I'm diverging from the original thread a little here, but I just couldn't resist the urge to editorialize a little: I didn't follow the Desktop Linux Event with much interest. It was never advertised as something that looked useful for me in particular. Insofar as the conference got out the message that Linux is great alternative to Windows I think that it is great. I use Linux and develop for Linux and many other OS's at work but had never gotten my wife to agree to put it on our home computers until now. A few months ago when we got a new laptop for my wife to use, with all the latest tools that Bill Gates was selling for home users pre-installed (XP and more), she got a look the "Microsoft End User License Agreement" and asked me about it. We went through it and discussed the implications of the all the legalese embedded in the EULA that she was required to agree to before using any of these new Microsoft tools. Of course any intelligent entity would refuse to agree to such a contract, so I started looking at the latest Linux releases geared towards non-technical home users. I took a very close look at Lindows and it appears to be a really great solution for the casual, non-technical, home user who wants easy access to email, IM, word processing, photo albums, recipe files, and other common home applications. I like the concept and the marketing approach they are using. My daughter is working on a degree in graphic design and needed support for tools and 3D hardware that Lindows did not seem to be very well suited for, and I of course already was quite familiar with SuSE 7.4 and wanted some of the compilers, tools, and services that I use at work and Lindows was not well suited for those either, so we skipped Lindows and went with SuSE 8.1 Professional on our home computers. There is a huge market for Lindows, and I could recommend the pre-installed Lindows computers from Wal-Mart to my parents or anyone else who is looking for a minimal basic system for use at home or a small office. Developers, hackers, large corporate users, dedicated gamers and audio/video nuts should be looking at SuSE or RedHat however, not Lindows. Of course in the future Lindows may become better suited for some of those large corporate deployments and other uses, and I think that would be great. There has never been anything at the FSF or in the GNU GPL that says that it is a bad thing to be successful and make a ton of money while freeing people from bondage to ridiculous copyright and patent laws and overpriced proprietary applications - even if the personality doing it seems to be unusually obnoxious or overbearing at times. Lindows is certainly does not have any kind of a monopoly on Linux, and I expect that if anyone at RedHat and SuSE has any sense then it never will. Anything that gets Linux some attention is a good thing. Any hype about problems will motivate the community to fix those problems. The proprietary vendors are the ones who fear and try to ignore and hide problems. The worst thing that could happen to the Linux community would be no attention at all. Grant Q mailto:Quinlan@ACM.org