Lindows Click-N-Run (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Lindows Click-N-Run (2002)

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49 pointsecliptik39 comments

ReactOS [1] has similar interface to LindowsOS. But ReactOS is still in active development.

Also LindowsOS was sued by Microsoft [2] back in 2001. Maybe this is why its gone now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com....

One is a reimplementation of the Windows operating system, the other is a Linux distribution that looks and is named kind of like Windows.

Actually the page you linked states what happened to LindowsOS, they won a settlement, got $20 million and changed names.

Your right :) Thanks for pointing this out.

Interestingly Linspire are still releasing. In fact their latest was just a few days ago! However you could be forgiven for thinking their homepage was a scam given it's dated look: https://www.linspirelinux.com/

Still looks better than some distro pages, to be honest....

The only premade installation media available are flash memory? I want a big box CD case! They lost a potential customer with this one!

Their site is a blogger.com page. And they're charging $29.99 for a tweaked version of Ubuntu. I wonder who's actually paying for that?

Sure, but does it have the Lindows Rock?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSdRTOh2jeA

I seem to recall that Walmart was selling turnkey Lindows PCs for a really low price, like $129.

I gave my father a Linspire boot CD to use when Windows XP failed him. He used to work for AT&T so he knew Unix. He liked it but died in 2010 I still have his PC in the basement.

There was a hack to install a BASH Shell on it because it didn't come with a Linux Shell. Only problem was their GUI updater would find a problem with newer libraries and hang and show a picture of a nerd hanging by his underwear.

Is this link surfacing because Apple claims the App Store is unique and Lindows pre-dates it?

Lindows didn't create any of the tech behind their "app store". That's based on Debian's "apt" which is from the late 90s. What's more, SuSE had a GUI package manager, YaST[1]. before any Debian re-spin did. But if you want to talk about the first command line package manager, well FreeBSD nips Linux to the post with it's 'ports' directory[2] back in the early 90s.

Weirdly though, all of this is pre-dated with something that is much more akin to a modern day app store. Unsurprisingly, it was released for NeXT -- though made by a third party called Paget Press, Inc. Their "Electronic AppWrapper"[3] had everything a modern day app store does:

+ GUI (which itself wasn't all that common in 1991),

+ commercial titles which the app store maintainers too a percentage of

+ a common gateway for download the programs

I don't know what happened to Paget Press but I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs bought them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APT_(software)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Ports

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper

oh, i remember lindows, it supposed to be Linux distribution that looked and felt like windows, and even come with wine preinstalled. in theory it was good windows replacement for less technical people

In reality it was only used by very technical people who didn’t want to pay for windows or support Microsoft

It was the first Linux distro I ever used, back when I was a kid and had never used a Unix command line before. :)

Eventually my dad replaced it with a similar distro called Xandros, and that got me hooked on Amarok 1.3, which Xandros had rebranded on their distro. Amarok was then a killer app for me, and got me into Linux as a hobby when I was a teenager.

Amarok was awesome! I really liked the "moodbar" addon that converted each audio track into a colorful 1D strip, underneath the progress indicator.

Ah, looks like it's a project in its own right, but the Wikipedia page has an Amarok screenshot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodbar

I loved Amarok for years, including after the 2.0 rewrite. It was my favorite as long as the main way I listened to music was a collection of local files, despite flirtations with other cool projects like MPD, Subsonic, Ampache, etc.

Documentation from the Exaile project (another music player inspired by Amarok!) indicates that while the Amarok developers did not invent the moodbar, their implementation is the one we know and love (which was packaged as the standalone `moodbar` CLI program that could be used to generate moodbars that other players would also read):

https://github.com/exaile/moodbar

For me, Amarok was so good that it gave 13-year-old me enough reason to switch operating systems for daily use. The moodbar was definitely cool, and I remember being impressed that I could actually identify different sections of songs I knew with it.

The feature that really got me was the automatic lyrics fetching and other contextual information. I listened to music kinda obsessively, and I loved being able to instantly see the lyrics and really learn a song right away.

Amarok really lost me with the 2.0 redesign. I switched to Clementine instead, which carries on the Amarok 1.x design.

Lately development on Clementine has been lagging a bit, so I'm using a fork called Strawberry.

The Amarok 1.x interface is closely tied with Quod Libet as my favorite audio library/player, but QL is significantly less user-friendly, thanks to its extensive flexibility.

Oh wow, I loved Xandros. Ran it on my PCs for a good period before the next new thing appeared. Is it dead?

Xandros has changed hands as several times over the years, but it looks like it's still around! It's based on Ubuntu instead of directly on Debian these days

Ironically (or maybe not?) Xandros was the company that bought Lindows/Linspire back in 2007(ish).

this is about click-n-run that was a package manager more like Snap today, that allows distributing self contained executables (without dealing with dependencies)

Click N Run is much more like Gnome's Software (app) or KDE's Discover (app) than Snap, as all Click N Run was doing was installing a .deb file with sane defaults, exactly the same as what Software and Discover do on KDE and Gnome today.

I remember getting a Lindows installation cd with a computer magazine, a linux magazine I think.

Ha, this was my introduction to Linux! It was a nice migration path from someone who had mostly worked on Atari Amiga and winPC

As soon as i read the title the Linspire song started playing in my head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIYtKHnU4mQ

Linspire was after they were forced rename. So many good memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSdRTOh2jeA

OMG I had totally forgotten about that ironically awesome cover

Wasnt this distro created by the guy who founded MP3.com?

Yup Michael something too lazy to look it up

Michael Robertson[0].

Another interesting piece of trivia is that he anonymously offered a bounty of $200,000 to get Linux to work on the Xbox.[1]

I believe his name was only revealed after the court case with Microsoft had been settled, presumably because his lawyers thought that paying people to hack Microsoft's console would be difficult to explain to a judge.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Robertson_%28businessm...

[1] https://www.linux.com/news/xbox-linux-donor-revealed/

It seems there is a distro that runs Wine by default, don’t remember which. (I’m sure it’s not called Winedows.)

Zorin OS?

There was Xandros Linux, which came with the Wine-based CrossOver Office to run Windows applications.

Xandros was based on Corel Linux. They acquired Corel's team and Corel Linux sources when Corel gave up on Linux. Interesting tidbit, although WordPerfect 8 was a native Linux application, Corel used their own Wine fork for porting WordPerfect Office.

Back then, the Linux distribution landscape was so much more exciting than now, when everything is just another fork of Debian/Ubuntu/Arch. Of course, it had downsides to -- distributions were far less compatible.

if you want to try out various isos/distros/make your own I've been trying to make my own Lindows custom OS on shells.com since its the one of the first flav of linux i tried back in the day

Pretty much if you have wine pre-installed you're good to go, things like photoshop are a bit rough..

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