Do Your Customers Hate Vista? Rip and Replace with a Twist
By Frank J. Ohlhorst
November 09, 2007
Give Vista the heave-ho and turn your customers on to alternatives.
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Do Your Customers Hate Vista? Rip and Replace with a Twist
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WINE = WINE Is Not an Emulator by anonymous, 11/9/2007 4:33:10 PM

Just a small correction:
" There is some truth to this statement, but emulators (like crossover-office and WINE) exist that allow.."

Please have a look here for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)



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Do Your Customers Hate Vista? by anonymous, 11/9/2007 5:33:48 PM

Nice article, I disagree with your choices for distros though. If you check on distrowatch.com, PCLinuxOS is one of the leading distrobutions there and has been in the top 5 for quite some time now.

I discovered PCLOS about 18 months ago when my PC blew up and I was informed that I would need to purchase a new copy WinXP to return to Windows.

PCLinuxOS comes on a single "live CD" which means that you can put it your CD drive and boot from and run the OS and it's many included programs without touching your currently installed system.

PCLinuxOS is specifically designed to be an easy desktop replacement for Windows. I found it very easy to use. Not quite so easy to setup and configure, but your end-users wouldn't need to deal with that. The look and feel is very much like WinXP.

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  • RE: Do Your Customers Hate Vista? by FOhlhorst, 11/9/2007 9:38:26 PM

    Thanks for the input - one of the reasons I looked at Ubuntu and Linspire was due to the distros freindly channel programs for support and for system builders, seems both Ubuntu and Linspire are trying to work with VARs more than some of the others out there -

    As for wine not being an emulator, for readability, I went with the most generic description I could muster to just try and get the concept across - sorry for the confusion.

    Frank

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  • RE: Do Your Customers Hate Vista? by anonymous, 11/10/2007 3:45:14 AM

    I have always thought Wine means "Wine Emulator" just like GNU means "Grand New Unix"

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Dual Boot by anonymous, 11/12/2007 8:22:55 AM

Having linux set up the boot is fine if you are doing it for yourself but I would set up Windows boot loader to include linux so it is more "standard" to the user.

Sort of a pain. You have to set the boot sector to the linux partition on linux install and then capture that sector and boot from it as a file with the Windows boot loader.

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  • RE: Dual Boot by anonymous, 11/18/2007 1:49:23 PM

    You could spend time figuring out the Windows boot menu, and squeezing Linux into the right shape to fit. Kind of like trimming the corners of the square peg to fit into the round hole.

    But a better option is probably to spend a little time learning GRUB, the Linux boot menu, which will allow you to create a custom menu with custom colors, a default choice, a time limit before automatically booting the default choice, and a splash image. For a small business, that would allow you to put a splash screen up before booting into the OS, so that every boot shows at least briefly the name of your business, and maybe the phone number for support.

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Vagueness and promises by anonymous, 11/17/2007 11:11:58 AM

I like Linux, and I have been a Unix guy since 1980. But the sales pitch on replacing Vista with Linux sounds like one of the ads on TV for fabulous new drugs. There is ample use of "weasel" words and terms like "can be made to" and "most". Like the drug ads, if one ignores the side-effects notices and the weasel words, and one really wants to believe, the drug will probably work.
The substance of the pitch, stripped of the whining emotional appeal, is that one can save oneself and one's customer from a lot of pain by building a DIY OS for them and then turning them loose to get free support from the user community. That's a load of bunk, and it's the same wanna-believe story I have been listening to for decades.

There is plenty of room for the hobbyists who want to search out, test, and maintain free software. People love to hear stories about DIY surgery, building houses out of recycled Coke bottles, and shrewd investing in lottery tickets. There are some very simple reasons that the mission-critical business world prefers Microsoft products, and most of us know what they are.

If you are going to propose this sort of solution to business customers, those responsible for the economic health of employees, be sure to do full disclosure, and I don't mean dreamy talk like this columnist's pitch. Also, use an ironclad contract to limit your liability. And use a real attorney firm for the contract, by the way.

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  • RE: Vagueness and promises by anonymous, 11/17/2007 12:28:08 PM

    This article was ludicrous and full of half truths. I'm a Linux lover but these arguments against Vista are unfounded. For one thing the asking permission issue in Vista is the same thing we have in Linux when we have to sudo - it's a security issue and it's time users learned that Vista finally caught up to *nix in this feature. Interface features change all the time too. 95 differed from 3.1, XP from 9x and so on. Vista is not XP service pack 3, thus it's different! Vista has far more real problems to concern ourselves about like for me it got slow as a snail over a very short period of time and wouldn't even make a new folder when I was in the middle of saving something, I'd have to make the folder first then click save and select the folder (on the fly folder creation broke iow) and the whole DRM tieing to hardware issue drove me mad! I used to be able to plug a tape from an interview into my line-in and turn it into an mp3 for my genealogy research and college papers, but noooo now MSFT thinks people do that to "steal" music from their long since purchased cassette tapes so they break my sound card. Then they decide media center extender features only work with the XBOX 360 instead of XBOX1 as well forcing more "upgrades." - Those are real reasons to dump MSFT products for good and switch to Mac, or Linux and use a PS3 for gaming and be done with it. Once you remove gaming from the equation thanks to powerful and cheap consoles reasons to NOT use Mac or Linux disappear.

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