The Register: Lindows in the Living Room–Can You Live With It?

“Earlier this year The Register expressed an interest in
Lindows.com’s Lindows Media Computer, and despite the accompanying
back-handed compliments, Michael Robertson himself got in touch and
arranged to have one shipped round. So for the past couple of
months I’ve been able to check out LindowsOS itself, the
Lindows.com business model in operation, the hardware, and the
whole notion of the ‘living room’ PC, or the ‘one per room’ PC.

“Don’t you just hate it when simple things get predictably
complicated? Any one of these really ought to have been enough to
be going on with, but you really can’t separate them.

“So we’ll start with a plugging in the box overview of the whole
package. The LMC is essentially a standard iDOT low-footprint
miniITX system with LindowsOS preinstalled. LindowsOS is
essentially an implementation of Debian designed to offer the
consumer a non-threatening and cheap alternative to Windows, and
the business model is heavily dependent on ‘Click-N-Run’, which is
a sort of combination of support mechanism, online store,
discussion group and walled garden. And the living room PC? That
will probably come out as we progress…”

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