TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

The idea behind Freespire is a good one, in my opinion. I've loved Linux for a while but one of the things that has annoyed me greatly (and I imagine I'm not the only one) is the sometimes fanatical devotion certain members of the community have to the idea of Open-Source.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a wonderful idea too, but I also live on planet Earth, and the utopia that those like Richard Stallman want so badly, where all software is free and open, simply does not exist. What this means is that most computer users will encounter some sort of proprietary software in their daily work/play/etc and they will expect (rightfully so) that their operating system knows how to deal with it.

Enter Freespire. It's an offshoot of Linspire's desktop Linux OS of the same name, designed to be a free (no cost) distribution that offers support out of the box (meaning no downloads or special tweaks required) for many of the most common media formats as well as proper 3D accelerated drivers for common display cards (ATI and Nvidia).

What makes this different than the approach that some non-U.S.-based distributions have taken (just including the codecs and crossing their fingers) is that the Linspire company is footing the bill. They've actually bought the appropriate licenses to distribute their codecs with the OS, making them legal. This is something that will no doubt anger RM Stallman, and to him I say "Eat it and go shave, hippie. By the way, I really love Emacs." As you can see, my relationship with RMS is complicated.

Install:

The installer is very polished even for a beta, and asks very minimal questions (user name, password, harddrive partitioning). You get no choices as far as what gets installed, but for the target audience I doubt this will be an issue. The installer claims it will take about 10 minutes to finish, and surprisingly it's about right.

Upon reboot I was greeted with a graphical logon and immediately remembered an annoyance of mine with Linspire. I was asked to log in using the user name I had chosen and the administrator password I had been prompted for. Your default user logs in as root. Although familiar to those who use MS Windows, this is nonetheless a glaring security hole. You're then taken to a last-minute configuration screen that lets you set up users, video resolution, and networking. Finally you're taken to the default desktop, which looks sadly like a hybrid of XP and Vista, with a strong KDE flavor.

I was happy to see that my "Beastie Boys - Intergalactic" and "Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist" music video MPG files played fine, as did my "Matrix Ping Pong" WMV. My MP3 album of The Minibosses also played fine in their iTunes lookalike program, LSongs. So far so good, and not a single bit had to be downloaded.

Unfortunately, despite much fiddling I couldn't seem to get my camera to work with their iPhoto clone, LPhoto. The sample pictures they included were interesting, though (particularly the one with the attractive young lady in the jeans). Also, although my iPod was detected and showed up on the desktop, I couldn't browse it using the file system or LSongs. My scanner was also a no-go with LPhoto, and kooka (the regular KDE scanner program) was not installed. In all fairness this was probably due to a documented limitation with the current version of my VM software rather than any fault of the OS itself.

When I attempted to launch Firefox, I got an interesting error message, "Cannot start JACK server." Apparently the version of Firefox Freespire uses doesn't know JACK. I tried several times to launch it and got the same error. Perhaps Linspire was so confident that their users wouldn't need the internet to get their computer working that they broke the web browser to make damned sure.

Software Selection:

The usual suspects are present (although in the case of Firefox they don't all necessarily work). OpenOffice 2.0, K3b, and a branded version of GAIM which also didn't know Jack are included. Apparently this JACK fellow is quite important to internet-enabled programs in Freespire.

The Freespire-specific programs installed are LSongs, LPhoto and Nvu. The first two I've mentioned before. Nvu is a webpage creator based on the Mozilla engine, and offers a little more full-featured an application than Mozilla Composer, but nowhere near the functionality of Dreamweaver. It's a decent in-between, though I've personally never been able to get it to work on any distribution other than Linspire.

Most Annoying Feature:

Potential. That's perhaps the one thing that gets me about this distro. It excels at some things that other distros ignore or outright refuse to provide (such as out-of-the-box LICENSED multimedia support) but it falls flat on its face when doing something as mundane as launching an internet program when there's no internet connection present. I suppose I can't be too harsh on this one because it *is* still an early beta. Hopefully the final product that's due out in a few months will iron out these bugs.

Who's it best for?

I'd not feel comfortable recommending this one to anyone, but at least it's for practical reasons this time rather than some terrible shortcoming in the distro itself. Freespire Beta 1 is very much still a beta OS, and you wouldn't want to try and run your day to day operations on it. That being said, there's enough laid out already to give me guarded hope that the final product will be very nice indeed, given a very rigorous beta testing cycle. Well, and they need to clue everyone in on this JACK guy.