- Hello everybody and welcome back to another video.Now in today's episode, we're gonna to be traveling backto the turn of the century to take a look at WinLinux 2000.A Linux distro designed for Windows userswho were thinking about switching over to the dark sidethat side that '90s Microsoft didn't want you to know aboutfilled with Open-Source, free, and community supported software.Oh, gosh. Is there anything worse than that?Well, yeah. If you were Microsoft in the '90sthere pretty much wasn't.But this was really a different time for Microsoft and the computing worldas a whole.And with the ongoing antitrust case brought on by the U.S. government,there was this shred of hope in the Linux community that, you know,maybe Microsoft's days of enjoying the stronghold that they hadon the operating system market were numbered.Maybe they were going to get broken up and that monopolistic powerwas going to go away and other operating systems would have a chanceto make a substantial impact in the consumer market.Of course, as we all know, Microsoft never got broken up.And Windows continued to grow in market share, though it certainly faced a bit of a challengefrom Mac OS and Linux, of course, grew in market share as well.But none of them ever matched and still do not match Windowsin the consumer desktop operating system space.So WinLinux 2000 was a product of this enviornment.And it was designed for Windows userswho were curious about the Linux world and wanted to experience itwithout needing to read up on how to partition your driveand go through the text based installation process,which could be extremely confusing for novice userswho just went out and bought a Windows computer that came with it pre-installed.So WinLinux solves this problem by bringing the entire setup processfor this operating system over to a Windows setupexecutable that installs just like any other Windows program.So if you had installed Microsoft Office, for example,you'd be able to install this with relative ease.It's very similar to how the Wubi installer, which would come years down the road, works.But WinLinux 2000 claimed to be the only Linux distro from this timeperiod that would install in this way within this Windows setup executable.So without any further ado, let's see how it works.Let's check it out.So we're going to eject the 98 PC's DVD drive right here.Of course we are running Windows 98, a fresh install.In fact, look at that.I forgot to take out the driver disc.So we'll set that asideand we'll put in our WinLinux 2000 disc.And we'll be on our way here.So it automatically starts the setup process right when you put the disc in.And yeah, as you can see it looks just like any other Windows setup executable.So we're going to hit "Next" here.We're going to hit "Next" (again)it's gonna check our hard drive for errorsand this is where we get to choosewhether you want a compact, full, or a typical installation.We're going to go with full.And it's gonna give you a little bit of a warning herethat says "WinLinux installs a new operating system and must be placed on a fixed drive."So it basically tells you "don't install this on a removable drive"because it may not be able to boot the system.And that's because you actually launch into WinLinux 2000 from Windows.There's no partitioning or anything done at all and there's no boot manager.You still have to boot into Windows and then you launch WinLinux 200 from there.If that sounds kind of confusing, I'll show you how that worksonce we get done with the install process here.So you have to make sure-this is very important, it says right hereit must be installed in the "\Linux" directory.You can change the drive that it's installed on.If you have a secondary hard drive that you want to install it to.But it must be installed in the "\Linux" directory.I believe it has to be on the root of the drive as wellthough it doesn't necessarily say that right here.So we're going to hit on "Next."And then here it just tells you what it's going to name itself in the program folder.It's going to put everything in, and you hit "Next."And that's it for this first part.It goes right off and begins copying files from the CD over to your hard drive.Now, a couple of things about this.This was completely free to download,just like a lot of other Linux distros, so you could get this for free.But it did cost $30 if you wanted to get a disc mailed to you,which is understandable if they're going to make that up and ship it to you.So they did charge for that.And there were other versions of WinLinux released.The latest version was WinLinux 2003.Which came out... well sometime in 2003or sometime in the early 2000s perhaps.I don't know if it was specifically 2003, but I would guess that from the name.And after that, things kinda went quiet in the WinLinux world.The website, WinLinux.net, according to the copyright date,was last updated sometime in 2004.And it just kinda faded into obscurity after that.And the Web Archive...When you try to go to 2007, 2008 and beyondit just doesn't really load anything.It's just like a blank page.And someone still owns the domain today.And there is a website hosted at WinLinux.netIt's just somebody's extremely barebones WordPress site with nothing on it.It's kind of bizarre.But hey, someone still owns the domain, so that's cool.So yeah, that's WinLinux 2000.Oh, and also one of the major things is the UI was designedto kinda look like Windows, which was something that, you know,you would want as a Windows user migrating to Linux.It would be helpful to have an environment that looked similar.So the window borders and everything, the controls and stuff like that, the layout.They've tried to really mimic Windows as best that they could.It does run the K Desktop Enviornment, or KDE.So there's definitely still a learning curve.I mean, much less so with WinLinux 2000.The learning curve really only begins when you boot into the operating systembecause you know, there are major differences between Linux and Windows.I mean, Linux uses a completely different file system structure.so there's things that you're still going to have to know and to learn.But the best way in a lot of cases is just to experience it yourself.And that's what WinLinux 2000 was all about.It gave you easy access.It's just getting in the door.That's the big thing. If you can get in the door,you can figure out all that stuff later on, right?We're installing here.We're going to let it finish up and I'll be right back with you guys.(the signature MJD timelapse music)All right.So we've just finished upthat first portion of the installation and it took about 15 to 20 minutes,which is pretty understandable for an entire operating system.There are a lot of files to copy over.It's now going to launch the WinLinux 2000 configuration utility.And this is where things can get a little more confusing.Certinly not on this screen where it's asking you for your name.But it's going to get into some driver stuff,which could definitely confuse some peoplebut they've definitely tried to make it as simple as they possibly can.So we're going to put in our name here and I'll just use "Michael" as my loginpassword, we'll do "mjd", super secure.And you have the option to use the same password for root if you want to.This is generally not a good practice.It's never a good practice to do this.But we're going to do it anyways because why not?And yeah, so right here is where it gets into the driver stuff.It says "your video card was not detected as a supported cardand WinLinux will be configured for standard VGA.This is not an optimal configuration since you are limited to only 16 colors.And right here is where you can go through and view the devicesthat it's detected and more importantly, the devices that it did not detect.And you can change these settings if you want to.So for certain things like the video here, since it wasn't able to load a properdriver, it's going to force VGA just, you know, loadthis really basic driver and run it at 640x480Though I think we should be able to-Actually it's loaded two different displays here...one at 640x480 and one at 800x600.So we should be able to change between those and hopefully get a littlehigher resolution than 640x480.But yeah, you can go through,make sure everything looks good and when you're ready, just hit "Next"and it says..."Finishing Configuration""Your system will now be configured to run WinLinux 2000 on your computer."And you'll notice you have a couple new icons on the desktop.Number one is the "Release Notes" text document.So, you can open this up.This is the update from November 11th 1999.You also have "Boot WinLinux 2000" and this is what I was talking about before.Because, WinLinux 2000 does not partition your drive at all.So we're going to boot WinLinux 2000and Windows will let us know that it's set to run in MS-DOS mode and cannot runwhile other programs are running. It will close all of their programs.Yes, we wish to continue.It will log out of our Windows session and swap us to MS-DOSand then begin to boot WinLinux 2000.And there we go...And we get a kernel panic!Isn't that exciting?"Unable to mount root file system on 08:01."Oh boy.Okay.So yeah, this is something that you would definitely not want to experience.We're going to restart here and we got to do some troubleshooting.Well, it turns out that the troubleshooting utilityturns out to be a simpleprogram herethat- you get to send a message to the developers.So that doesn't really help us nowbecause, well, that development team isn't around anymore,so we're not going to be able to get help from them at all.But yeah, this is the program group that it creates in the Start Menuand we can launch the configuration utility again if we want to.And okay, so we're in a bit of an interesting predicament here.I believe it's trying to mount on sda1.That would seem to be the case.Judging from what we have here.If you run the WinLinux executable filein the "C:\Linux\winlinux" folder, it'll tell you how many hard drives you haveand what the Linux system is going to try to mount that drive as.So it says "sda1 is C"but this is an IDE drive and typicallySDA is reserved for SCSI or SATA drives.Not IDE.hda is usually reserved for IDE.So I wonder if we can just go into...Let's go to programs here...WinLinux 2000...And go to the config utility here.We're not going to bother changing the password configuration and all that.If you go to advanced here, there is this option to"Boot WinLinux from user defined hard drive partition(e.g., /dev/sda1)"So we'll do "/dev/hda1"And hit "Ok"Oh, I guess you can't hit Enter.We'll click "Ok" down here.Let's just look at these other boot parameters first...Oh, look at that, you can load some additional modules.Video capture card, Iomega ZIP drives, older Iomega ZIP drives.So that's pretty cool, so we'll hit "Ok".We'll hit "Next" and "Finish."And let's try that.Let's see if this works.So yeah, if a novice user were to run into this,I mean, this is definitely not,not the most pleasant thing to deal with.Let's hope... Ahh-Oh, it's 03:01 now.Okay.Well, I wonder if maybe it's detecting hda1 as the CD drive.In fact, I think the CD drive might be the primary-In fact, let's boot into the BIOS here.Yeah, the primary master is the CD-ROM drive.Yeah, I found this thread over on LinuxQuestions.orgof somebody who is essentially in this same predicament though,they were just in 2002when you would actually be wanting to use this and they were using-oh, and check that out...They said they were using WinLinux 2003 in 2002.So that answers that question.Looks like it came out before 2003.I did find this really interesting article from TechRepublic from the year2000 of somebody who also ran into the same problem and just gave up.They said, like, after a few tries of restarting the computerand reinstalling WinLinux, like uninstallingand going through the installation process again,they just gave up because they were so fed up with it.Okay. So it's interesting.I just noticed this.You see right up here, "hda"and then it's got the DVD-ROM drive.and then "hdc"...That's the hard drive.Yeah, maybe it's that simple.Maybe we just have to change that to hdc.But I don't know why the program in Windows there is detecting it as sda1Well, yeahthis is certainly not really making my statementat the beginning of the video, where it's like"Oh, this is so easy!You know, you just install it like a program in Windows and it's all good."Yeah, it's not really living up to what we're actually dealing with here.hdc1OkThere we go!That was it!It was as simple as that.Okay, so keep that in mindif you try to-Of course it is-it's gonna vary depending on what hardware you have.But if you were to try to do this and it gives you that kernel panicand it says it cannot mount the root filesystem,it's probably because WinLinux is just trying to mount it on the wrong device."Now your computer runs WinLinux 2000"And here's the beautiful K Desktop Environmentbefore it was called KDE.So we're going to log in.Gosh, I love the root-Oh no, my mouse isn't working!So I do have a USB mouse and it could be that the...that the USB driver here is not loaded.My mouse is not working.Let me grab a PS/2 mouse.Yay, there we go.So what I was saying before is I love the root user icon here.Like, this is looking pretty, like...So like this is a pretty great icon, but we're going to log into my account hereand you can choose your session type- is there anything other than KDEor is KDE the only... yeah, KDE is the only thing.Okay. So we're going to go.So as I mentioned earlier, it did not detect our display devicethat we have in here.So it didn't load a proper display driver.So that results in some pretty interestinggraphical effects going on as we're moving windows around, which is unfortunate.But hey, we got the thing loaded.That's the most important thing.So let's see what version of KDE that we're rocking here."KDE desktop environment was written by the KDE team"oh, there's no version number.Okay, I thought there'd be a version number in the about menu there, I guess not."About KFM"This is the, the K file manager.Okay, so that's version 1.167.2.21.One of the other thingsI'd mentioned before is that yes, this does try to mimic the Windows UIas best as it can and that is something that it touts on the website as well.So you've got a similar color scheme, even a similar gradient up here, this blueto black gradient that you would find in Windows 98 or 95 by default.So it's a little things like thatthat just make this feel a little bit more familiar to a Windows user.The, the menu down here, if you click on this,you've got all your application groups up here, your search function,go to the home directory, help information, refreshthe desktop, open up the trash can, let's go and see what we have installed.So let's go to applications here. So we do have Netscape.This is one of the things mentioned on the website as well,I would suspect kind of a middle finger to Microsoft because you know,Microsoft was definitely trying to get rid of Netscape.They did not like Netscape at alland Internet Explorer, basically with them bundling IEwith Windows essentially killed Netscape.I mean, I've done a whole video on that.But yeah, that's that's the short version of it.And it looks like this is Communicator 4.7.So yeah, if you had used Netscape Communicator on Windows, well,you'd feel right at home because the UI is essentially exactly the same.All right. So let's see what else we got here.So we took a look at Netscape.We do have GIMP, if you want to open up GIMP and reallyexplore that, we did that in the PlayStation 2 video.I guess it's kind of a rule.If there's a GIMP installation on a Linux distro that you install,you have to take a look at it.So let's see what version this is. I'm going to guess...I mean, it's definitely an early version here.Check out thisanesthetic man in this boot screen or this startup splash screen here."The GNU Image MAN-ipuation platform..."Yeah, that's really, really fancy.How they changed the color of the text there.So let's see... GIMP Tip of the day.The GIMP uses layers to let you organize your image.Think of them as a stack of slides or filters.Awesome. Okay, so we'll close out of that.And let's make... let's see here, let's do a new document.256x256That's fine.We'll get it to use all the default settings, and let's grab our pen toolLet's make this a nice, like, blue and, you know, right outlet's see"m"it's a really bad looking "m" there"j""d"Oh, isn't that so beautiful?Okay, and then we'll make changes to, like, a yellow and do that.And let's call this amazing.jpg.And there we go. Beautiful. It's been saved.So you got to always use GIMP.I mean, we're just having fun at this point, man.We're just messing around with this because it's always coolto explore an operating system like this for the first time.So one thing that is worth mentioning is how it haslaid out your file structure on here.So you've got this My HD icon on the desktop,which will open up the root directory or whatthe system sees as the root directory, which in this case is the Linux folderon your hard drive, on your C drive back in Windows right.You had that Linux folder.So just like we did on Windows,we can go into the WinLinux directory and we can see that Linux.batand the winlinux.exe and the .bat file down here.But you also got this DOS folder here and this gives you access toyour Windows files.So you've got my program- or my programs.. My Documentsand program files here so I can go into program files.We got Norton right here.This is where Norton Antivirus lives.If you really wanted to... I mean, you're not going to launch it on Linuxbut, you know, there it is.If you wanted to view those files and yeah.So, you know, you can still get access to to your fileson the Windows side of things, which is definitely very useful.You've also got a shortcut to that DOS folder right here on the desktop.You've also got a floppy shortcut right herewhich we don't have anything in the floppy disk drive right now.So it's not going to do anything.You got a CD-ROM shortcut as well.You've got MP3 PlayerWhat is this?Doesn't show up ultra well.The X multimedia system, XMMS, okay.I personally have not used this before, unfortunately it does not show upreally well, because it's running in 16 colors hereand that does not look the greatest... again frickin graphics driver, man.I wish we had something that we could load hereother than this justgeneric one that's limited to 16 colors.We can go to display properties though.And here we are.So this is where you can change the-Oh gosh.That's looking really great, isn't it?We can go to- you can change the wallpaper if you want to.Let's browse here and see what wallpapers we got.Let's go with circuit. That sounds intriguing.Oh yeah. That looks, it looks like a cool wallpaper.Unfortunately, it's you know what, this actually looks kind of neat.I mean, yeah, they're all going to be just not displaying the greatest.But let's golet's just- I'm just going to hold the down arrow keyand then I'm just going to stop on a random one while looking away.One, two, three, stop.And we're still going it's still going.Okay,I think we looped back to the top here.Yeah, maybe I should not have held on the down arrow key for that long.Because we are-It's still scrolling through.Yeah, it's got a lot of keystrokes to catch up to, man.This is-It's really going down this list here.Pebble Town. Boom.That works for me. There we go.So there is Pebble Town, but I didn't mean to close out of that.Let's go back in the display properties.You can set multiple desktop wallpapers for your different desktopsif you want to do that.So on desktop, too, for example, right now I don't have a wallpaper.I could set one if I wanted to.Let's go to Screen Saver here.Yeah, see this right hereI mean, this has given me a real Windows vibe.I mean, just the way this is laid out, I mean, the background.Yeah, this is substantially different.But Screen Saver, this is pretty dang close.There you have it.So let's see.Oh, Flame, this looks nice- Let's see how this-You think this is gonna preview alright?This is probably going to be a mess.Oh, no, this looks pretty nice.Yeah, that's a that's a neat little screen saver.So colors can change the color scheme if you want to... Fonts... Style.A couple other things of note.You've got FreeCiv on here.So if you wanted to play a round of that, there you go.You've got what appears to be Acrobat Reader.This looks like youryour help information here which oh my gosh, I did not want to do that. Oh,yeah. Thatthat was not oh, that's probably cause Acrobat's...opened up there because Netscape did the same thing.Yeah.So when you open up Netscape, it actually I mean, again, improperdisplay driver that's again, a very, very common theme here.I think you have to connect to a server.So we got to start up this here.This is the FreeCiv Server and there we go.Now we can connect.And there I've joined the game.What nation will you be?Let us see.So I have never played FreeCiv before.But if you knew how to play it well, you could have a lot of fun here.We're probably gonna- I'm probably going toget down a bit of a rabbit hole here, so we'll just close this for now.But yeah, FreeCiv you got FreeCiv on here.You've got... this is Netscape Messenger.Ton of games here.I mean, look at all these games.Poker, RaversiSmiletrisOh, this is kind of like Tetris, isn't it?I think it's just like a free clone of it.I mean, not a literal,like they clone the code, but, you know, you know what I mean.Let's do a new game here.Yeah, yeah.There we go.Now, this is a game I could play for hoursand oh...I held down the key again.Like, I'm just holding down the down arrow...Now I've let go, and it's like...oh, it's actually, like, freaking out.Like, look at that. It's like, a bit of a glitch.It's like changing-I'm just holding down the key to change it,and it's actually preventing the block from continuing down.Now, I've let go but because I sent all those key presses.It's just doing them, just going through them until it's done.And the block is stuck in midair, which is great.And I literally can't like, I can't move it to the left or the right.So there's a bit of a tactic you'd use to your advantage in Smiletris hereIt's still going!oh, my gosh.Oh, now it's doing my left and right.There we go. Okay, we're done.Now, one thing I want to dobefore we get out of here is let's log out of our session hereand let's go back to our login screen, and we're going to shut this down.So we'll go to shut down.We will shut down.And this will power down the system.It's not just gonna quit out of this and go back to Windows.So I'm just going to press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart.And we will just boot back up into Windows 98and that pretty much- that wraps it up for this video guysthat is a look at WinLinux 2000 in all of its gloryhopefully you guys enjoyed this one, I hope you found it interesting.If you did, be sure to give it a thumbs upget subscribed down below, turn on notifications, all that good stuff.And as always guys I want tothank you all so much for watching, and I will see you in the next video.(outro music)