Ubuntu-based Windows XP looker freshens up
An Ubuntu-based Linux distro identical in look and feel to Microsoft's Windows XP's been updated. Ylmf OS 3.0 has been released from a Chinese software maker with the familiar Luna theme found in Microsoft's Windows 7 and Windows Vista predecessor. The Linux distro has been updated to Ubuntu 10.04, released in April, and packs …
OK. When you go to install, English isn't exactly the first choice, but it's there.
Apart from that, this distro is very competent. It does everything you need it to. Codecs are pre-installed as is "build-essential", it's certainly enough to get most of the major file formats running from the starting blocks. The install is simple and clean and there isn't an excess of configs slowing it down.
As for the XP-esque layout - it ain't perfect, but it is enough to get XP users roving around the system without crying. The CLI is, as always, a "new" feature to most Windows users, but when it comes to getting the job done, a single typed command is a welcome relief to navigating a bunch of icons. Say what you like about the console - the direct approach often works brilliantly.
I like this distro - it's simple, it works and pretends to be XP well enough for XP users to get the hand of it in a few minutes. An awful lot of distro makers should learn a few things from this in making an OS that gets to the point. YLMF does exactly what it says on the outside of the box.
The penguin - in trying to look like Windows, it looks like Linux at it's most brilliant. A tool that works - no matter what that look is like.
"Microsoft is reported to have said it would not take action because the distro was based on Linux."
They probably have a case for the icons and other artwork, but otherwise what could the really sue for?
My XP doesn't look like that. I have a slightly edited Classic NT4/Win98 theme. I'm not 6 years old so don't need the TellyTubbies Theme,
To get drop shadow on Icon text and plain background, add a plain wallpaper of the same colour as chosen background colour, as Drop shadow only turns on with wallpaper.
Can you create a toolbar and dock it on the left/top/right edge of the screen, then have it pop out when the cursor moves to that edge? Can you overlap toobars and slide them over each other?
I like to have an empty desktop, except for the Recycle bin, which I can't get rid of.
Win7-beta didn't do that last year and I assume that Win7 doesn't. I'm staying with XP until I can be sure that whatever replaces it can do user configured toolbars. (They're great !!)
Yes you can is the short answer. GNOME panels (which is what they use for the toolbars) can be docked on any side of the screen and can be configured to auto-hide (i.e. only pop out when the cursor moves to the edge of the screen where they are).
Bruno,
You can "hide" them if that is what you want.
But, you can do even more, you can do what I did - and that is make a picture frame of panels on each edge of the screen, and through panel properties, select a color, and then dial DOWN the transparency (i.e. make it more transparent).
Thus when you maximize a window, some of your screen wallpaper "peeks" out from under the window. In my case, the bottom, left and right hand panels are transparent, but the top one is not.
The best part is using a nice wallpaper for your screen. and that choice is left to your imagination.
My imagination led me to this photo of Alicia Keys taken this past 7th, when she was in South Africa for the FIFA World Cup. Every good looking woman MUST have that `one` "little black dress", and DOES IT LOOK GOOD on her. It might still be on her site (aliciakeys.com).
The caption added to that photo is taken from one of her song titles - `sure looks good to me`.
With the exception of the "Start" button everything looks like its using the default icons for the F/OSS software installed. No copyright issues involved.
I'll have to check it out, I know a few people who are Linux phobic that might just like this.
Looks like the horrible-looking Lindows back when it was still called that. That blue/green "1980s-era gardening products catalogue" look: just awful! That Microsoft thought it was nice speaks volumes.
Even though there is blatant copyright infringement on the icons? Of course Microsoft may have released their OS as Public Domain, but I doubt it.
Well that just rolls off the tongue.
What about MylfOS?
So they went mental over Lindows because the name was similar. Yet when someone actually copies the graphics from Windows to make Linux look the same, they're OK with it?
It looks like Windows, but it doesn't crash. MS get the credit without lifting a finger.
Microsoft should take action, if only to serve the purpose forcing Linux devs to focus on important Linux related issues, not waste their time making windows like interfaces...
A bunch of icons and a background image is not an "interface", it's just a theme.
And "Linux Devs" don't "waste their time" making themes, artists and designers do that (and they're not programmers who could have been coding something else).
It would take a hell of a lot more than a few images to get any Linux distro have a Windows-like interface (especially Gnome based distros that can't even implement something as simple as the single-click launching option that Windows has, never mind the various other elements that go to make up a Windows interface - e.g. proper ACLs, case insensitivity, shell access to non-filename dependent hidden attributes, app independent clipboard, file manager undo, GUI access to metadata etc.).
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121113#c56
"Not that imitators always get away with it: Chinese authorities successfully prosecuted the creators of China's most popular pirated edition of Windows XP, Tomato Garden Windows xp, in 2009. The Tomato-Garden duo got four years in jail and a $147,000 fine."
Maybe that's because they pirated XP? Not made something that happens to look like XP while being something completely different?
Skinning Linux to look like Windows is NOT the same as giving away "free" copies of XP.
All very nice and shiny and I am sure it will hook people in, but are things going to progress with all this incestuous behaviour? Linux copying Windows, Windows copying bits of OSX, OSX pinching bits off Windows.
It might work well in music for people to borrow from one another, but in IT desktops it simply leads to a very bland and boring landscape of identical systems.
Users have enough trouble running software for the system they have, let alone accidentally trying to run Windows software direct on a Linux box!
all i see coming out of this whole linux 'commune' is more window managers, more color schemes, more file systems, more vi vs emacs flamewars...
The os is just a platform to run APPLICATIONS. Go make some of those. I am waiting to see some kick-ass software ... sadly ... so far ,none.
I trust the Chinese not to data-mine my PC using their version of Ubuntu - not.
Who knows what spyware might be there.
