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On 18/05/2013 18:18, alex mclennan wrote:
Hi all, can anyone give me any info on a distro called "lindows",i found some info about a court case involving microtosh,but thats about it.I seem to remember it being a distro based on um... okay I can't remember that bit, was it based on Debian?alex the noob
It was available a few years back (early to mid 2000's before Ubuntu) and was released by the guy who made a shed load of money setting up MP3.com.
I only ever looked at it once, and if I remember correctly it was designed to look quite a bit like Windows XP and had an interesting feature that everything ran as root. As you mention, Microsoft sued the company, I believe their arguement was the name Lindows was very close to Windows which they held the trademark on, so eventually they had to change it to Linspire. They also wanted to add Windows compatibility to run Windows applications on Lindows (I presume using something like Wine). I can't remember if it was just available as a commercial product or if a free to download version was available too (of course the sources would have been available to build your own if you wanted, but the user base it was aimed at would have been new Linux users).
There's more on the Wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire
It's a name I haven't heard in ages, it's up there with Corel Linux and Caldera Linux (yep, the same folks that turned into SCO* and sued the world+dog, but had a great Tetris game in their installer).
* If I remember correctly, the original SCO who made Unix changed their name back in the mid to late 90's and the SCO name and assets were sold to Caldera who released Linux distributions, then later changed their name to SCO and started dishing out lawsuits to the likes of IBM, Novell, RedHat and lots of other companies. If you're interested in reading up about SCO I'd suggest you read the Groklaw.net (or maybe this Happy Birthday post about Groklaw itself - http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130515162826518).
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq