Linux: Ur Doin' It Wrong



  • I just bought myself an Acer Aspire One netbook, a neat little piece of kit aimed at the student crowd. The retailer listed 'Linux Operating System' prominently in the features list, and I took it home expecting something along the lines of Xandros.

    What I got was... unimpressive. The bundled software was mediocre; the default media player can't handle streaming radio and has an awkward interface, the default photo viewer can't open .gifs for some bizarre reason, and several programs I need were notable by their absence. I wasn't massively impressed with the UI either, which felt a bit Fischer-Price for my liking; does anyone really need a desktop -sorry, 'home screen'- icon for Wikipedia when Firefox has a built-in search bar for it and several other search engines?

    No matter, I thought, confidently clicking the 'Settings' icon. The default settings are always aimed at complete beginners; I'll just have to deep-six the crapware and download the stuff I actually use, and change the desktop settings a bit...

     Then the true nature of this machine's operating system was revealed to me. There is no add/remove programs function. There is no means to add or delete items from sub-menus. There isn't even a command prompt. I'll leave a little white space to let that sink in.

     

    Just what kind of brief was the design team for this thing given? "We're bundling it with Linux because it's cheap and buzzword-compliant, but we're marketing it to computer-illiterate Hooray Henries who work in PR and management consultancy so it needs to be idiot-proof"? It's simple to pick up for a beginner, I grant you; it's the OS I'd put on a twelve year-old's machine as less hassle than getting rid of all the spyware and porn diallers once a week. But surely it might have occurred to them that someone might want to add Wine and Last.FM's player or a couple of utilities without changing distros?

    Ah well. 1.6GHz and a gig of RAM ought to handle Ubuntu alright...



  • @Jake Grey said:

    There isn't even a command prompt. I'll leave a little white space to let that sink in.
     

    Usually, any Linux distro should allow ctrl-alt-f1 to switch to a text-only console. if that is of any help. you might be able to use apt, rpm, or whatever package manager the distro uses from there. personally, i'd just (re)install my favourite OS.



  • The operating system for that device is "Linpus Linux Lite" It is Fedora- and KDE-based, and can be run in either Simple Mode or Advanced Mode. How do you switch modes? Oh, that's OEM-dependent, but it's in their manuals. Oh wait, you can't get them from here!

    So, I went to the Acer website to see if I could find me a manual. And I found two. The first one only mentions a command prompt in passing, that you could update Firefox only by downloading Fedora 6 RPMs and using the "rpm" tool from Konsole, but Konsole appears nowhere in the UI and nowhere else in the manual. The second one can't possibly have either been proofread or prooffollowed with the number of errors and other WTFs.

    On the bright side, the hardware does handle Xubuntu quite nicely. ^_^



  • @TwelveBaud said:

    Linpus Linux Lite

    I like the feature summary. How is "web 2.0" a feature of an operating system? I mean, it's not even a feature of a browser, it's a buzzword for a way of using some features of a web browser. Also, yes, the abbreviation "w/i" totally makes sense, it makes everything so much more readable, and so much shorter!



  • Oh, and something else I just noticed; the Aspire One has an integral microphone, but Linpus has no obvious program for actually using it, even to make voice memos. About the only good thing I can say about this wretched distro is that it comes with 3G support in the form of a proprietary app from Huwaei. I haven't persuaded said app to actually work yet, but the thought's there.



  •  And I thought I could never find an OS worse than Macs.  Holy wow.



  • @TwelveBaud said:

    The operating system for that device is "Linpus Linux Lite"
     

    My Acer laptop also came with Linpus. Too bad it didn't work at all, even the keyboard didn't work. At least other Linux distros run well.

     

    And I love how, in the Applications section, they feature Wiki and Pigeon.



  • Ok, you all seem to be taking this seriously, so am I the only one who's grossed out by the name "Linpus"?



  •  Linpus Linux is an atrocity, and I would not feel bad in the least if whoever designed it came down with some horrible, horrible disease.



  • @TehFreek said:

     Linpus Linux is an atrocity, and I would not feel bad in the least if whoever designed it came down with some horrible, horrible disease.

    Linpus of the genetalia.




  • @Feek said:

    @TehFreek said:

     Linpus Linux is an atrocity, and I would not feel bad in the least if whoever designed it came down with some horrible, horrible disease.

    Linpus of the genetalia.


    It's not Linpus It's not Linpus.


  •  Update: Somwhat worryingly, 'sudo passwd root' did the trick. Note that this is a former shop-floor demonstrator, and that when I got it up and running, the screensaver wasn't password-locked. I'm thinking Currys should stick to fridges and plasma TVs.

    But anyway, I can now listen to Radio Caroline and play Dwarf Fortress on my Aspire One, so all's well that ends well.



  • @Jake Grey said:

    the default media player can't handle streaming radio and has an awkward interface

    They were afraid that Real and/or Korea would sue them if they included a decent player...

     



  • @alegr said:

    They were afraid that Real and/or Korea would sue them if they included a decent player...
    I'd have picked Realplayer over what they bundled, actually; the Linux version is tolerably WTF-free, possibly because most of it was coded by someone else.



  •  Okay, that does it. Just tried this guide to getting my mobile broadband dongle running, and guess what? Linpus won't let me create files in /etc. Even though I'm logged in as root.


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