Linked by Barry Smith on Wed 26th Nov 2003 18:11 UTC
It seems to me that a lot of attention lately in the commercial Linux development area has concentrated on either large enterprise customers, or wooing the home user who can barely turn a computer on. Even distros claiming to offer the perfect solution for both ends of the spectrum don't quite seem to fit what I am looking for. 
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That's an excellent article. You do focus on ur own problems, but those problems hint at potential problems in other installs as well. I personally haven't given Lindows a try. But I've tried 20 to 30 other desktop distros. I have finally settled on Arch and Vector, primarily for package management reasons. If I were to pay for distro < $100, I would probably choose SuSE Pro 9. When I last tried SuSE (at 8.1) it's package management sucked, but it does come with a dizzy arraying of software in the multi CD sets.
The sole advantages to me of Lindows would be the AOL client, package management, and hardware detection. I believe though that the AOL client has been dropped. I might try xfering the old client to a new lindows in the future.
As far as the modem, that sort of thing happens at times. With a few distros I have to add the symlink for /dev/modem even with my external USR on tty1. I guess urs is internal hardware modem and they just don't get it right since it's on tty4.
The click and run sounds decent. I am not above paying for a good package manager. RHN and others are $100 a year as well. I too, have had the problems with net install, or net upgrading packages on dialup. A few servers will not allow resume, or simply seem to ban my IP after a short while. I assume the banning is due to firewall rulesets that assumse some max time of download and terminate the control connection after a few hours.
It's funny how Lindows assumes you are on broadband. The aol client supplied with earlier versions was also broadband BYOA client, not dialup. Since Lindows pc's are a cheaper alternative to Lintel world, you'd think they'd cater to dialup users as well as broadband. Half the point of linux, is that it's cheaper TOC per year, than Windows for the average home user. They should assume that some users have 5 hour session caps, etc. (Mine is 10 hour session cap on MSN for instance.)
A lot of folks are on MSN, AOL, Netzero, etc dialup. To truly convert them over, special directions / tools should be supplied with Lindows/Lycoris/etc. Unfortunately not every broadband modem has ethernet, and on dialup there are many proprietary protocols and PAP hashing.