TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Freespire has lofty goals. They want to give end-users everything they would find in an OS like Microsoft Windows, including proprietary audio and video codecs and accelerated 3D drivers. They want the OS to be easy to use and administer. They also want all this to be free of charge.

Freespire is the free-as-in-beer version of Linspire, sold by the company of the same name. Over the years they've shown increasing desire to make as many deals necessary in the corporate world to make their OS the most interoperable.

This includes licensing things like DVD decoders and fonts, as well as signing non-aggression pacts with companies like Microsoft.

Not everyone in the free software realm likes this. I personally could give a damn. If it works, it works. I'm interested to see how well this release stacks up.

Install:

The installer starts up a pretty blue graphical interface that is reminiscent of YaST. You're asked very few questions, such as your username and root password and whether you want to take over the whole harddrive.

If you answer yes, the installer takes care of any and all partitioning and formatting concerns and goes about its merry way installing the OS.

About 5 to 10 minutes later (yes, it's that fast) the installer finishes up and reboots. The CD spits out and you're up to your first boot.

Reboot brings you to a surprisingly plain GRUB screen and then a graphical progress screen. You're then given the logon prompt. As soon as you login, the EULA pops up.

This basically just reiterates the GNU GPL license along with licenses for whatever proprietary media codecs they've included, such as Real, Quicktime and Windows Media.

Configuration continues with a few final questions: sound setup, time zones, users. The last screen asks if you'd like to get Click 'N Run, Linspire's proprietary install framework. It's basically a graphical front-end to apt-get, since Freespire (and Linspire) are based on Ubuntu.

I was also given the option to pick a display driver. I chose the "nvidia" official driver (which was already installed) and rebooted to see if it would work out of the box. They did.

I was then able to set my default resolution to something other than "big note edition" (1024x768 to a more respectable 1280x1024). On to the testing.

My scanner was not detected, nor was the SANE library installed. I'm sure this could be rectified with a broadband connection and some work in either apt-get or Linspire's CNR client, but out of the box I got nothing.

Auto-mount worked, hallelujah. I was getting quite tired of mounting things from an xterm. MP3, MPG and WMV8 playback worked fine. Unfortunately though, the default program to launch MP3s was RealPlayer. As far as I'm concerned, Real should have been swallowed by the unholy abyss many moons ago.

Software Selection:

OpenOffice, Firefox, and Pidgin were included. The Nvu web editor is present as well. This isn't surprising since Linspire wrote it.

Java 1.6 was installed. I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Most of the newer distributions I've tried lately have included this. It might have something to do with Sun releasing most of Java under the GNU GPL, thus making it less of a pariah to GNU-only folks.

Who's it best for?

Freespire is slick. It's easy to install. 3D drivers, auto-mount, and media playback work out of the box. It's distributed by a reputable corporation who seems to genuinely want to make users' lives easier.

If any of the above offends you, seek solace elsewhere. Perhaps in a distribution that requires you to flog yourself more often. I hear Gentoo is taking converts.

The lack of scanner support kills this distro for me, but if it weren't for that I might be able to stand it. The visuals are a bit too...bright for my taste. If that's the worst I can say about an OS, they're doing something right.