Ubuntu Switches to Google...again...

I see that Yahoo! is getting replaced by another party. First, my former colleagues at T-Mobile realized how much Yahoo! was losing them in content sales and not producing in search revenue, now I see Ubuntu is probably realizing the same thing...or...they are realizing that since the Yahoo! Bing deal has passed federal acceptance, they now realize that Microsoft, and not some non-evil empire will be giving results. Although, since the Bing folks are also my former colleagues, I can honestly state Bing and Microsoft are just related remotely. Sure, there are some old school has-beens in the Bing group, but once they hired in more talent from other search companies and bought a few others, the ideals in Bellevue (where the OSD group/Bing is located) is quite different than in Redmond. Sure, it is only 20 minutes away in traffic, but the leadership at Bing understands it isn't about brute force.

The money part, well that I can understand. Having gone head to head with Google on search with Mobile, I can honestly say that Google's pockets are way deeper than Microsoft...shocking isn't? I know what MSFT paid Dell and HP for their placement, I know what MSFT paid Verizon for that deal, however I am not going to publish the numbers for many reasons (I can spell NDA and LCA), I know that in both cases Google was offering more. What MSFT brought to desktop were most likely (I didn't do that deal myself, so guessing) concessions on other items. For mobile, we offered a flexible platform, that would continue to promote content, ringtones, games and internal feeds, where Google treats all data on its relevancy. Why does that matter?

In Mobile, it isn't yet about search ad revenue, there just are not enough clicks and users generally to get the CPS model to a high value. Users just don't have enough space on the screens to be bothered by enough ads to get people interested in clicking them. So content, albeit a slowly decreasing and since Apple/Android started their own markets, just make more money than what search can offer. Verizon makes more on content in one year that all the revenue that could be offered over many years from search. Rumors were that Yahoo! cost T-Mobile 25% of sales on content. This would put it in the magnitude of $100-200 million a year. I would estimate even on a good solid year that Yahoo! might have done $5-10 million in ads in that time frame, possibly up to $20 million if they did something amazing...they didn't. That is reserved for the iPhone.

So what is left? Since Yahoo! killed off a majority of their search group with the Microsoft partnership, I would imagine more groups will go to Google. Yahoo! owned mobile space, with at least 10x all the other partnerships combined. Where are those deals now? My bet would be towards Google as I know what Microsoft can handle and willing to step up for...Sorry Yahoo!Bing, seems that open source will be closed to you, not that it really matters, your 24% just doesn't grow there.

Returning to Linux, where to start? Part 1

I used to review linux, some of you may remember either knolinux or new2linux websites. Every once and a while a former reader would email and ask, "what happened?" How do you explain certain things in life? It wasn't health, family, ideological changes, or anything even close to resembling something dramatic. I simply took a new job...at Microsoft. No, I am not a programmer, so it wasn't even remotely related to operating systems, office, or anything that makes them money. It was mobile search, so in fact the pieces I worked on actually cost them several hundreds of millions of dollars. I digress. Since I left them after my 18 months of pain, shame and learning how lame it really is to not be a programmer, I have been working ever since on getting back into my engineering discipline and my love for linux. No, I wasn't forced to stop using Linux, I simply made a decision to try to understand my company's products, as I had spent nearly a decade of trying to make sense of what came out of Redmond. I only take from my time there a learning of how not to manage products, how not to spend money going after lost causes simply to try and beat others, and that free soda just doesn't make up for the slow and steady pull of life from the lack of color in the offices. 

So my last few months have been dealing with a physical move and at the same time learning a new role, which is actually an old one. At the same time, my poor old laptop was struggling with the load of Windows 7, as it is stuck with 1 gig of RAM (odd shaped slots prevent me from upgrading). So every once and a while I would download a new Live CD of a various distro that I was used to in  order to determine what was I going to head back too. Would I be a lemming and jump onto the Ubuntu ship? Go with what I knew best with Mandriva or OpenSuse? Or should I venture to some of my favorite distro's I reviewed previously to see where they all lied?

The one thing I knew is that I still can't stand KDE and Gnome has really become more and more about others dictating form and function. My two favorites from years past had really gone in two different streams: XFCE was becoming main stream while Enlightenment was struggling. I took a quick gander on Distrowatch to see what new and uprisings were happening on the leaderboard and noticed two old KDE camps both had a XFCE distro out; Mint and PCLinuxOS. I had rather enjoyed both and actually interviewed Tex and Clem for my previous reviews, so why not head back to a reasonably comfortable place. 

Now the first thing you might notice, I am not going to be doing reviews like I had done in the past. Those were a lot of effort of VMWare to go through the loading and installation. I figure that enough time has past and most distro's now have excellent forums, so my efforts would really be a waste of time. I decided to focus instead on what I think is done right, what needs some tweaking and are the distros really worth effort of installation for others. 


The first one I installed was PCLinuxOS XFCE Phoenix Edition.

The style is quick to impress, I love the look of flames on a wallpaper. The rest, well, let's just say for a first run at an XFCE, my expectations were not over or underwhelmed. 

The installation process had a hickup, in that it couldn't understand my partitions. They are not all that confusing and no other version I played with has run into any problems. I think it might be the fact I have an extended partition in the middle, making the system choke when running a expect. This wasn't too big of a deal, minus when I tried to load the other partitions up as their own folders (easier to find files from the others) the system crashed and I had to start over. So when I went into the pretty PCLinuxOS Control Center and tried to add these via  "manage disk partitions", it failed to mount the new drives. 

So then I tried to mount as root and it told me that it cannot recognize Ext 4 partitions...huh? Have I missed something over the past 3 years? Maybe a new magic command that I just don't know about? If someone could fill me in, would greatly appreciate it.

So this really bummed me out, as now I am missing some files from this distro from previous screen shots and will have to install another distro just to gather them back. Not going too well so far. 

Other disappointment was that openoffice was not installed. I understand that this is a memory hog, however many others have found a way to install these without going over the magic 700 MB iso. I did notice in the web browser that there is now a Appstore. Like many other distros, it seems PCLinux now has a way to gather applications outside of Synaptic...why? I don't see the need to go beyond a solid method of gathering applications. One thing I did learn in developing applications at MSFT, KISS (keep it simple stupid). Why have two points of failure that are doing the same thing?

So what do you get as options? If you don't install office, wouldn't you think that office would be an option? Nope...just Opera, google chrome, Dillo, Epiphany...a couple of HTML editors, a music manager...eh...I just don't get it. Installing the applications actually seem to take longer than download and installing command line. I get the ease, however simply instruct people how to get all applications. In fact, my favorite was when Google Chrome didn't load, and I got this error message....classic.

The rest of the package I would rate as average. Nothing really screams wow, nothing else is really lacking. With this you get a solid XFCE distro, albeit a bit fragile that is not as robust as others. If you are a fan of PCLinuxOS, the support is there, the community that is second to none and the packages are customized towards what those users are wanting to see. I love that the links are there in Firefox and I love the line "The distro-hopper-stopper" as I have always felt PCLinuxOS was one that would stick with the user a bit more than others.

 












So how would I fix pieces? It really doesn't need a lot. Understanding a bit more on the installation issues would be a good start and finding a way to put a script to allow users to install some sort of office script would also be a solid step to help people get what they need with a system. Video playback on websites was solid, media is well represented. Like the Phoenix in the wallpaper, this is a nice picture, just not a whole lot of extra color.  I will keep it around for a while and that usually says that I don't hate the distro, I have hope, and patience so time will tell how long it stays.

So there you have it folks, my first review after a few years off trying to figure out how not to lose millions :) Let me know what you think and please offer suggestions of how to improve, what would be a good next distro to review or anything else on your mind. 

Cheers! KLG

Last fall we wrote a review that was generally well received on Simply Mepis 6.0. This is a very nice package out of West Virginia that takes KDE to Ubuntu in a more polished and solid way than even Kubuntu can do. Much was made by people, even on Distrowatch about little coming from the Mepis camp over the last couple of months, and then right around Christmas, sure enough here comes a nice little improvement package and much to my suprise a package offering 64 bit support.

Now, some may have seen the listing of my older eMachines m6805 laptop, which I have been struggling to get native 64 bit OS' on for almost 3 years now. Every now and then someone would offer up their version of 64 bit, and I would bite and try, only to fail one of many things, much of which was either DVD players or wireless woes. Now, that machine is now at the bottom of some scrap heap, but my replacement from Worst Buy was still a 64 bit machine from the new owners of eMachines, Gateway, with almost the same exact specs. So my dreams of being free of 32 bit still live on, yet I still cannot get a package that wants to work across the board...until now. More on that later, but let's give this new polished package a review before the Feb 10th expected launch and let people know if they should move over from other KDE systems to the one out of the Mountaineer state.

Details:

Website http://www.mepis.org/
Download Here
Kernel - Kernel 2.6.15-27 Based on Ubuntu, talked of moving to 2.6.17 here
Desktop - KDE 3.5.3
FAQs - http://www.mepislovers-wiki.org/index.php/Main_Page
Cost - FREE!!!
Special Features - Live installer, nice add ons and decent packages in small install, full multimedia support, 64 bit

Nitty Gritty:
Installation ( )

When you first run the Live CD, there are the basic options for running in Normal, Vesa, Minimum, and Small, which is a great idea for people with older machines or no clue on what level of video support they might have. The system is even setup now to let you know if you are installing in VMWare, to use the Vesa driver to get the best results. Since that was where I was installing, I used this for my screen captures, but used the Normal for the full system installation.

NOTE: The screenshots will show 32 bit on the wallpaper due to my installing on VMWare for 32 bit native, therefore the install had to be 32 bit as well. The results and methods for 64 bit was exactly the same, you just have a different wall paper, which is good if you download both versions so you know which one you are using/installing at the time. Of course you can always run 'uname -a' in terminal to check as well.


Once you select the video profile, you will then get into a very nice live environment. The typical user account is 'demo' with password 'demo' while 'root' with password of 'root' can also be used. The install routine works with either login, so stick with 'demo'. My favorite color of blue again, guess everyone but Sabayon is working with this.



This keeps the color flow, and note that now we are on Beta 4, and not Beta 1 as from my screen shots.



So the start up desktop is classic KDE, with the only real change from Mepis 6.0 being the lack of the fish tank. Some people found that anoying I know, but for me it was a nice way to ensure my machine had not hung up, so I miss the little fellas. Oh well. They did change the bar on the bottom to be 85% of the total screen, which you cannot tell from my screen shot, I guess to give the KDE a more "apple" look, such as you would get with Xfce, or Enlightenment. I personally liked that they are getting away from the traditional Windows clone look, which for me is extremely tired.

I have never hated KDE for its look, just that too many times I get the feeling that they are working harder at getting the desktop to be a Windows clone than they are worried about functionality and usability (is that really a word?) There are not too many icons on the desktop and the ones there are nice, clean and funcitonal. Too many icons and I get lost, while I still want to get to my main folder and the internet with only one click.

Interesting the weather is still keyed to West Virginia, just so you know what it is like where Warren lives. It is easy to add your local weather and remove this, but I still like the little local plug. I wonder if the city council gives them a kick back?



Once you select the 'Mepis Install' icon, you get into one of the best installers going today. I know this from ease of taking screen shots. Maybe it is because I have had the last couple of Slackware based systems, which takes over 30 shots to finish, but this was so nice having only 10 for installation.

The first one is just the T&C for use of Mepis, nothing scary here, typical legal ease.



Now, the first real selection process is the disk you wish to install onto, and also a built in tool, QTParted, to modify your partitions. Now, I am not the biggest fan of QTParted, as this tends to hang on wierd occasions. Now you can also select the Auto option, which just goes ahead and makes all the decisions for you. DO NOT USE THIS if you have a windows partition or any other system which you want to install.

Now, I had my only problem with installation here, when I moved along, so we will try and explain. Basically when I installed on my laptop in a real enviroment, I was using my existing paritions. On the 80 Gig hard drive I have 25 Gig for Windows Vista (keepin up with that crap as well, I don't ever use that monster) then 5 Linux partitions of 10 Gig each, a data backup partition of 4 Gig and a 1 Gig swap. So one of the 10 Gig I was using as a Home folder, and when I went with the existing partitions I was given the option of keeping the Home folder intact, which was the option if you were upgrading your system, so it said. Now any time I tried to use the /Home folder option with no formatting (keep data intact), the installer crashed. If you just use the home folder being a part of the /root partition option, then it worked fine. When you do this, you can then modify your fstab later and re-establish your home folder, but just be careful. KDE seems to get confused with some hidden file settings and you can crash your system sometimes, which is why I never try to use the Home folder, even though many tell you that you should. Great for the typical install, bad if you have 4 versions of Linux on one laptop.



Now, for the purpose of this install, and to install like a newbie might, I just used the Auto funcitonality, and since I was installing on VMWare, this was not an issue for me. But only do this if you are willing to dump your entire hard drive. Hence the warning message, making sure you want to wipe out your hard drive. BE CAREFUL!!!!!



Simple little dialog lets you know where the install process is, go get a cup of java and wait a few, this doesn't take too long.



The first thing you have to decide once all the files are transfered over is where you want your boot loader to be located. Now, if you have no system, just select MBR. If you have windows, or another Linux system, then I would suggest the MBR as well. If you are an extremely experienced Linux and know what you want, then do that here as well. I do like how they tell you that MEPIS cannot find other Linux systems so you will have to add these to your /boot/grub/menu.lst file once you reboot. Sorry, no Lilo, but I am sure if you want that then you can force it later from a different system. I personally like Grub so I am pretty happy with the options provided and the excellent explainations to boot (get it, boot, my try at pun humor =))



Next there are some options you can enable/disable on runtime. The one option you probably will want if you plan on printing anything is cupsys, while Bluez is the bluetooth option so if your laptop supports it, or if you have an external card, select away. These typically don't hurt anything, just adds to the boot time.



Here is where you set up your local domain and/or windows system if you have one. Now, if you don't have anything like this, or if you have no idea on what to put, just leave it alone. If you do have a windows pc/laptop, then likely you either use WORKGROUP or MSHOME as your Workgroup. To see this, right click on My Computer on the windows machine, and select Properties and then Computer Name, which has a button for rename or join a domain. Whatever is there, then this is what you want setup for your Linux box to use Samba. If this is setup properly, then browsing your linux box to a windows domain is easy. If it isn't then it seems impossible.



The next step sets up your keyboard and locale. If your clock is wrong in the bottom, then likely your machine is setup to UTC time instead of local time, which is the check box saying system clock uses GMT. Windows typically uses this to work on auto daylight savings time adjustments, so know that if you change it here, then your windows time will be wrong next time you boot. I typically set this later, will help you on that down the road.



So the final step here, which is odd to me, is to set your root password and user name and that associated password. I say that this is odd, because most systems do this first, get it over with and then move on to the good stuff. Now, I like that these are on one screen, and that there is no option mentioned for no passwords. Just remember what they are. MEPIS does not use sudo like Ubuntu does, so one needs to use 'su' to change to root level in the system. I am not sure why they didn't implement sudo like most others, but hey, as long as you know that, you are ok.



And that is that folks. Congratulations! If you are really observant, then you would have seen that even with my screenshots, this took me 20 minutes to complete. Now, I only gave this a 4 Pennie score, so why not 5? Well, a couple of silly things I guess.

First, you don't know where you are in the process at any given time. You can go back, but one never knows what step they are on or how many more are to go.

Second, there is not an option to determine what I want to install, I am at the mercy of the MEPIS folks on what gets included. Sure, it is a live system so I know that I like it before I install it, but still let me know that there are some things that doesn't have to be there.

Lastly, I hate QTParted. Not for the look and feel of the tool, just that it doesn't work well. If there is more than one action to perform, I find that often I am stuck and need to reboot in between each step. So if I want to create 5 parititions, that would take me 6 boots. Unacceptable. Just provide options for other tools, even CFDISK, just so I don't get stuck with this below average tool.



Altogether, a very easy to follow, complete installation that gets you from live system working to new distro in less than 20 minutes. Minus my problem with the Home folder I am extremely pleased with the progress of MEPIS on this release and pleased to be running a solid 64 bit system.

Now, how does it work? Let's find out shall we?


Starting ( )

The best part of my new Gateway laptop is one thing: NO MORE BROADCOM!!!! whew. The new laptop runs a Belkin RTL8185, which has a package r8180 built into many kernels. What this means is that there is no more need for ndiswrapper for me with these systems, and I thank my lucky stars for that.



For the people still using broadcom (sorry for you my friends) I am leaving the following from my previous review on getting this to work. Please note that you will need to use the 64 bit windows driver, which can be found on the ndiswrapper lists and is generally called 'bcmwl5a.inf'

First, my wireless was not working, even though the light was on. It seems that the kernel with the BCM43xx module compiled runs the hardware and it will respond to an 'iwlist' command, but for some unknown reason just won't lock on when you try to get an IP address with 'dhclient'. So there are a couple of steps to remedy this for us laptop people with Broadcom (which is by far the most common PCI card out there it seems. Here are the steps

• Blacklist bcm43xx in the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file
• rmmod bcm43xx
• ndiswrapper -l to see what cards are already installed
• for me 'ndiswrapper -e bcmwl5' to remove the existing driver
• copy the drivers from my windows partition (can be googled pretty easily if you don't have them)
• from the directory with the windows drivers 'ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf'
• 'depmod -a'
• 'modprobe ndiswrapper'
• 'ndiswrapper -m'
• reboot (don't know why, but it is required)

and my wireless came to life.

For my video woes, which seems to happen all too often, all I had to do was search mepislovers and found that to add ATI card support all I had to do was use synaptic and install the package 'xorg-driver-fglrx' and restart the KDE with a ctrl-alt-backspace. Very nice there.

My new look once I changed the wallpaper and moved some icons.



So, is this better than Kubuntu? What sets MEPIS apart from the Ubuntu KDE camp, or other KDE systems similar? Well, one just needs to head to mepislovers.com to see that the MEPIS community rivals Ubuntu in many ways. It doesn't have the amount of people around the world, that is no doubt, but what it might lack in quantity it makes up for in Quality. Fast and friendly support is there to be had.

Bonus Stuff ( )

Some features that are added to MEPIS and not available to typical Ubuntu builds include some nice utilities called Assistants, which can be found by clicking the Mepis icon/System/Mepis as show below.



Each one of this adds a nice little functionality to typical items that newbies find challenging. First is network.

This gives you two methods of controlling your network, Manual or Automatic. If you select Auto, then the other tabs are grayed out. If you do use Automatic, you typically have to reboot and then go to Mepis icon/Internet/Connection/Network Manager (Knetworkmanager) in order to see the difference. This is basically going from you setting the parameters to the system trying to do this for you. If you are new to Linux, Automatic might be your best option. Once this is there, in the icon tray in the bottom right, you will see the Knetworkmanager icon, you left click it, and then you can select to find a wireless network or connect wired. Nice stuff here, good to have instead of knowing both methods by themselves.



The next one that really helps is Graphics XConfig. Graphics is by far one of the most complex items to work yourself into and shouldn't be taken lightly. You either know what you are doing here, or you are going to break your system and end up and a command line prompt, banging your head against your keyboard. The really nice things is that here you can configure up your NVIDIA or ATI cards without knowing what package to select in Synaptic or where to download these. Now, again, if this doesn't work you might end up with command line hell, where you can't do anything, so unless you know what you are doing, don't break the system. In other words, unless you can backup your xorg.conf file, move data files around in command line, or vi/nano edit a file from command line, stay away. It is working, so leave it alone for now.

I applaud the tool, just wish there was more of a tutorial on its use and how to recover if something goes wrong, which typically happens with proprietary drivers on video.



The last one and most often overlooked is user configurations. Most people only use a computer with one log in, which makes user folders messy and people can delete your stuff on accident (or on purpose). By taking advantage of one of the strengths of Linux, in having groups and users seperated in permissions and folders, one has a computer that can easily be shared and no one can hurt the other.

This makes this process easier and pretty well laid out, if you ask me. If you don't have this need, it does offer some nice copy/sync functions and repair if you accidentally bomb out your home directory or if you just want a nice backup of your data somewhere. Again, very nice addition and well done!!!!



Overall ()

To quote myself, something I never do, "I will be back for the 64 bit when available however, as I am still waiting on a distro that will uncork my boat anchor." Well, guess what folks? I am happy to say that MEPIS is now my default system and I am happy to be running 64 bit on my not so much of a boat anchor laptop. I haven't really given up much now, as one can add win32codecs if they go here and libdvdcss is installed into the repository. Flash is working with Firefox 2.0, so that seems to have been taken care of by the people at Mepis, which is usually something one loses with 64 bit.

So MEPIS is the real deal now, and has brought a big smile to this users face for a while to come. I also just for fun installed GNOME and Xfce from the repositories, and while the look isn't that clean the systems work. Here is a big thanks out to the West Virginia folks, who even though they didn't respond to us with an interview request, gave us a system that we are happy to support in time and financially as well. We will be handing over some cash when we can because we truly feel that this is a well deserving project and hope it lasts for a very long time.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed my opinions. Good luck with your personal Linux quests and I just hope I have shed some light on this package for you. Cheers!!!!

KnoLinuxGuy

Well, round two on blogging yourself into debt...

Well, my last blog entry was about how I blogged myself into debt by actually having too many people read my blog. Imagine that, too many people doing what you want them to do. I still think there is a problem on the server that I was operating on, due to the fact that with only one blog posting I was still using nearly 1 GB an hour of traffic. For the non-technical that is about the same that a decent DSL line will allow in an hour.

So anyway, the bandwidth continued to grow and my bill was looking more and more every single hour, with nothing published, so I contrinued to call godaddy.com to express my worries. Well, it seems the communication had already moved up the food chain so that when I was on for the second time on the 17th of Nov, another person picked up declaring he was from the Office of The President. What that meant, I didn't really know, but it was sounding a bit more promising that someone from legal or security might sound. He stated that I was one of the first people to use this product from godaddy and one of the most popular in way of traffic and visitors. They wanted to work with me to figure out what was happening and to see if they could provide me enough bandwidth to keep my site operational without these monster bills. They also stated they were going to credit back the bill for the bandwidth up to that point. They agreed that it would be not a viable product if there was a bandwidth limit for blogs, when I could get a free site (and have at blogger.com called knolinuxguy.blogger.com) and not worry about this.

I am still a bit cautious about all of this, I mean unless they create tools to allow bloggers to see the traffic they are generating, then there is no way to see where the trend will cross the bandwidth limits. This simple, but necessary, network engineering tool would be the first step in me not worrying about whether or not.

The biggest irony in all of this to me was that I was on bobparsons.com, the CEO of godaddy reading his blog while I was on hold, and he just published an article talking about the methods of business that basically was titled "The secret John D. Rockefeller used to build Standard Oil. It's simple. Putting it to work in your business." In this nice little post, he talks about knowing exactly what your product is costing you, what is working, what is not, so on and so forth. This is exactly how I try to function in my wireless career, knowing exactly what each component of our network does, needs and how it affects surrounding pieces. However, this is exactly the tools I am missing from this quick blogger to do what he is talking about. They limit your bandwidth but provide no tools to monitor that bandwidth. I can see IP addresses of people who hit my site, but not on a daily or hourly basis. It also combines the IP hit from a single address into a tally instead of telling me how, when and where. I can't see how is printing each article, just how many people total have printed them. I can't even see the amount storage each posting is taking, even though I have a limit of 300 MB. For the longest time, even with a ton of pics in my postings (I deleted those from the posts, you can see them at knolinuxguy.blogger.com) I was at 0.00 MB of storage.

So my opinion is that this is at most an Alpha product and should be tweaked with many add ons, which really are not add ons but fundamental tools for the blogger to have, if they are going to place limits. If they want a product similar to blogger, wordpress, or others, they need to not worry about it, see how successful they are, they re-evaluate periodically to see where they are spending too much and where is the product being successful. Hey, they sounds a lot like Bob's posting. I guess he knows how to do it, let's see if his company can put it into practice for this.

Thanks for reading this, hopefully we will keep everyone up to speed on what is happening.

Cheers!!!!!

KnoLinuxGuy

Linux XP 2006 - From Russia With Love????

So the other day I was reading the Weekly review on distrowatch.com and was checking out a recent tidbit on Linux XP that seems to have caused quite a stir on their site. Seems that for the past 7 days, Linux XP has surpassed Ubuntu for number one on their list. To quote Ladislav

"So why did so many of you click? Is it the catchy name or the attraction of a Linux system resembling a more familiar environment? Or maybe just plain curiosity? And if you downloaded and tried the new release, what do you think of it? Is Linux XP likely to remain on your computer? Have any of you paid the license fee? If so, why?"

So I decide to download and see what I think of it. Personally, something this hyped has a lot to live up to, so let's see how they did.


Details:

Website http://www.Linux-xp.com/
Download Here
Kernel - Kernel 2.6.15
Desktop - Gnome
FAQs - http://www.Linux-xp.com/index.php
Cost - FREE to try, doesn't work very well, 30 boots then it crashes, so really $39.99 for Key ($39.98 in Canada)
Special Features - Look and feel of Windows, LDAP support, full media support out of the box and that's about it really

Nitty Gritty:
Installation ( )

Since this is really a repackaged version of Fedora, it is no surprise to see Anaconda used to install. Nothing new here, so if you have ever installed Redhat or Fedora you will see some familiar things. First thing I did note was that the splash screen was fuzzy. Not a great start folks.



Next the splash screen is nice and colorful, but reminds of my neighbors in Redmond. I mean I know you can try to make software look like what people are used to, but to really try and steal a name comfort like this too, splash screens and everything, does this mean there is no unique look and feel to this?



Ok, so we are right into Anaconda here, same silly logo.



So the first thing here is to setup my disk, which you can do automatically and then manually with disk druid. Now, I absolutely hate disk druid for many, many reasons, but again being a Fedora clone, this is what you get. For my VMWare install I used the automatic, but for my personal laptop I used disk druid since the auto didn't work. So far negative two on this so far, not going so well.



So even though you select Automatic, the tool then goes and asks me a question. Hmmm, not very automatic, more like manual with no chance of....no wait, I can delete everything here. Not the best option for a newbie. So for those who don't know, what you want to do here is based on what you already have on your system. If you have windows, you will likely need to select use free space, which will resize windows and create a Linux partition next to it. If you already have a multi partitioned drive, then you can use Keep all partitions and use existing free space. The others are just stupid, as they will either wipe out the entire hard drive, or wipe out all the Linux partitions (non NTFS ones), which both are going to end whatever might exist already. Three negative, one cute logo....



Now, I don't exactly get where this was automatic on anything, minus that it took my VMWare drive and created a EXT3 partition for my main, created a small boot partition and then a swap drive. But in my case, none got labeled, so I had to manually edit each and assign their relative usage. Big gets "/", little gets "/boot" and medium gets "Linux-swap". Arrrgggg....



So here you need to select/set up your boot loader. In my laptop it did see my Windows partition and add that, but it didn't see any of my other Linux distros. I did add them and used what it calls "default boot" for each, but that just added a chainloader line to grub. Um, that really doesn't cut the mustard folks, so only my windows partition worked. Now, most newbies only will have the one probably, so this isn't a killer, but for anyone with a debian Linux distro, this means your system will have to be reconfigured after you get into this one. Minus four, and I am really starting to hate that logo.



So now on to network, where my options are to do DHCP (which 99% of you will need) or Static IP. You can edit the configuration of your NIC, but not many will need to do that. However, this did not see my wireless or make any attempt at configuring. Minus 5. Logo sucks.



Ok, I know where I live on the pretty map....make sure you select UTC if your machine is set that way.



Pretty basic here, root password. But wait, the dialog on the left says that "once the installation is completed, create a non-root account for my general use...are you kidding me? I will need to create my user account after I log in as root? Um, did these guys miss the class on Linux Security 101? That means unless you directly take them to this, the likelihood of someone creating a separate user account is about a snowball's chance in Miami. Minus 6.



That is it folks. No place to select what packages, or system type. Now, for a newbie this might not be so bad if they have never install Linux before. But, what is the goal of this install? No user account? Didn't find my wireless card? Cannot select any package type for desktop or laptop? Compared to other products similar in class, mainly Linspire and Xandros, this install really is overly basic and extremely dangerous. This is my first 2 Pennie install, in that it doesn't do what it needs to do and can do too many bad, bad things. Some people may like it, but for me this doesn't do what it needs to do, nor what it should do, or instruct people on what it could be doing along the way. But they do have pretty screens to watch while it installs.



Based on how many packages need to be installed? Don't they know, they restricted me from selecting any....



We will learn that this is very misleading once we launch the program. Seems you get a 20% ride on the free bus, and if you want any packages you need to pony up $40.



Ok, so I am not pleased with what I have seen so far, but things can only get better, right? I am afraid I won't ever know. Why? Read on....



Starting ( )


So there are about 500 distros out on Distrowatch.com. Some charge a fee like Linspire, Xandros, Novell, Redhat, etc...but even those have demos that allow you to install for a short period of time, say 30-60 days. This one is supposed to be the same. It states that you can boot for 30 cycles, which is odd because if one never reboots, they get the system forever. Free Beer, right? Wrong.

The look and feel is very similar to Xandros for me, however they are using Gnome and not KDE. On their website they state...
"Forget about KDE. KDE is for hackers and that is why it sucks in end-user oriented distribution.We are not supporting it in any way. You can install it from Fedora repositories and use it on your own risk."

Hmmm, ok. Guess we see how they feel.



When I clicked on the Start button and then selected Office, I was surprised to only see Dia there. There is no Openoffice as claimed by the website and then even in the install pretty pictures. Where is it I wonder. Well, it isn't there. Period. It didn't get installed. So I then go to the control panel to install it.



When you click on the pretty Application icon (this is very well laid out, but honestly I am not going to make a big deal out of that) you get the option for Install or Update.



Um, not to be picky, but you cannot select Next. So party is over folks. Sure, I am more than positive I could take the time and download RPMs and install them manually, but obviously they don't want me to have a fully functional machine until I cough up the money. Now, I realize that people want to earn a living. But if you want to compete in Linux offerings one has to give away Free as in Gratis, not Free as in Beer. Sure, keep your 30 boots for the trial version, but let me be fully functional without having to hack my own Linux system. What is the point then, I am worse off than I am with Windows.

I can honestly say this is the most disappointed I have been with a distro for a long time. You may love it. It might jump right out and get you to pay the $40 and use this. But there are so many better options out there where I could give $40 to any distro and know that my contribution is for something I like, rather than something I might like.

Bonus Stuff ()

Um never got anything bonus minus the loss of a $0.50 blank CD, an hour downloading the distro (use torrent or you will wait until the Soviet Union comes back to power). Sure it looks like windows XP. I hate windows XP. I am the guy that makes my XP on my work laptop look like Windows 2000.

Overall ( )

Well folks, if you want to give this a shot, be my guest. If you speak Russian, you got a great package to play with. But in my opinion if you want to spend $40 for an OS, this is not the one to invest in. Xandros offers so much more, so does Linspire. What they are trying to do I am not sure. Why there is so much activity on Distrowatch for this, I really don't know. I do know that the hype is not worth my time, nor will this be spending any more time on my hard drive. Anyone want to buy my CD? Click on about 4 of my adds, do some searches and follow threws and email me and I will send it to you =)

Cheers

KnoLinuxGuy (Kevin)