7 ms·

Lindows Click-N-Run (2002)

49 points by ecliptik 6y ago

Szpadel 6y ago
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
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  In reality it was only used by very technical people who didn’t want to pay for windows or support Microsoft
  - pxc 6y ago
    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.
    - bqmjjx0kac 6y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodbar
      - pxc 6y ago
        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 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.
      - KozmoNau7 6y ago
        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.
    - jaggs 6y ago
      Oh wow, I loved Xandros. Ran it on my PCs for a good period before the next new thing appeared. Is it dead?
      - pxc 6y ago
        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
    - hnlmorg 6y ago
      Ironically (or maybe not?) Xandros was the company that bought Lindows/Linspire back in 2007(ish).
- sbassi 6y ago
  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)
  - posguy 6y ago
    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.
- amadsen 6y ago
  I remember getting a Lindows installation cd with a computer magazine, a linux magazine I think.
tux 6y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com....
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  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.
  - tux 6y ago
    Your right :) Thanks for pointing this out.
  - hnlmorg 6y ago
    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/ https://www.linspirelinux.com/
    - techrat 6y ago
      Still looks better than some distro pages, to be honest....
    - devenblake 6y ago
      The only premade installation media available are flash memory? I want a big box CD case! They lost a potential customer with this one!
    - weare138 6y ago
      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?
raw_creations 6y ago
As soon as i read the title the Linspire song started playing in my head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIYtKHnU4mQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIYtKHnU4mQ
- billyjobob 6y ago
  Linspire was after they were forced rename. So many good memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSdRTOh2jeA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSdRTOh2jeA
  - danbmil99 6y ago
    OMG I had totally forgotten about that ironically awesome cover
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
S_A_P 6y ago
Wasnt this distro created by the guy who founded MP3.com?
- danbmil99 6y ago
  Yup Michael something too lazy to look it up
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    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_%28businessman%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Robertson_%28businessm... [1] https://www.linux.com/news/xbox-linux-donor-revealed/ https://www.linux.com/news/xbox-linux-donor-revealed/
danbmil99 6y ago
Ha, this was my introduction to Linux! It was a nice migration path from someone who had mostly worked on Atari Amiga and winPC
Wistar 6y ago
I seem to recall that Walmart was selling turnkey Lindows PCs for a really low price, like $129.
Koshkin 6y ago
It seems there is a distro that runs Wine by default, don’t remember which. (I’m sure it’s not called Winedows.)
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  Zorin OS?
- danieldk 6y ago
  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.
DownwardFall 6y ago
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..
orionblastar 6y ago
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.
asiachick 6y ago
Is this link surfacing because Apple claims the App Store is unique and Lindows pre-dates it?
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APT_(software) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Ports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Ports [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper
cable2600 6y ago
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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

49 points by ecliptik 6y ago

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

throwaway1777 6y ago
In reality it was only used by very technical people who didn’t want to pay for windows or support Microsoft
- pxc 6y ago
  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.
  - bqmjjx0kac 6y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodbar
    - pxc 6y ago
      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 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.
    - KozmoNau7 6y ago
      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.
  - jaggs 6y ago
    Oh wow, I loved Xandros. Ran it on my PCs for a good period before the next new thing appeared. Is it dead?
    - pxc 6y ago
      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
  - hnlmorg 6y ago
    Ironically (or maybe not?) Xandros was the company that bought Lindows/Linspire back in 2007(ish).
sbassi 6y ago
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)
- posguy 6y ago
  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.
amadsen 6y ago
I remember getting a Lindows installation cd with a computer magazine, a linux magazine I think.

tux 6y ago

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

tinus_hn 6y ago
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.
- tux 6y ago
  Your right :) Thanks for pointing this out.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  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/ https://www.linspirelinux.com/
  - techrat 6y ago
    Still looks better than some distro pages, to be honest....
  - devenblake 6y ago
    The only premade installation media available are flash memory? I want a big box CD case! They lost a potential customer with this one!
  - weare138 6y ago
    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?

raw_creations 6y ago

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

billyjobob 6y ago
Linspire was after they were forced rename. So many good memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSdRTOh2jeA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSdRTOh2jeA
- danbmil99 6y ago
  OMG I had totally forgotten about that ironically awesome cover

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

S_A_P 6y ago

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

danbmil99 6y ago
Yup Michael something too lazy to look it up
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  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_%28businessman%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Robertson_%28businessm... [1] https://www.linux.com/news/xbox-linux-donor-revealed/ https://www.linux.com/news/xbox-linux-donor-revealed/

danbmil99 6y ago

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

Wistar 6y ago

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

Koshkin 6y ago

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

NegativeLatency 6y ago
Zorin OS?
danieldk 6y ago
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.

DownwardFall 6y ago

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..

orionblastar 6y ago

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.

asiachick 6y ago

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

hnlmorg 6y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APT_(software) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Ports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Ports [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper

cable2600 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]