[KLUG Members] Lindows

[Tony Gettig]

I was at a conference for K-12 technology folks this past week and one 
of the sessions was on Lindows.

The presenter forgot his root password, which was recovered by booting 
from a Red Hat CD in rescue mode, editing passwd/shadow, yada, yada. 
Kinda funny.

Anyways, the interaction in the room was great with a lot of good 
questions and answers. The presenter had tried Mandrake, Red Hat, and 
other distros, but from an "end user" perspective, was most impressed 
with Lindows. I just got version 4 last week and loaded it into VMware 
prior to leaving for the conference. Granted, it's not exactly my distro 
of choice, but given the lowest common denominator of end users, I have 
to say it really doesn't look that bad. In fact, I will go out on a limb 
and say it looks pretty usable. It's debian underneath, but they've 
really made it easy to install and manage software with the 
"Click-n-Run" feature.

Speaking of install, I installed it on a spare hard drive in literally 8 
minutes. That is, from the time I booted from the CD to the time I was 
at the desktop and playing a music CD, it was 8 minutes. Cool!

The presenter has not rolled it out into production yet, but says he has 
had good luck connecting to his Novell servers using the Native File 
Access feature of NetWare 6 (I'm guessing over NFS). Others asked about 
browsing their W2K network, and many folks in the room were quick to 
point out it was not a problem with Samba.

My biggest beef with Lindows is the cost. It looks like you can install 
and run it without buying the "Click-n-Run" thing, but it's nearly 
usable without it. But then again, for businesses (in my case, school 
districts) that can't seem to understand the word "free" and feel 
compelled to somehow buy a software license, they apparently have very 
attractive pricing for K-12. One gentleman in the room bought a site (or 
district?) license for $500 for one year. That is, he can install 
Lindows on as many PC's as he wants for that price. I am going to look 
into the details of this as I understand the pricing may have gotten 
better over the summer. Again, I think this is nutty, but if an 
attractive price will satisfy bean counters who think if it's free it 
can't be good, then great!

Yes, I would agree with many that say there are security issues with 
Lindows, such as being able to have no root password, but I think it can 
probably be secured for an enterprise by a knowledgeable administrator type.

Side note: a lot of school districts in Michigan are Novell shops. I 
mentioned that Novell was presenting 10/21 at KLUG and gave the website 
url. There seemed to be quite a bit of interest! One gentleman asked if 
the event could be videotaped (he's up near Mt. Pleasant).

Overall, I caught a LOT of positive Linux talk at this conference. Very 
encouraging indeed! And Lindows seems to have somewhat of a future in at 
least a few school districts in Michigan.

Tony "nevermind jigdo, just get me the iso" Gettig