Lin-X Linux 1.1
What I Liked Most
The clear attraction to Lin-X is its resemblance to Mac OS X. Otherwise it would just be another version of Ubuntu. The single thing I liked the most about Lin-X is the cool Apple logo with a pirate skull and crossed swords in it. It’s a way of taking Apple’s marketing slickness and turning it upside down. If I were a marketing droid at Apple I’d be outraged by this bastardization of one of the most well known corporate logos on the planet. I suppose that that’s one of the reasons why I like the Lin-X logo so much.
Problems & Headaches
This distro was a pain in the ass to deal with initially, to put it bluntly. The developer’s site seems to have been closed so I had to get the .iso file from Softpedia. But when I booted into the Live CD desktop I got a screen asking me to login with absolutely no information about the login ID and password were. I tried to find it on the developer’s site by using the cached Google version of it but still couldn’t locate it. I tried using “root” for the ID and password but that didn’t work either.
So I opted to go right to the install instead. However, that stalled out in VMWare so I had to use Parallels instead. If you try to use Lin-X in a virtual machine I recommend that you try to have more than one kind available in case you run into problems. I usually start with VMWare but I’m glad I have Parallels and VirtualBox on my machine for situations like this.
Certainly not the usual kind of apple...
(3 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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(4.75 out of 5)
I guess I’ll just have to get over the coolness of this distro. Without enough information to really deal with it and no assurance that there will ever be an update or any further development, this is a hard one to go after, but just like before, I always enjoy reading about these niche distributions. Sometimes I even go out on a limb and get a few of them, but I tried the Hannah Montana Ubuntu variation, I actually have instances of Live Android working in my Virtualbox OSE, plus I have Tiny Core, Tiny Me (in a Unity Linux 3.7 prototype skin), a really off the wall version of Debian called Canabix, so I think I have enough unusual distros in my collection right now. I use them for research and for amusement, but return to my every day systems for most of my activities, and my every day system remains sidux right now (with antiX, SimplyMEPIS, and Debian Stable providing a solid core, and backup should anything “happen”). That’s enough for right now. Besides, SimplyMEPIS is starting to gain steam on their 8.5 effort, and I want to help out with it, and antiX is bound to be active testing its next release soon, and I want to be an active part in testing and promoting those two – a couple of my long term favorites.
Yep, I’d classify this one as a fun curiosity but not something to really be used on a day to day basis. Distro-hoppers might have some fun playing with it.
While I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, this is clearly NOT the best way to make your desktop look like a Mac. Rather than relying on a shady offshoot of Ubuntu with little support, why not just re-skin your existing Ubuntu install? That’s what I’m running right now, it looks and feels great, and the only problems I’ve had are people unfamiliar with GNU/Linux thinking its some sort of Mac ripoff (grrr).
Anyway, a combination of the Mac4Lin theme, Avant Window Navigator with the OSX skin, OSX fonts, the Global Menu bar, and a few other tweaks, you can make your fully Canonical-supported Ubuntu distro look just like this. In fact, here’s a tutorial: http://mihirknows.blogspot.com/2009/05/turn-ubuntu-jaunty-into-mac-osx.html . Its easy enough to do or undo for your average GNU/Linux user, and is a fun little project that shouldn’t take nearly as long as setting up a whole new distro.
Actually Lin-X Linux is based on MAC4LIN project
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac4lin/
Its developed by Anirudh Acharya(infra_red_dude)
http://phoenix-ani.blogspot.com/2009/06/mac4lin-ver10-released.html
You can see more screen shots at
http://143sachin.tumblr.com/
Jim, i have a suggestion for you…
while doing reviews about linux distros,please give their performance in multimedia…while most of the famous distros does not support multimedia on the spot,it will be useful for news users….
That is one advantage given by Lin-X live dvd…you can test everything on the spot (multimedia,AWN etc) and it will help newbies….
If you already have installed ubuntu no need to download Lin-X LInux…just download the 33 mb tar file from mac4lin project page
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac4lin/
For more, you can find step by step procedure in how to forge….
http://www.howtoforge.com/mac4lin_make_linux_look_like_a_mac
I remember years ago using some distro that allowed you to pick a MacOS theme from the selection of themes. This was the “old” Mac OS desktop complete with wrong sided window buttons.
It too was fun to play with for a while, but eventually I switched back to the default KDE.I think they eventually got threatened by Apple or something as I have not seen it since.
No matter how hard I try, I just cannot get into the Mac interface. It is just slow and cumbersome to me. Since this is just a Mac’ed up version of Ubuntu, I would just rather stck with that.
Beyond that, this seems like yet another distro built by the author to prove that he could.
how to install software in linux??
linux is very difficult for me…
Is this distro dead? I’ve look on distrowatch and it’s not listed anymore.
[...] reminds me of the version of Linux designed to look like Mac OS X. Heh. I don’t know how many people would really want to run this though. Don’t people [...]
i cant find link to download lin-x, it seems pretty cool
all the links are unavailable…the site of lin-x shows just the logo
can someone plz post the links for downloading lin-x???