Speaking at the Oracle Appsworld here, the 58-year old Ellison, said he hoped that Oracle would soon be able to run its desktop applications on Lindows. The shrewd Ellison was however quick to sense the skepticism among the audience about the concept to make a cheap open software that runs both Linux and Windows code, but that looks and runs like Windows. “Lindows may not succeed, but it’s at least possible. Even if Lindows comes close to success, the product could beget the massive transition that Microsoft perpetually fears,” Ellison said.
Oracle’s Ellison Bets on Lindows
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Proof once and for all that Ellison is indeed crazy. I’m just glad he picked Lindows. This way when he goes down in flames at least he won’t make the other Linux vendors look bad.
Oracle: that’s another company that MS will eventually have for breakfast. Elison is pretty much like McNeally -both men seem to be driven by nothing other than contempt for MS. Meanwhile, MS is growing and successfuly eating into their markets
A man worth 10s of billions of dollars will not go down in flames. This is a major coo for Lindows.
“A man worth 10s of billions of dollars will not go down in flames. This is a major coo for Lindows.”
I’m referring to the article quote “said he hoped that Oracle would soon be able to run its desktop applications on Lindows,”. How would this be a “major coo”? The .005% of users who run Oracle desktop applications will now be able to run them via wine in Lindows? How many of them would even do that as opposed to running them on Windows. This is typical Ellison PR about a world that doesn’t need windows.
I’m not saying Oracle will go down in flames, but Ellisons dream of somehow dominating some part of the desktop app market will. The idea that users will flock to Oracle desktop apps on Lindows is even more laughable. Major coo this is not. PR stunt it is.
//This is a major coo [sic] for Lindows”
I don’t see it as a *coup* at all. Ellision is a real dimwit, if he thinks MS is quaking in their boots because of the “threat” of Lindows.
What a buncha bs.
“I’m referring to the article quote “said he hoped that Oracle would soon be able to run its desktop applications on Lindows,”. How would this be a “major coo”? The .005% of users who run Oracle desktop applications will now be able to run them via wine in Lindows? How many of them would even do that as opposed to running them on Windows. This is typical Ellison PR about a world that doesn’t need windows.”
Because if they run on Lindows they will run on any Linux.
Because if yet another large company of the talent of Oracle uses Wine it will improve at a much faster rate.
Because Oracle is not talking about “dominating” the desktop app market, they are talking about being a part of the migration away from Microsoft.
If all the kids begin to leave Billys overextended birthday party it will become a party of one.
A Coo is the sound a chicken makes. I think you mean a coup. Unless you’re talking about Michael Robertson. Now he IS “a major *coo* for Lindows”.
>What a buncha bs.
I hafta ‘gree.
/me puts in a phone call to hell
nope, its still hot. carry on.
What a stupid name for an OS. It makes it out to be a pathetic windows knock-off.
the diskless linux-based thin client:
http://www.thinknic.com
Man, those things have really been selling.
I had to laugh…
A blatent rip off of Apples web sites nav scheme.
LOL!
No way, no how, Ellison is crazy and if he does this he will do more harm than good to his company. No one uses Lindows. The only reason why i would buy a Lindows Wal-Mart PC is for the hardware but i would clear the drive and put on a “real” Linux distro such as SuSE or Red Hat I do not forsee Lindows making any kind of headway into the desktop market. It appears to me the only thing this guy wants to be is an annoyance to Bill Gates & Company. No one but Micheal Robertson takes Micheal Robertson seriously, as for Ellison he controls such a little part of the desktop App market I doubt any kind of agreement will even dent Redmonds armor.
“Man, those things have really been selling.
“
No kidding. I went to the NIC website – there are no technical specs or pricing information on their product whatsoever (or even a decent synopsis for that matter) and their online store is closed for business (just an 800 number to call, that’s it).
I do wonder how many people who buy he Microtel Lindows PCs actually keep the Lindows OS or do they have my same idea, buy it purge the HD and install Windows or another version of Linux ?
I can understand the Oracle Linux pitch. For example, for their enterprise cluster
Old way:
$1m Oracle, $1m Sun
New way:
$1m Oracle, $150k Dell, $10k RedHat
But Lindows? Who installs Oracle that couldn’t handle a RedHat or a Debian install? The Oracle installation guide for Oracle 9.2 (latest version) is pretty similar to what a Linux install felt like in 97. A 60 page manual that refers you to 2 dozen other manuals to actual make the thing work. And of course actually using Oracle makes using Linux even as a server look trivial. Oracle is massive, for example on my laptop I’ve got an Oracle Enterprise Server with Enterprise manager setup with an essentially empty database (i.e. 2 databases one for the manager one to be managed). The total size of that empty database setup is:
4.12 gigs spread over 60,555 files in 6,594 directories.
What does Lindows bring to the table?
Client tools. The article doesn’t make any claims to running the database server on LindowsOS. I’m sure he’s got something up his sleeve, he isn’t where he is because of bad decisions. At face value I’d say that this isn’t a great decision, but if Oracle client tools will run on Lindows then they will run on MY OS too. 🙂
The applications Larry Ellison is referring to are not Oracle’s server software (e.g. database server, application server) neither your typical desktop applications (e.g. word processors).
If *my understanding* is correct, he’s referring to the client tier of the “Oracle E-Business Suite”, also known as “Oracle Applications” which is an SAP-like system for accounting, inventory management and the like.
There’s 2 ways to access this system from your desktop if you are a user (e.g. a clerk that enters invoices, or the CEO who wants to see how many widgets his company sold today):
1. Through a web browser as HTML pages.
2. Through the JDeveloper web browser plugin (NS or IE) which is basically a Java applet that renders a GUI similar to Swing.
So when he says that you should be able to run Oracle’s desktop applications on Lindows he probably means that the HTML pages will be displayed on Lindows properly and that the JDeveloper plugin will also work.
That’s all there is to it.
Thank God someone put these idiot in place.
“Oracle: that’s another company that MS will eventually have for breakfast.”
MS isn’t going to have Oracle for breakfast anytime soon, MsSQL doesn’t scale well for truly massive data werehousing. Almost all of the Fortune 500 companies are using Oracle on their data werehouses.
It’s not necessarily a limitation of MsSQL that it doesn’t scale well, but more a limitation of the x86 hardware it currently runs on. With Oracle and data werehouses, we are talking massive E10K servers with up to 64 way processing.
x86 hardware simply isn’t there. And even if it were, Windows is not ready to support that kind of massive scaling.
I only agree with some of the above posters in this: leave Microsoft out of the threat question, right now Microsoft is suns away of any “threat” whatsoever (absolutely).
Lindows is doing what Red Hat still ***fears*** to do, to sell preloaded Linux boxes at Wallmart (or any big distribution channel), and to really (meaning REALLY) actively target the Desktop.
I’m sick of Lindows bashers, I don’t like the name either, I don’t buy the click ‘n run thing, and I personally prefer Red Hat as a desktop toy OS (MS Windows XP for work), but I do applaud Robertson’s moves towards a Desktop Linux. I applaud HIS decision on legally responding to Microsoft bulling, something everyone fears even the USA Gov after having them convicted.
My easy bet is that those Lindows straits on the Linux Desktop are still pretty inmature and technically irrelevant and will remain so at least for the next year, because a few tweaks and a marketing plan don’t make a competitive Desktop OS, they simply lack OS engineering. This doesn’t contradict Ellison, he basically says that you got to start sometime with something, and Wallmart Linux boxes sold as a Desktop product is starting at it.
What I want to see is Red Hat taking ReHMuDi far more seriously, instead of beta testing Phoebe and having ReHmuDi as an another obscure pet project shared with the hopeless GNU/Debian/andwhynotHurd thing (yes, even with the EU support). Then we could talk a bit more about any “distant” threat to MS.
JDeveloper should be JInitiator in my comment above. Sorry for any confusion. JInitiator is a Java Virtual Machine running as a web browser plugin, JDeveloper is an IDE for Java, XML and other technologies.
With client tools I’ve got the opposite problem. What distribution doesn’t support that stuff? For that matter most beta OSes would support that stuff. I don’t know about all the clients mentioned but most of them either:
a) Run under JVM 1.1.18 which means just about every Java in the world
b) Run using simply html and would even work fine under lynx.
So on the client side, again what is Lindows bringing to the table that the other distributions aren’t? The only things I can think of doesn’t make sense. For example might agree to start bundeling in the Oracle client software with every copy so that it during first boot or something it searches for an Oracle name server and self configures; but in most enterprises I don’t see that working. I don’t think end users are going to be able to know which database they want to connect to. Frankly any enterprise which is using Oracle is going to want to configure the desktops in lots of other ways in which case they can autoinstall install their own preconfigured clients for the end user.
Maybe I’m just being dumb. Any ideas?
A Coo is the sound a chicken makes. I think you mean a coup.
And don’t forget coop, where a chicken lives.
What is Lindows bringing to the table that the other distributions aren’t?
The Lindows *distribution* probably nothing, the Lindows *solution* (desktop hardware and software starting at $249) perhaps is cheaper than buying a Redhat desktop system from Dell or some other hardware company.
. . . they were a lot smarter about how the root account is handled.
I’m sorry, but all that I’ve read about Lindows seems to indicate that it is shoddily done. Quality control is as much a part of ease of use as GUI design is.
It says so right in the article. He feels that any Linux client/server platform will work. It’s just jabbs at Microsoft to use Lindows as an example.
And there are difference between the dumby terminal/NIC and the desktop PC with it’s own hard drive to the end-user. I know I don’t want ALL of the files I work on during the day to be saved back to the mainframe. Hell, if the mainframe goes down, I can still keep working.
Again the point is client/server computing. That’s what most folks do at work with Windows 95, 98, ME and XP Home. With a Citrix set up you’ll get Office on Linux. Oracle can’t be any harder. Forget a web browser.
THINK CITRIX!
This has remote dial-up and faster connection capabilities and you really don’t have to configure the client at all.
Or terminal Server if you want something terminal…
Vic
I run Lindows full time and love it.
Mark
It says so right in the article. He feels that any Linux client/server platform will work. It’s just jabbs at Microsoft to use Lindows as an example.
If the purpose of Lindows is because of the name lawsuit then that at least is a reason.
And there are difference between the dumby terminal/NIC and the desktop PC with it’s own hard drive to the end-user. I know I don’t want ALL of the files I work on during the day to be saved back to the mainframe. Hell, if the mainframe goes down, I can still keep working.
Have you ever worked on a mainframe. The ID of considering a PC even remotely more reliable than a mainframe is plain silly. With the amount of redundency in a zSeries machine you could quite literally walk up throw a hand granade into one of the nodes and the end users wouldn’t even notice. I’ve crashed most every Microsoft and Unix OS out there, I’ve never met someone who managed to crash Z-OS doing anything normal. The mainframe never goes down, never ever ever ever ever. That’s what you are paying for.
Again the point is client/server computing. That’s what most folks do at work with Windows 95, 98, ME and XP Home. With a Citrix set up you’ll get Office on Linux. Oracle can’t be any harder. Forget a web browser.
My point is that Oracle is much easier than office not much harder. iSQLPlus is vanilla HTML, that was my point about Lynx (a plain text browser) working perfectly. Some of the clients require Java but its very old and very standard Java. If I gave you access to my Oracle, today, with your computer just as it is, you’d be able to do virtually everything a client can ever do on an Oracle box.
It IS a pathetic windows knock-off.
Yes, but why buy a Microtel PC with LindowsOS instead of Lycoris or Mandrake? Besides, most companies generally need more than that $200 Microtel PC offers. Plus, Microtel PCs aren’t sold in huge bulks either.
If they are willing to go down to that price, then they may as well invest in thin client, a potentially cheaper and more cost effective solution, in the long term.
Besides, Lindows.com doesn’t have a all that big competitive advantage. Give me 10 million dollars, I can out-hype Lindows, I can steal Lindows’ customers and I can maintain a good PR with the mainstream and Linux press while avoiding any potential litigation from Microsoft. Unfortunately, i don’t have 10 million bucks, and even if I had, I much rather invest in another more profitable market then on Linux.
But really, how can I do it? While Lindows generated a lot of hype, its method was pretty easy, making outragious claims that comes back and kicks them in the arse later on. One area you can diffenately depend on hype is to generate them on Linux/geekish press (with good betas, for example), then the mainstream would follow suit.
And while doing all that, I can maintain a bigger competitive egde than Lindows.com. All I need is 10 million dollars.
J.J., the “run as root” situation with Lindows is not an issue anymore – you can set up users during installation or afterwards.
As for being shoddy, I don’t know, there may be shoddiness in areas I don’t know about. But, the front end for apt-get does not seem shoddy – it works beautifully. I have many questions about Lindows myself but, put into the hands of an average user, leaving aside all other Lindows questions, they are doing a good job as far as I can see.
//A Coo is the sound a chicken makes. I think you mean a coup.
And don’t forget coop, where a chicken lives//
Actually, only doves “coo”. Rebels stage a “coup.” And yes, chickens live in a “coop,” but the “p” is pronounced, not silent.
Also, I’ve never heard a chicken make any noise other than, “buck-buck-bu-CAWK!”
–Old Macdonald.
I don’t thinks NICs are such a bad idea, but not in the current form.
For my main OS never, but for my wife, or kids or even my mom back in England, I would relish the chance not to have to do maintainance, not to pay for multiple Windows licenses, (and don’t even think of saying Linux please), not to be always upgrading hw.
For it to work, I would have to be able to manage it from my ISP, and it would be limited mostly to an IE/webTV equivalent surfing box with email. Internally it could use Linux in Rom/CD whatever, but no local storage. Most of us here have mostly clueless relatives, but if they get a clue, they can always get a real PC.
I find it odd that’s he’s betting on Lindows to succeed, especially using the words “massive transition that MS fears”. Ellison was on the board of directors of Apple and he’s – apparently from the accounts I’ve read – very good friends w/ Steve Jobs. Shouldn’t he, instead, compliment Apple and not Lindows?
Ask him how much Robertson paid him to say Lindows. I dont care how much Lindows gets preloaded on Desktops, all people do is buy the cheap hardware and install either another version of Linux or they install MS Windows, there are not enough Lindows users out there to make anykind of dent in any linux distros armor. That coupled with the fact nobody takes them seriously. SuSE or Red Hat are the only way to go for any kind of Desktop Linux distro.
It is odd. A multimillionaire hiring a multibillionaire to mention his company’s name. Interesting and very odd. Yes, I can see why Ellison is really interested in Robertson’s money… NOT.