. My second ‘puter has one drive, 40GB split partition
(20/20GB). After a few days of downloading and surfing CNR, I
found I could get Lindows 4.0 for $10 bucks.. ($16 after shipping)
which I wanted to use on my newer (second) machine AMD2000+. I use
it to record my music, mostly, but I’m having songwriter’s block
recently… hmmm, maybe it’s computer-related… anyway, the
install went well for that one, too.

“I like the idea of LindowsCD, because you can plop it in and
search your drive. Now, if they added a virus scanner, it would
rock. There are those quirks, though, of course… even that
“OTHER OS” has them. 3.0 has a problem with graphics when they
move horizontally; i.e., move the horizontal scroll bar back and
forth and you get vertical lines messing up the screen. Probably
something simple, but not to a ‘new b,’ and it can’t find the dang
modem in that one. (It found the Internet on my crossover but not
the dang modem.) Understandably, on my second one it couldn’t find
my Echo MIA sound card. I haven’t tried to use the DVD, TV tuner,
USB MIDI, and 50 other devices I forgot I put in it, though.

“Overall, I’m happy with what I got. I wish I could do more,
Linux-wise, with it, but there are not too many Tips or How-To’s
around with easy-to-follow Tutorials, you might say. I don’t even
know if you can install (I hate that word) software manually from
other distributions. It’s all so confusing to newbies: RedHat,
SuSE, Debian, Mickey Mouse… you name it, it’s out there. That’s
where you more than likely know a lot about stuff that takes a
long time to learn, and newbies don’t have patience for that. But,
I’m still gonna try and stick it out; learn a little here, go nuts
a little there, forget what I learned here, etc. Well, now I’m
going to quit boring you and try to read about how to unzip and
install a file on Lindows… or is that tarball… gz!… shoot…
what directory do they save to? Well, good night. Oh… and it’s
not raining much here either.”

Bo writes:

“I downloaded the latest Lindows, to try it out on
my new machine. Asus p4p800 with Intel 865pe chipset. The rest
doesn’t matter, because shortly after starting I got the message:
‘Lindows does not recognize this chipset,’ then it quit. I had
used it before on AMD900, and it worked okay.”