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Exactly The Same But Different

4 January 2010 - 8:43am — Christopher Wright
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Help Desk, by Christopher B. Wright
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Comic Transcript

ALEX: Well that's officially the first time I ever had to use our Litigation Insurance to get out of criminal charges.

MONK: Our premiums are definitely going up.

KING: There you guys are. Some party, huh?

ALEX: I don't want to talk about it.

MONK: King, are you still running Nifty Doorways Xceptional Product? Why haven't you upgraded to ND 7?

KING: Oh... er... I never got a new machine. This won't run ND7. I don't mind.

ALEX: Well that doesn't make any sense. Henry said he upgraded the last machine in our department in October.

KING: Yeah, well, he forgot me...

ALEX: And that looks like the same model as my machine. Flat screen and everything. So why is it running ND XP?

MONK: You know, I read that a couple of Chinese hackers had released a version of Ubuntu that was designed to look exactly like ND XP in every possible way.

(Silence.)

ALEX: Is that a Bash terminal?

KING: Oh look, I'm late for a meeting.

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Comments

Hold on.

4 January 2010 - 12:58pm — Pvblivs (not verified)

If a version was designed to look like NDXP in every possible way, the bash terminal would be configured to look like a "Command Prompt" window. There is no way Alex could have caught on that easily. Now, if he had been using GIMP, he could have gotten caught. (Even if he said it was a Nifty Doorways version, it would still be non-Ubersoft-approved software.

That depends.

4 January 2010 - 1:23pm — Christopher Wright

All you have to do is type "ls" once and you'd see that the directory structure is not DOS.

In fact, the screen shots I saw of the XP ripoff (this is based on an actual Slashdot report) do duplicate the user interface in every way, but it still uses a Linux filesystem, so when you're looking at any part of the UI that deals with files you still see /home, /usr, /var etc.

Very well, there is no way,

4 January 2010 - 2:51pm — Pvblivs (not verified)

Very well, there is no way, from the passive observation that he actually had, that Alex would be able to tell. If he were sitting at the terminal, the mere fact that "ls" was recognized as a command would be a giveaway. Then again, that assumes Alex knows how to use the command prompt. I'm expecting he would know that it exists, but little more.

Why would you expect that?

4 January 2010 - 3:14pm — Christopher Wright

Take a sample home directory, loosely based on my own:

ls

/Desktop /Documents /Downloads /Graphics /Mail /Music /Projects /Videos /Web todo winetricks

... dos^H^H^HWindows doesn't use the slash to show directories, it encloses the directory in brackets ("[ ]"). If any of those directories are symlinks (like /Mail, which I have pointing to the directory Kubuntu uses for KMail) they'll display in a different color. If either of those files are executable (some people like to make winetricks executable), it will be a different color. This is assuming you haven't modified the default bash configuration Ubuntu uses.

So assuming Alex has some prior Linux experience (not sure why you assume he wouldn't) and had seen a bash terminal in the past I still don't see the problem. :)

Subject intentionally left blank

4 January 2010 - 5:02pm — Pvblivs (not verified)

I just always pictured him as refusing to have anything to do with "non-approved" software. But I was specificly thinking that he didn't seem sufficiently into computers to know how to use the command prompt in windows.

The bash that comes with my copy of Linux just shows directories in blue (no slash)

Hmmm...

4 January 2010 - 5:07pm — Pvblivs (not verified)

I replied and got spam-filtered. Whatever your opinion may be about my actual comments, I am not a dirty filthy spam-bot.

Sorry about that...

4 January 2010 - 5:13pm — Christopher Wright

... I've been fighting with the spam filter ever since I installed it. I can't figure out why it makes the decisions it does, though I have noticed it dislikes people who post from Scotland.

Anyway, I set it to right.

Why the hell would anyone

4 January 2010 - 8:02pm — The Man With No Username (not verified)

Why the hell would anyone want to make Gnome look like XP? That's like modifying a Mercedes to look like a Hyundai.

Well...

4 January 2010 - 8:43pm — Christopher Wright

... apparently Microsoft has actually been getting some traction getting the Chinese government to crack down on Chinese groups who sell pirated copies of Windows. So these guys turned around and modified a distribution of Ubuntu to make it look and feel exactly like Windows XP, right down to the dialog boxes.

Which is every bit a violation of trademark/IP/etc, but you have to admire their attention to detail.

Here is the Slashdot article:

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/12/28/0213213/Chinese-Pirates-Launch-...

You don't need a Chinese distribution

5 January 2010 - 5:29pm — AliasMarlowe (not verified)

If you really want a Gnome desktop to look and feel like XP, there has been a solution available for quite a while. Just google for the InstallXpGnome.sh script. Here is a video (French) of it being installed & used on Ubuntu: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FocT2fFBU50 The fellow was sensible enough to uninstall it afterwards, of course.

There are also configuration scripts to make Ubuntu look like Windows 95, Windows Vista, Windows 7, or even OS X. Google is your friend for finding these, and YouTube has many videos of the procedures and results. It's entertaining to see Compiz effects (bendy windows or spinning cube) on a "Windows" desktop (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWBQGFBJ2gU) or on an OS/X desktop (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0hzi22g2DE)