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An Early Look at Freespire Linux

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Aug 02, 2006 01:52 PM
from the lime-in-the-coconut dept.
Software Linux
An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com takes an early look at Freespire Linux in a recent article. Linspire will be releasing their first version of Freespire, the first community Linux distribution to include many third-party proprietary codecs, drivers, and software. From the article: 'While I still have my doubts about the long-term wisdom of using proprietary software and drivers with Linux, I must say that if you feel you need to use such programs, Freespire makes it much easier than any other Linux distribution. And, when is all said and done, that's really what Freespire is all about -- making Linux as easy as possible for users.'"
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[+] Linspire CEO dispels Linspire Linux Myths 278 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Chances are that you think Linspire lets you run Windows applications, that you have to run it as root, and that it's really not quite a proper Linux. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. At LinuxWorld in Boston this week, CEO Kevin Carmony explained what Linspire Linux is, and isn't all about. Carmony said that people are still getting these things wrong. Yes, in the beginning, Linspire had the goal of letting Linux users run Windows applications with WINE, but it dropped that theme years ago. As for requiring you to run as root, that was, Carmony said, only the case with an early alpha release that was never put in the public's hands. As for not being a real Linux, that's nonsense, too."
[+] Linspire Announces Freespire Distribution 223 comments
LinuxScribe writes "Is the world ready for another community Linux distro a là Fedora and openSUSE? We're about to find out, as Linspire used the Desktop Linux Summit to announce a community-driven version of Linspire, to be called Freespire. But here's the twist, Freespire will come in two flavors: a completely open source version and a version that includes all of the fully-licensed proprietary apps, drivers, and codecs in Linspire."
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An Early Look at Freespire Linux 50 Comments More /

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  • It's about time... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Geldon (444090) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @01:54PM (#15834061)
    Linspire has had some pretty good ideas when it comes to making Linux easy for the Windows user. But since it has not been free, I have been reluctent to recommend it to friends. I would like to see how this turns out...
    • Seems Linspire is moving to the business model of giving away the software and charging
      for the support.

      I agree with the notion that 'non-free' software with an 'open' api and documented
      formats is not a true evil and should be allowed as a choice on a free system. If you
      use such an application you are not truly locked in to it as you can migrate your data.

      The only problem I see with Freespire is the same one I see with other Debian clones.
      They may use .deb packages but they don't all follow the same source
    • is that it uses root accounts by default. That's pretty much asking for trouble.
      • Freespire doesn't handle accounts the same as Linspire.

        It's more like Ubuntu in that regard - a user account with sudo privileges with the account's password.

        It's quite easy to create user accounts in Linspire, and it's even recommmended during the installation.
      • linspire hasn't done that for years.
      • "is that it uses root accounts by default. That's pretty much asking for trouble."

        How long is this rumor going to live? That hasn't been the case for quite a while now. And version 5 is extremely nice! Much faster and much more stable than ever. It's actually at a point where I'd use it daily at work if I could.

    • I agree. This gives me a good chance to see it for myself: test the waters, so to speak, before passing it along to the less initiated. From the description, it sounds like a killer distro: I'd love to have proprietary codecs and the like installed out of the box. If this distro ends up being all it's cracked up to be, I might just subscribe to the click and run even though I know how to use apt-get already: just to support it.

      Of course, I'll have to really give credance to the FSF's take on proprietar

          • Try this: charge a newbie Windows-user for something like the Gimp, pocket their money, point them to the official website where they can get it for free, explain what you did was perfectly legal and then watch their reaction. Think they'll pay you again? No matter how legal it is for Linspire to run their CnR thingie, *nix-users don't want to pay for free software and a great many view it as a (legal) scam

            If all you do is point, the user has a right to be pissed. That's not what Linspire or any other L

          • I don't see what your problem with linspire is. What you're paying for is time savings, essentially. You're paying $99 for a system that doesn't need much anything in the way of setup, and another $99 per year for guaranteed-working builds of free software (something I've found is lacking in the wikiality of community-assembled builds of OSS).

            Usually, linux needs careful configuration to get it working well, and when it's done, it works better than anything else. But it takes time and patience.

            Not dissin

  • Odd name (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Winckle (870180) <mwinckle&gmail,com> on Wednesday August 02 2006, @01:56PM (#15834079) Homepage
    For a linux distro that contains software which is not "free"
    • Yeah, but I heard that this distro includes free beer, so count me in!

    • Re:Odd name (Score:4, Insightful)

      by QuantumFTL (197300) * <justin.wick@EEEg ... inus threevowels> on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:44PM (#15834452) Homepage
      It is the perhaps unfortunate nature of the english language that two, entirely separate concepts are both given the same name - free. The target audience of this distribution does not care about source code or software politics. They want a tool that they can use to get work done, and they want it on the cheap. For them, the name Freespire is good, as the point of the distribution is that it does not cost money. Whether or not it is Stallman approved means less to them than if it is "kid tested and mother approved."

    • Re:nice quip (Score:5, Insightful)

      by aixou (756713) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @03:06PM (#15834608)
      Nice quip, served you well.

      You appear to be misinformed however. Freespire will be released in two distinct versions:

      One containing entirely free software, and one containing proprietary codecs (paid for and licensed by Linspire).
      The user gets to choose which he uses.

      Hence the "Free" -- freedom of choice to opt into one of two free (as in beer) choices: a completely free (as in speech and beer) version, and a free (just as in beer) version.
      Seems pretty free to me.

      Any questions?

  • More Bubbly (Score:5, Insightful)

    by neonprimetime (528653) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @01:58PM (#15834103)
    Is it just me, or do Linux Desktops seem to be following the Windows trend? They seem to be getting more bubbly. Take me back to the days of BlackBox

    • Re:More Bubbly (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BecomingLumberg (949374) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:04PM (#15834159)
      I agree Linux is going that way, but familiarity and 'good' looks are the only way to start converting the non-geeks. And there are plenty of nuts and bolts distros.

      Eye candy is very appealing to the mainstream user, and will help A LOT to increase Linux's usage and familiarity.

      • Re:More Bubbly (Score:5, Insightful)

        by B11 (894359) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:20PM (#15834287)
        I don't know about you, but it's nice to have a system that isn't ugly. Of course, the first thing I did when I installed ubuntu was change the theme and get rid of the brown. Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? Of course now, it's sort of their claim to fame, and they can't change it now, but I wonder how many "regular" users are put off by unbuntu altogether, right off the bat?
        • I'm actually partial to the color scheme in Ubuntu (my choice of distro). I have an asian themed room and the subdued tones mesh very well with the colors of the room. (Using the 'Dawn of Ubuntu' wallpaper, the tree with the faded sky behind it)
        • Actually, they have said that each cycle will possibly have a different color theme, so don't be surprised if they change from Brown/Orange to Pink/Neon Green for Edgy.
        • I don't know about you, but it's nice to have a system that isn't ugly.


          Sadly, I'm not a fan of the 'bubbly' look of XP (or Linspire). Give me a functional look like fvwm or Gnome any day. Functionality and simplicity have their own aesthetic!


          -b.

      • It's amazing how many of my classmates I've converted to Ubuntu because they saw how sexy it was with proper theming and the use of a few desklets. Yes, even to senior level computer science students, eye candy sells.

        ...Of course, once they actually tried it out and used the slick features like apt-get the first time, they were head over heels.

    • Re:More Bubbly (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Divide By Zero (70303) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:17PM (#15834254)
      It's easier for an expert to kill X than it is for a n00b to start it. It's not like XP where the CLI is an afterthought. It's there, just like back in the olden days of Windows, running under the GUI.

      If you don't like it, don't use it. For me, I'm looking for a linux system that works BEFORE I start working on it. Give me a working system, then let me customize it. I don't have the chops to build a linux box from the ground up, and while that puts me in the minority here, I'm very firmly in the majority over the general population on this one.

      I'm hoping this gives the linux movement a bit more momentum, even if it does do so at the expense of tarnishing the OSS camps' dreams just a bit.
      • For me, I'm looking for a linux system that works BEFORE I start working on it.

        Not exactly Linux, but my OpenBSD install worked quite nicely out of the box. X even booted in 640x480/256 mode the first time I typed "startx" (sort of equivalent to the "win" command back in the day?). "xorgconfig" was required to set X up to play nice with my video card at 1024x768, but that wasn't a big deal - the config took a minute and was completely straightforward.

        Installing Debian was slightly more fun because of

  • Kickstart (Score:5, Interesting)

    by also-rr (980579) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @01:59PM (#15834116) Homepage
    Proprietary software, as long as it doesn't make the system less free, is not necessarily bad.

    For example a proprietary document system that uses open formats and has open APIs does very little to harm the user and potentially fills a niche that cannot be served by free software very well (eg handles certain legal compliance issues, which requires expensive insurance and research).

    As long as you *could* write your own software to replace bits of the system, or interoperate with the system, then you dont necessarily have to for the benefit to be very real indeed.

    A lot (although not all) of the stuff that comes with Linspire falls into this category.
    • Much of the concern over the use of proprietary material is that it'll eventually be relied-upon with no alternative. If that happens and then the owner of the proprietary software has a change of heart or goes belly up, there are problems. For example: if everyone uses ATI's fglrx drivers, there's no need for the open source ones. If ATI goes out of business, everyone's using this huge black box to power their ATI cards. Bug fixes would have to be in the form of unofficial binary hacks, and new featur

  • Actually.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by AltGrendel (175092) <<ag-slashdot> <at> <exit0.us>> on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:01PM (#15834138) Homepage
    And, when is all said and done, that's really what Freespire is all about -- making Linux as easy as possible for users.'"

    Usually, when all is said and done, more is said than done.

  • not exactly packaged with the distro... (Score:3, Informative)

    by tlacuache (768218) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:06PM (#15834175)
    ... but EasyUbuntu [freecontrib.org] accomplishes the same thing (at least as far as the codecs and drivers go, I didn't RTFA) for Ubuntu and is as easy as the name suggests.

    • Re: just one little thing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by aixou (756713) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @03:11PM (#15834640)
      One eensy weensy little detail distinguishes Freespire from EasyUbuntu:

      legality.

      Freespire uses fully licensed codecs (paid for by Linspire), whereas EasyUbuntu takes the gray area route of not using fully legal stuff.

      Since Linspire is footing the bill for the codecs, I think we can all see which choice is both more practical for the user and more ethical.
      • >One eensy weensy little detail distinguishes Freespire from EasyUbuntu:
        >
        >legality.

        Only in the U. S. of Eh. my friend. Up here in the Great White North, not to mention the rest of the free world, (NOT Australia since they've joined the US copyright tyranny) it is completely legal to use most of those codecs that might land an American butt in the slammer.

        What I find most frustrating is that because people are so afraid of what the Americans will do, they intentionally cripple these distros.
  • Far superior, of course, to Ubuntu + Automatix [ubuntuforums.org].
  • When Redhat dropped their supported free desktop version and split their offerings into the 'community' Fedora Core and the 'professional' RHEL, everybody beat up on them then, and continues to do so (see the Ubuntu-as-Redhat-Killer article from earlier today). Yet it seems like many Linux distros with commercial aspirations are doing the same (Suse, and now Linspire).

    Maybe Redhat was onto something?
    • With respect to SuSE, you got that wrong. OpenSUSE (the free SuSE), is ONLY free software. Nothing that doesn't have source is included in there. Non-open SuSE (the pay for DVD one) contains all the binary only bits that make GPL folks cringe.

  • low-quality drivers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bcrowell (177657) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:41PM (#15834421) Homepage

    What sometimes gets left out of this kind of discussion is that closed-source drivers are often of very low quality. Recently, I've been scanning in an old 400-page book on an HP scanner, using HP's closed-source MacOS 9 driver and scanning software. The MacOS X driver wasn't released until a couple of years after we bought the scanner, although they claimed it would be coming "real soon now." When the MacOS X driver finally was released, I found that it crashed so often as to make it useless. So here I am, in the year 2006, booting into MacOS 9 whenever I want to use the scanner. IIRC a driver is available for SANE, but I think I had dependency problems getting it to instal on my Linux box.

    I scanned the first 100 pages or so, transferred them to the Linux box, and made sure I could read them. No problem. I finished scanning the book, transferred the rest of the pages to the Linux box. Oops --- can't read anything after page 250. Why? It turns out all those files are empty --- zero bytes in size. Why? Oh, the Mac's hard disk had apparently filled up, and the software didn't check for an I/O error when it wrote the files.

    I'm not saying that OSS is always perfect and bug-free, but I doubt that this kind of low-quality code would ever have become widely used if it was open source.

    I don't really want closed-source drivers for Linux. All I want is two things:

    1. I want to be able to find clear, accurate, up-to-date information on what devices have OSS drivers available, so I can buy hardware that's well supported.
    2. I want to be able to install the OSS drivers without a lot of hassles.
    Really, #1 seems to be pretty well covered by the SANE folks (although the situation seems to be worse for wireless cards, where there's a ton of out-of-date info on the web, and I didn't find any canonical, well-maintained site that had all the info). #2 is probably slowly getting better too, as Ubuntu becomes more and more mature. I suspect that by the time I upgrade to the next Ubuntu, the scanner driver I need will already be included in SANE by default, and the dependency problems will be fixed.
    • The problem with #2 is that the drivers need constant support, because the kernel changes so fast. Of course it is logical that a driver written for Kernel 2.6.1 may not work with 2.6.15, but sometimes stuff even breaks because it was written for 2.6.14! This makes Linux driver maintenance expensive. If the maintainer does not have 24/7 devotion behind it, the driver is gone.

      Contrast this with stuff like ext2fs for Windows. I can *still* use it, even after the updates and the switch from 2000 to XP. There s
  • Not only does the default interface look like Windows XP, some of the icons look like their Windows equivalents. The IM icon for Gaim, for example, has more than a passing resemblance to the AOL AIM icon.

    ...and even more of a resemblance to Apple's iChat icon [google.com].

    Hmmm.

    iqu :|

  • It's an Operating System (Score:3)

    by sqlgeek (168433) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:47PM (#15834476)
    Linux' ability to run proprietary software such as an Oracle database is essential to its success. How is this any different?

  • Haskell : strange but true (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hortensia Patel (101296) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:50PM (#15834499)
    Coincidentally, I discovered [earth.li] today that Linspire/Freespire are standardizing on Haskell [haskell.org] for core OS development. I'm still blinking a bit about that one, but you have to give them marks for chutzpah.
  • I was hoping this would provide a free alternative to the CNR warehouse of Linspire. Linspire isnt' really that expensive to begin with ($50 or even cheaper last I checked). But then asking people to pay $20/year for the CNR warehouse wasn't cool. People don't want to associate some kind of yearly fee with this I don't think.
  • Sheesh! The "launch" menu is basically a clone of the Start menu, which wasn't a great idea in the first place. Give me an application menu that can show up anywhere on the screen like in fvwm or blackbox, and a NeXT/Apple-style dock on one side of the screen for the apps and directories I use most often...

    Actually, give me a true 3-button mouse and allow different menus to show up at the pointer site with different combinations of button clicks.

    -b.

  • Two other versions in the works (Score:3, Funny)

    by jiawen (693693) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @03:37PM (#15834819) Homepage

    Two other versions are currently being designed. One, which requires that users give the company some of their intellectual property in exchange for additional software packages, and another, which allows users to exchange a few hours' work for a robust Linux-based system. The first version will be called Inspire; the second, Perspire.

    The company is also thinking of donating free software to relatives of the recently deceased. This will naturally be called Expire.

    • The work around is that there is no GPL violation. The Linux Kernel has an open API. If you conform to the API and have written all the code yourself, your code isn't subject to the GPL. The Kernel source is GPL. Any module can be whatever the author deems it.

      • Except that binary kernel modules are illegal, and will not be allowed in, period.

        Seen the various talks at OLS a couple of weeks ago? Seen the stance by Novell as a result of it?

        • Using the GPL layer approach, they are not.
          But apparently, I was mistaken about the open-source nVidia kernel modules that act as the layer. They are not GPLed. If they are re-released under the GPL, then the nvidia binary drivers are perfectly legal.

    • Re:non-GPL Kernel modules (Score:5, Informative)

      by ardor (673957) on Wednesday August 02 2006, @02:33PM (#15834367)
      It is illegal to distribute non-GPL binary kernel modules (ask any kernel developer), and Freespire should respect the GPL since they are a Linux company.

      Well, the actual nVidia/ATI kernel module IS GPLed. It acts as layer between the kernel and the binary blob. This layer has an open API, which is used by the blob. Thus, the blob uses the kernel, it does not extend it. The extension comes from the GPLed layer.

      The real issue is that nVidia & ATI use GPL code from other parts of the kernel in their drivers. This is the only issue, because the way I described above makes binary blobs perfectly legal.
      • The layer is not GPL'ed, its not even open source. Take a look at the copyright notice at the top of the source files that nVidia distributes:

        /* _NVRM_COPYRIGHT_BEGIN_
        *
        * Copyright 1999-2001 by NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. All
        * information contained herein is proprietary and confidential to NVIDIA
        * Corporation. Any use, reproduction, or disclosure without the written
        * permission of NVIDIA Corporation is prohibited.
        *
        * _NVRM_COPYRIGHT_END_

    • "It does mean that the user would need a valid windows license, but they come with all computers now."

      That license does NOT grant the right to run Windows on any other system.

      But, on a different note. There are different points of view. The first is that the "Operating System" is simply a resource manager. Its goal is to maximize utilization of your computer. From this point of view, Linux is already superior to Windows.

      Another point of view is that the "Operating System" is central to your (enjoyable) use
        • I guess that by "newbie" I mean me. I have 10 years Linux experience, and have just recently started to learn windows. I also find it illogical, and completely irrational.


          Don't we all? :)
    • Yes,

      But this is web 2.0 stuff we're talking about here!

      Caldera was early and the Linux desktop has come a long way since.

      I'll hazzard a guess and say Linspire is still a little early to the game, but I think Longwait's convoluted marketing plan with different packages unlocking different functions only benefits Linspire.

      If they continue to concentrate on OEM contracts, I think they'll provide a great deal of exposure to the Linux desktop. It will be a clearly lower priced and function as well. Let's not f
    • Indeed, automounting still has issues. For example, you unmount it using the KDE menu, but after unplugging, its still present. Or, it simply does not automount etc.
      IMO automounting is not well integrated, even after Project Utopia. The Unix design is simply not made for automounting and removable media, and it shows. Only after the creation of pmount *useful* media mounting is possible (i.e. you dont have to be root).

      Another thing I am not fond of is samba share mounting. It is really not trivial to mount
    • Hmmm ... ever try to play a DVD on a vanilla Windows install? Yeah, SuSE doesn't let you play MP3s or other goodies of that ilk out of the box. You need to update against a few choice repositories before you can use that goodness. That said, it's VERY easy to create a super-install DVD from Yast with all those "omitted" packages. As for the CD and USB thumbdrive issue, you need to run SuSEPlugger, it handles all that mount / unmount stuff for you. I don't use it personally, I like to mount shit when I need

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