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LinuxOne Plans Merger, But Shows Few Signs Of Life 47

Posted by timothy from the who'da-guessed-it? dept.
An unnamed correspondent points to this NewsForge article by the esteemed Grant Gross about the ongoing saga of LinuxOne, the long-beleaguered and much-abused phantom Linux vendor. Anyone else have light to shed on this story? You may also be interested in reading earlier stories about LinuxOne.
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LinuxOne Plans Merger, But Shows Few Signs Of Life More

LinuxOne Plans Merger, But Shows Few Signs Of Life

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  • It sounds like something Fred Flintstone would say, but what does "Bababooey" mean anyway?

    I mean are you saying "Fuckwad to you all !!! !!" or "Good to you all !!! !!" or "Lemon Lollipops to you all !!! !!" or what?

    Eh sonny?

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • LinuxOne needs to improve their image... (Score:5)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday January 15, 2001 @11:30AM (#506449) Homepage Journal
    They should get into porn and make money fast spamming. That'd radically improve their credibility and image in the community. At least porn spammers do something...

    It kind of blows my mind that you can for all intents and purposes publically plan fraud on a massive scale and keep the ball rolling with a shell company with no products or revenues for as long as they have without winding up in jail. It's like those pyramid schemes spams you get which always claim to be legal. I assume they consider legal "Not getting caught." So why hasn't this guy been caught?

  • 04:54 - Accipiter: "Okay."
    04:55 - LinuxOne: "Uhhhh, a Mouse pedo...pedio meeta, which measures your desktop mileage, how much heh, you've been moving around."

    They're lucky they don't live in Britain. Why angry mobs would be outside stoning the paedo's house.

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • International Pacbell DSL? (Score:3)

    by Dr.Dubious DDQ ( 11968 ) on Monday January 15, 2001 @12:54PM (#506451) Homepage

    I did a quick traceroute to france.linuxone.net (to see if I could guess where their server was, geographically).

    It started with this:

    bash-2.03$ traceroute france.linuxone.net
    traceroute to ram.linuxopen.com (216.101.248.93)
     ("ram.linuxopen.com?" The whois entry for this says it's registered to LinuxOne, inc. - are they planning to change their name to confuse people?) It [the traceroute] ended with this:

    12 core4-g2-0.snfc21.pbi.net (209.232.130.77) 39.969 ms 38.057 ms 37.433 ms
    13 rback3-fe2-0.snfc21.pbi.net (206.171.134.134) 41.637 ms 49.016 ms 50.158 ms
    14 * adsl-216-101-248-93.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net (216.101.248.93) 2559.41 ms 2972.05 ms
     Is "snfc21" in San Francisco?
    (Or does pacbell.net have adsl available somehwere in France?)

    I was also under the vague impression (I could be wrong about this) that pacbell's Terms of Service for their adsl lines involved not running servers...Is LinuxOne busted? (That'd be pretty funny, after the hassle they gave the reporter about his Yahoo account Terms of Service...)

    Well, I thought it was kind of funny, anyway...
    A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.

  • Ummmm.... something like, it's got a real, live product?

    --
  • But it wasn't a 'prank' call.. I've heard the actual MP3 (months ago).. the questions are genuine, the answers are complete and utter bullshit because she thinks she's talking to someone who doesn't know much, and she's trying to sound as if she has a clue when she obviously doesn't. Go read the link (hopefully someone will have modded it up so it should be easy to find) Nice to see the transcript too, the mp3 was pretty distorted and harsh.
  • Here's an idea: A job! [linuxone.net]. So instead of whining about how terrible they are, I could get in there and show them how to improve things.

    Yah, that'll work.

    tc>

  • Truth, Justice, and Ellen Degeneres... more like.

    But on topic - they do have a "d/l able" version of their distro that has been reviewed: A badly configured Redhat (alternate language installs still mention Redhat). It's not alleged, it's not vaporware, it's just arse.

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • Usually I support the Slashdot fellows, but it's a little strange that a link to Newsforge (part of the Andover/Slashdot nexus) is from an "unnamed correspondent"?

    Need the traffic guys?
    --
    OliverWillis.Com [oliverwillis.com]
  • I mean, you just can't get better comedy than this.

    from their site [linuxone.net]:

    list of device drivers supported by LinuxOne OS

    [snip]

    Enhanced IDE/MFM/RLL disk/cdrom/tape/floppy support

    Old hard disk (MFM/RLL/IDE) driver
    Include IDE/ATA-2 disk support
    Include IDE/ATAPI cdrom support
    Include IDE/ATAPI tape support
    Include IDE/ATAPI floppy support

    bwahhahahah.

    i can just see it now.

    root:/usr/src/linux# echo `yes|make config` > /home/httpd/htdocs/supported_devices.html

    and (one of) the really funny thing(s) is that they must've used something like kernel version 2.2.5 b/c it's missing some stuff that's been in 2.2 for a *long* time...

    I think what this company is actually trying to merge with is annonymity..

  • > My sentiments are with the rest of you in saying that these people are probably either out to make a quick buck or a front for a more nefarious orgainization. However, they allegedly have a d/l able version of their distro.

    Me too. However, my server is down right now, so you can just download my distro from RedHat instead.

    --
  • I was also under the vague impression (I could be wrong about this) that pacbell's Terms of Service for their adsl lines involved not running servers...Is LinuxOne busted? (That'd be pretty funny, after the hassle they gave the reporter about his Yahoo account Terms of Service...)

    It's OK to run servers if you pay for one of the static IP options (like I do).
  • Anyone who knows anything about Linux immediately associates "LinuxOne" with "Sleazy fly-by-night scam from Hong Kong"...

    No way, man -- that's far to harsh against Hong Kong!

    ;)

  • RedHat has revenues, if not profits (Read their SEC 10-Q Filing [yahoo.com].) One can even see the potential for eventual profitability in RedHat's case. Finding RedHat is easy, as is talking to someone in the company. It's pretty easy to tell that RedHat's a legitimate company.
  • traceroute to www.linuxone.net (216.101.248.92), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
    1 adsl-xx-xx-xx-xx.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net (xx.xx.xx.xx) 28.458 ms 24.849 ms 32.341 ms

    Uh-huh. Your first hop, presumably your router, has a near-30ms latency?

    Riiiiiiight.

    --

  • Interesting; china.linuxone.net [linuxone.net] has a LinuxOne-modifed Apache install message similiar to the one found on RedHat. The HTTP headers, however (see here [netcraft.com] or here [netcraft.com]) report RH, presumably because LinuxOne forgot to change them... ;o)

  • It does exist - they've sent me a free sample about 1.5 years back.

    They didnt do much, though - the distribution is an odd mix between packages from old Red Hat Linux and Mandrake releases.
    The only code they apparently wrote themselves is a (proprietary) KDE 1.x based frontend to formatting floppy disks, looking almost exactly like KDE 2.0's kfloppy (I wonder if they bought a Qt license from Trolltech?).

    Also, they're not very familiar with the way rpm works - they've occasionally changed the filenames of their RPMs to indicate a different version/release, but rpm -qpi still shows the real one.
  • owillis:

    No, an anonymous and cowardly reader really did submit this :)

    As another reader points out, if we wanted to assign it to a fake account we *could* have, but that's not how it works. If you think about it, it's not that strange that NewsForge and Slashdot have a lot of readers in common -- if they didn't something would be terribly wrong with their management ;). Both emphasize free software and its implications, though with markedly different approaches. Now what *I* think is strange are all the stories that we link to anonymously from sites *not* owned by Andover / OSDN ;) That seems like much stronger conspiratorial ground.

    (I thought the story was hilarious, though, and would happily have posted it as coming from *me* if I had been the first one to spot it on NewsForge :) )

    Cheers,

    timothy
  • > He utterly failed to get any part of the truth!

    *ahem* It certainly was not for lack of trying! The quality of the investigation can be measured by the fact that the author attempted to cover every base, which, by my measure, he did very well. Sure, his leads came up dry, but it looks like the few people involved with LinuxOne have disappeared. I personally found it to be a very good article that at least tried to uncover the truth.

  • Yeah, right, the people "disappeared".

    His job was to find them and get the real story. He failed. That failure may have been justified but it does mean that this was not excelent investigative journalism.

    He made a good effort. Great. Next time he should keep trying until he actually gets the story.

    -sam

  • Idiots. (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Monday January 15, 2001 @10:33AM (#506468) Journal

    Anyone who knows anything about Linux immediately associates "LinuxOne" with "Sleazy fly-by-night scam from Hong Kong".

    You'd have to be nuts to merge with them and acquire the stench of scandal. The people that started this to begin with are stupid to think that anyone would fall for it after the Linux tulip bulb mania.

    I never thought we would hear from them again. Does the LinuxOne distro even exist? If it does, it is anything more than RedHat with no changes other than the name? Does anybody run it?

  • From day one, as the article says, LinuxOne has looked like a farce or something "fishy". If after the huge amount of research, no information can be tuned up, then it looks like it may be truth.

    I am not suprized that the Linux world has attracted the "alleged shady characters" that LinuxOne appears to posses, but it looks to the rest of us that we all will be standing on our desks pointing and yelling "I told you so!" to those that were blind enough to ever believe that LinuxOne was a real company. (real as in going to produce something tangeable and not fictional)...

    Has ANYONE ever seen their "product"? I dont mean a scripted demo on their hardware that you cant touch. Gimmie a copy on CD, Or download. I'm bettin that such a creature never existed.
  • Interesting: According to their site, this company is "International".

    Their France.linuxone.net, Taiwan.linuxone.net and China.linuxone.net web site is the default Apache web page. In fact, both servers are the same machine. I'm surprised those servers run on a LinuxOne distribution.

    The other are links to a guy in Latvia. Hmmm... Me too I'll put a lot of flags on my web page to make professional!

  • I think referring to LinuxOne as a "Linux company" is a bit of a stretch. Of course, referring to it as a "company" is just about as far of a stretch.

  • I was going to post a deeply thought out response to a story today, but I keep falling asleep reading them and forgetting what I was going to say.

    "Does anyone at your work tell you that you have a case of the mondays?" [slashdot.org]
    "No... No, Man. I beleive someone would get their ass kicked saying something like that."

  • Re:Check this out (Score:4)

    by Hanno ( 11981 ) on Monday January 15, 2001 @10:55AM (#506473) Homepage
    This phone transcript is a hoot! Go checkt it out! [ufies.org]

    My favourite part (the caller asked about the set of applications that come with LinuxOne):

    04:18 - LinuxOne: "Ummmm...There's a terminal emulator, a RPM manager called KPackage."
    04:25 - Accipiter: "What is RPM?"
    04:26 - LinuxOne: "RPM is uh, the program language that you program uh, within Linux."
    04:33 - Accipiter: "Oh, so you can actually make programs with RPM?"
    04:35 - LinuxOne: "Yes, it's a C++ programming, uh, programming tool."
    04:38 - Accipiter: "Oh! Very cool..."
    04:40 - LinuxOne: "Uhhmmm... A --"
    04:42 - Accipiter: "Does that include a compiler so if I want to...if I write my - if I write my program in RPM, I can compile it with RPM too?"
    04:49 - LinuxOne: "Yes."
    04:49 - Accipiter: "Oh, Great!"

    ------------------

  • Check this out (Score:5)

    by Booker ( 6173 ) on Monday January 15, 2001 @10:37AM (#506474) Homepage
    http://ufies.org/txt/phonecall.html

    Linuxone has hopefully trained their phone staff since then...

    (there used to be an MP3 of the phone call somewhere...)

    ---


  • I thought the salesperson did fine.

    *You* try and politely handle the other end of a phone when you're dealing with what is obviously a prank call.


    --
  • I could swear that a (I think) ZD publication serving VARs (Smart Reseller? ) did a ranking of Linux distros ranked LinuxOne as number 1 or 2.

    Wondering: Was that really THE LinuxOne?

    If so -- What happened to that survey?
    A lot of people found it incredible that LinuxOne could have ANY customers, let alone satisfied customers.

    Wish I could say that I was skeptical enough about that, but I wasn't.

    The L1 story is just plain strange.
  • Is that the best you can do? Judge the worth of software by the GPL? Is that what makes it a real product?

  • Anyone seeking to know what good investigative reporting is about should read this article. I haven't seen stuff like this since, well, I did investigative reporting. I wasn't this good, but I didn't have Grant Gross's resources, either. [I was at a crappy radio station that just wanted local news...but I still did more hard reporting than our news director did.]
    --
  • That was "very fine"? He utterly failed to get any part of the truth!

    That piece of run-on poorly-edited crap was most certainly not "very fine" investigative reporting.

    -sam
  • Yes, I've seen their product and ordered my free CD because I am a member of the educational community. What I saw wasn't impressive, but at least they were real CDs and not CD-Rs. I didn't play around with it very much, realizing that it wasn't really anything special and wasn't really all that interesting. It was, in my opinion, poorly re-branded RedHat.

    The only good thing about LinuxOne is their logo, and even that isn't that great.

  • first LINUX ADVERTISEMENT [bluescreen.org.lu]

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • See, we've got two companies merging. One is a software company with no software. The other is a hardware company with no hardware.

    This is a merger made in hell! (The lawyers will be paid I'm sure.)

    It seems fitting that the two companies obviously haven't done enough research to make a company, much less a businees work. They deserve all the bad press they can't afford.

    Better bad press than no press!
  • I dunno.... any AI InfoBot that can not only discern the question the sender asked and answer it appropriately, but can also tell that they're violating the TOS from the sender's email account provider has *GOT* to be pretty amazing!

    I know *I'd* buy from LinuxOne, based on their ability to create such a phenomenal bot alone!

    -drin
  • I manage all the computers for the group of guys that are doing this deal. Linuxone isn't a shadow company at all. They do have some interesting developments, but I'm not sure if I'm supposed to go talking about them or not. They are doing work with embedded systems, at least last I heard. The company is going to split, with Dr. Cho (SP) keeping Linuxone, and the current CEO, Richard Krauss (SP again) splitting off into a new company with his toy, a device that lets you use USB over the Internet, which seems rather silly to me... I don't know what LinuxOne will do, but I'd assume something emdedded...I have no clue why they even bother having their distribution, which probably isn't maintained and was mad buggy. I had to play with it quite a bit to make it even run...

  • If LinuxOne ever sold a product or made a dime, I would have a heart attack and die of shock. But fortunately: LinuxOne is at a low risk for financial stress So I feel safer already.


    ---
  • > Please, why give these jokers any
    > kind of exposure? The only place I want to see the name "LinuxOne" is in the FuckedCompany Hall of Fame.

    Well, I'd say all of those jokers probably agree with you 110%. Right now, the last thing anyone connected with LinuxOne wants is for someone to remember that stupid company: each of one of their corporate officers are trying hard to find a new job in a softening high-tech economy in order to pay the rent & buy groceries.

    It's one thing to work for a company like Microsoft & not understand what Free Source Software is about (``Okay, I screwed up -- but I know where my next paycheck is coming from"), & another to try to make money off of Free Source Software, but not know what it's about (``Okay, I screwed up -- but lots of technically savvy people remember I made a fool of myself, won't hire me, & I don't know where my next paycheck is coming from.")

    Geoff
  • "The world doesn't really need more busy people, maybe not even more intelligent people. It needs 'deep people'..."

    I whole-heartedly agree. There are some people who need to be sent to the bottom of the ocean.


    "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
    (I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
  • and i found this:
    "...LinuxOne launched its first product, the LinuxOne OS, which easily facilitates the migration of many Linux application programs from Microsoft Windows to Linux systems ..."
    is it just me or does this make _no_ sense.
    something smells fishy here.

  • Why, why, why? (Score:3)

    by Platinum Dragon ( 34829 ) on Monday January 15, 2001 @10:37AM (#506489) Journal
    Let's see:

    Still no products that anyone uses.

    Still no IPO.

    Still no business plan.

    Still no legitimacy.

    This is an interesting article and all about a true fly-by-night company without a clue, but I'd forgotten about LinuxOne, and realized how happy I was about that fact when I saw the name "LinuxOne" on the front page. Please, why give these jokers any kind of exposure? The only place I want to see the name "LinuxOne" is in the FuckedCompany Hall of Fame.

    I'd say the "AI Info Bot"'s reply to Gross' first e-mail says enough about how much attention this company really wants, or deserves.
  • "If you are seeing this instead of the content you expected, please contact the administrator of the site involved. If you send mail about this to the authors of the Apache software or LinuxOne Inc., who almost certainly have nothing to do with this site, your message will be ignored."

    Expectable i guess.

  • An entertaining story (Score:4)

    by Linux Freak ( 18608 ) on Monday January 15, 2001 @10:28AM (#506491) Homepage
    The NewsForge article is definitely worth a read; it's an example of some very fine investigative reporting and is entertaining as well (particularly if you were following the earlier LinuxOne news over the last year and a half).

    This ``Micrometix'' company which is supposedly planning a merger with LinuxOne seems rather shady itself, eh? :-)
  • My sentiments are with the rest of you in saying that these people are probably either out to make a quick buck or a front for a more nefarious orgainization. However, they allegedly have a d/l able version of their distro [linuxone.net]. But I even doubt this is real, because I've tried connecting to the servers listed, and I get no response, and this is before I'd imagine the rampaging hoards got around to it.
  • I thought the salesperson did fine.

    *You* try and politely handle the other end of a phone when you're dealing with what is obviously a prank call.

    A prank call for a crank product. Somehow, I don't see the problem here...

  • I remember the original saga from about 16 months ago. I think the basic conclusion was that they took the entire RedHat distro source code and did a find/replace RedHat -> LinuxOne. I vaguely remember that if you chose an install language other than English, it said "Red Hat" in the foreign language of your choice. Oh well, I wanted to make a boatload of cash buying options after the IPO.

    -B

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