I bet you do wish you had the energy and time to experiment with it Dean. It sounds pretty impressive to me, but then as the author of this article wrote,..."What?" I am a Grandma and yes, you would install it for a grandma sir'.

Has he been into the world outside of computers and seen todays Grandma's! In my later twenties I played tennis with Ms. Elke Sommer and she is a grandma now. Look at Cheryl Tiggs, Cher, Jayne Seymour, Linda Evans, Farrah Fawcett and Cheryl Lad! Wake up dude, grandma's are not all chubby lil' grandma's with an apron on anymore. Giggle giggle. Yes, we still bake the Best cookies around! Just look at Suzanne Sommers too, she has some great recipes for her grandchildren.

I did not know about the security issues of the Windows XP though. Uumh, that is what I have now. But, grandma here is interested and I speak for some of the other lovely grandma's out there...Just call me, "JaJa"...my first grandson coined that name for me.

Linspire isn't free. The base OS is a $50 download. If it lives up to its promise, it could be worth it, but they don't appear to offer a free demo version.

Last time I tried Linux, Red Hat 7 I think, it found my built-in Ethernet on install (yay!!!), but I couldn't figure out how to connect to the cable modem on eth0 to get online. No doubt there was an extremely simple way. But, after several fruitless hours reading docs and tinkering, I purged my humble abode of all things Linux. Going back to Apple II days, I used to take such things as challenges. Now, they inspire darker urges. Linux is a wonderful thing, but if you have to lift the hood, God help you.

Windows XP may be a lumbering beast, and a target for every freaking hacker in creation, but it gives me what I need. In recent years, actually, I've found Windows itself to be more reliable than hard drives, which have a way of going toes up at such awkward times.

Oh, wait. They have LinspireLive, a $20 CD version that lets a Windows user try Linspire without installing it. OK, that's closer to a free demo, but still twenty bucks. Hmm, hmm.

Damn, I miss the BeOS.

So Lindows is now Linspire? You mean they didn't go with "Lindash"?!

I've heard good things about the Linux Distribution Formerly Known As Lindows. (Gee, maybe they could have renamed it "Ꮉ" ;) User-friendly, etc. Though I really know nothing about it first hand. When I escaped to Linux back last fall, I chose to go with Mandrake, another relatively newbie-friendly Linux distro.

It's worth making the switch. Now that I've found my sea legs with Linux, there's no way I'd ever go back to Window$. But you're quite right, it does take time and energy to cope with the learning curve. Like Bill says, you've got to lift the hood.

Fortunately I had the time and energy (and modest "amateur hobbyist" computer know-how) to put into it. I'd say Linux is great for those who like to tinker, or for those who can turn all their set-up and support issues over to somebody else. Otherwise... hmmm, who knows, Ꮉ just may be worth looking into.

Typical Linux snob: no answers. What the hell does one have to do to make the damned system talk to a cable modem?

If you're tempted to try Linux, you must be prepared to encounter assholes online who delight in taunting you for your lack of knowledge. It's a priesthood.

Over time, and repeated attempts, I say, fuck them.

And not in a good way.

Bill, are you talking to me? If so, you misread me: I'm not trying to taunt anyone.

I started out with Linux as a newbie back in September. I chose Mandrake because it's supposed to be an easy distribution for newbies like myself. Over the weeks and months, I put a lot of spare time into learning how things worked. I made a lot of mistakes— some of them stupid bonehead mistakes. I spent a lot of time online chasing down scattered, vague, and often incomplete answers to my questions.

I'm no genius. I'm just an average person who's been a computer hobbyist for some years, and for whatever reason, I put a lot of tedious and often frustrating hours into figuring Linux out, one step at a time. That doesn't make me better than anyone else, it's just the course I chose to follow.

And if somebody else decides to follow a different course, with Windows XP or OS X or whatever flavor of Linux, I say good for them, and more power to them.

It is not my intention to taunt or look down on anyone: anybody who knows me personally will tell you I'm not that kind of person by temperament, and if you took my words that way, I sincerely apologize to you. I didn't mean it that way, and it is not my intention to taunt or hurt anyone.

I'm sorry, I honestly don't know the answer to your cable modem question. Like I say, I'm not that bright when it comes to computers, I'm just someone who's put in a probably unhealthy amount of time and sweat on them in a hobbyist way over the years.

And I genuinely and sincerely wish you all the best.

Paul,

I apologise. Clearly, I was painting with too broad a brush. Sorry.

You kids! Don't make me stop this car!

Speaking as a "Lifetime Lindows Insider" (I plunked down $99 for a very early version of Lindows a couple of years ago), I can safely say that this is a very user-friendly product.

I have done the following more than once: drop the CD into the tray, reboot the machine, and tell Lindows to "take over" the machine (as it were). Ten minutes later (yes, that's right) I had a full-up Linux-based system running.

Bill, I can say have had NO problems with cable modems; I subscribe to RoadRunner, and (as above) I've installed Lindows on several machines, all plugged into my Linksys cable router at different times. I never had to do a single thing to get internet access thru the cable modem. To steal a slogan, "it just works." :)

Bill: I'm a tad upset that the "demo" now costs money. I could be wrong, but I thought that you could download that, burn it, and try it out. It's pretty useless as a "real" distro, as it's CD-based. I'm surprised they charge that much for it. :(

I don't know why they charge for the demo; even the Suse demo is free, if you don't mind downloading the iso and burning it. Sigh...

I've spoken with Paul about this before, but I'm with Bill on this one. I just don't have the energy or the inclination to do all sorts of research, just to make the system useful.

To my mind, a useful system comes designed that way; you don't have to make it so.

I don't have to tune my car up every week just to get it to work; I don't have to study the details of automotive engineering, the internal combustion engine, or differential gears just to make the damn thing work. I get in, turn the key, and drive.

That's how properly-designed tools work. Same thing for TVs, radios, water faucets, elevators, and ATM machines. The controls are simple, and engineered properly. This is why they have become ubiquitous in modern society.

Right about now, the Linux Enthusiast will explain that, if you Just Read The Flipping Manual, all will be well. The True Linux Believer will add that anyone who can't understand The Flipping Manual is just too stupid to use God's Own OS, and they deserve "retard" systems like Windoze, or Splacintosh.

These people don't understand the major point, which is: any properly designed interface obviates the need for a manual for normal operation.

This applies for computers, cars, telephones, and traffic lights.

The problem is that too many Linux True Believers treat a tool (an operating system) as a religion. This makes about much sense as worshipping a tire gauge

Obviously I don't include Paul in the above: he has more energy than I do. On the other hand, I'm not as "anti-Windows" as he is. :) Call me "software agnostic." Then again, it's easy to be complaisant in college; I got a free copy of XP Pro and Office 2000 for $12. I don't want to think about how much the MSRP is for those two items. So maybe Paul makes some sense for non-college, discount-challenged crowd! {grin}

As for his idea: that's how Suse, Red Hat, Lindows/Linspire, et.al. make their money, by providing a service, and support. In truth, anyone with time and patience can download and create a complete Linux OS without paying a dime. You could even do it with a dial-up connection, although that would take a LOT more time and patience than I have!

I suppose that's Dean's point: he doesn't feel as if he has the time or energy to devote to this right now. I keep telling him how easy it is to install/run Lindows, but he's not interested. Then again, I'm out of school, no family, and I'm not the operator of the worlds 12th most popular blog. :))

Actually, Bill, if I read your post correctly, the last distro you tried was RH 7. That is truly ancient compared to what's around these days! RH 9 is much better, and there are other nice distros like Mandrake as well. My non-use of Mandrake relates to relatively minor, very-personal preference sort of stuff, like how BLOODY HARD IT IS TO GET MPLAYER TO WORK PROPERLY,(ahem) but I'll let Paul explain that. :)

Bill, I take it you still have your cable access? Then run over to www.linuxiso.org. They have literally dozens of different Linux distro .ISOs that you can download for free. This includes Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Mandrake, FreeBSD, Lycoris, and others. Most are written for Intel platforms, but there are some Motorola/PowerPC flavors as well.

I would recommend Mandrake or Red Hat. My personal gripe with RH is that support for NTFS is not built in, nor can I get a vanilla distro to recognize my keychain drive (aka USB storage). Mandrake was much better with this, but quirky.

BTW, Lindows 4.5 reads NTFS drives locally (dual-boot machine) or over the local net just fine, and automounts stuff like keychain drives onto the desktop automagically for you! Sweet.

Bottom line: if I were to spend $50 (which is still A LOT LESS than anything from you'll ever see from MicroSoft!!) I would get Lindows, especially considering how painless maintenance and operation are.

If I didn't want to spend that money, I would get Red Hat or Mandrake. I think I would tilt to Mandrake for ease of operation.

If I really wanted to tweak things, I would get Slackware or Gentoo. And if anyone don't understand that, don't worry, it's very geeky. :) And if those "anyones" want me to explain it ask me here. If you are still curious after the comments close, drop by my blog and let me know; I'll post something.

Casey, I smite myself with a flail. :)

As it happens, I have a 13 GB drive, installed and humming, waiting for useful employment. Maybe I'll give Linux another shot.

I got full-up Windows XP Pro at the price of $300 at CompUSA. I paid the price willingly, after my hard disk died, taking its restore partition with it. I can't bear to be offline.

It may shock your your young ears, but once upon a time, I paid $10 per megabyte for a 60 MB hard drive for my Apple II. Now, any fool can get storage at $1 per gig. My Tungsten T3 handheld came with 1000 times the memory of my Apple II, and that after a $200, 16K (K, mind you) add-on card to bring the pup up to a priapic 64K. There is such a thing as progress. That 16K, by the way, was in the form of a genuine Microsoft brand card with, count them, three blinking LEDs.

Oh, for the good old days.

Bill:

If you should choose to give Linux another whirl, one possibility would be to pick it up on CD-ROMs for a song. I recently ran across a site called CheapBytes. I've never done business with them, but they look interesting. A fairly wide variety of Linux distributions on CD, some for less than $10.

Casey:

Slackware? Gentoo?? Aiiieeeeeee!!! Mebbe one of these years...

Yes, overall I've had a good experience with Mandrake. I'd say it took me two or three months of much sweat and midnight oil before I really started feeling at ease with the basics. And I still have much, much to learn about its workings.

But Mandrake installed nicely, it auto-detected all my hardware, and I had very few problems getting it up and running:

(1) I did have to edit one config file to get the system to stop freezing on me sometimes when I dragged a window— an incompatibility in my video card, the one potential showstopper I encountered, fortunately the fix cured the problem completely;

(2) I got a PC Card modem to use in place of the winmodem;

(3) many minor problems with the file manager and/or removable media (floppies, zip disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs) disappeared magically once I disabled supermount. Advice for anyone who goes with Mandrake: supermount is not your friend.

As for mplayer, yes, getting the real version of mplayer (and not just the crippled version that comes on the Mandrake CDs) installed and running is a real challenge. I ended up downloading RPMs from I think three different mirrors. Recently I had to install a security-update version of mplayer, for some reason that went more easily. But hey, mplayer is very nice: and in a few days here Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Matrix Revolutions will be arriving on DVD from Amazon...

I think Lindows/Linspire may have a very useful role to play, in helping to turn Linux into an OS that just works. I gather Linux is great already in an enterprise setting, where there's a computer support person available to keep things humming along; or in a hobbyist setting where odd birds like me can indulge their masochistic urge to take months to learn how to get their floppy drive or printer working with Linux; but if Lindows can make Linux into a system which just works right out of the box, that would be great.

BTW, Casey... as for the Linux Distribution Formerly Known As Lindows... as a "Lifetime Ꮉ Insider," tell me... how does one pronounce "Ꮉ"? :-)

Speaking of Linux distros which "just work" straight out of the box... I've heard good things about Xandros. No personal experience with it, but I've heard good things about it.

Hi. Long time reader, but this is my first time postin'. :)

If I'm not mistaken, doesn't Lindows always run as root?

I started with RH 7 myself. I ran my first server on that, too. Then I moved on to RH 9. In my newbie days, they taught me well. However, "RPM hell" was holding me back. I tried Mandrake, which I loved, but was still RPM hell. (Although it is my favorite RPM distro. Even more than Debian.)

Slackware 8 was up next. Tried it. Loved it. No RPM hell. Easy to configure if you know your hardware.

Now I'm using Slackware-current and I just compiled my first kernel. (2.6.5). In the last three years, I went from total newbie to expert.

I urge anyone to try Linux. Any distro will do. Learning is the key. Oh, and I'm not one of those "asshole" Linux types, nor am I anti Microsoft. MS has made a great OS for people who want to do basic stuff with computers.

If you really want to try a Linux distro but do not want to install anything, burn yourself a copy of Knoppix or SLAX. The OS runs straight from the CD without any installation.

I am such a geek! I could spend weeks shooting the bull about stuff like this. Heh.

Bill: I actually like XP Pro in many ways. One little trick I developed is partition your boot drive to 30 gigs (if you have one larger), then save the rest for logical drive 1. Then I use TweakUI to point My Documents to D:. That way, I have all my data intact, and I can reinstall XP when it goes haywire. (note to propeller-heads; every time I've re-installed XP, it's been my fault. I like to muck around with things. Don't get excited about it. Heh) I just thought you might like to hear that idea.

Dunno about the "young ears" part. My first computer was an Epson QX-10 running CP/M. :) My first hard drive was a 20-meg hard card for nearly $600.

My first IBM PC machine was the classic Compaq Portable with a whopping 640K of ram. Right now I have on my desk an Athlon 1.4Gz machine with 640MB of ram. I never got an Apple, altho I thought the IIgs was really nice.

Paul, I've seen someone who is a Slackware afcionado make it sit up and do tricks; and this was on old Dell PIII-933 machines with a lousy 128Mb RAM. He set up our entire lab (remember those doggy-soccer shots?), and even included nVidia drivers and antialiasing stuff that matches XP. Sa-weet. Now, if only I could do that... Heh.

And Paul, I pronounce the "?" as "?". As would any proud American. :)

Also: thanks for referencing Xandros. As you say, no personal experience, but hear lots of good things. Certainly a good alternate to Lindows/Linspire.

Rob: Linspire installs the default user as root. This -to a degree- makes sense, as this is a distro for "Aunt Minnie," or anyone who doesn't want to lift the hood. Not talking down to anyone here, but many of them might get lost in the discussion of "root vs. user." They call root password "system password," and since most folks generally run single-user systems, this avoids a lot of complexity. Then again, if *nix-based worms or Trojans gain popularity, this may become an issue.

Still, it is very easy to add regular users to Linspire, and I think that it might not be a bad idea if they add, as part of the install or tutorial, the instructions to create at least one regular user account.

As I said above, Slackware is fantastic, if you know how to tweak it. I just don't have the time or energy.

If I had the time, I also would devote a test system to Gentoo. The idea of custom-compiling apps to my specific hardware is seductive. Heh.