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the approach used by other distros such as Suse or RedHat that have placed the development of a major part of their sys- tems in the capable hands of the FOSS community. Freespire is based on GNU/ . makes many promises about their new creation. “Freespire,” says the project homepage [2], “is powerful enough for the most so- phisticated Linux user.” After all, Linspire is competing with it- self by producing a free distribution that so closely resembles the company’s flag- ship commercial product. Users can download Freespire for free. Compare this to the price of US$ 49.95 for the Lin- spire Standard Edition. What does Freespire have to offer? Is Linspire just trying to push the CNR Warehouse? With this in mind, we de- www.photocase.com cided to take a closer look. Installation You can download a CD image of the Freespire beta release from the Freespire server at [3] or via BitTorrent. The CD contains about 700 megabytes of data. If A look at the new Freespire distribution you have a broadband connection, you should have no trouble downloading the file and burning it onto a CD. The CD Start menu gives users a num- ber of options. Besides the option to in- FREE TWIN stall the distribution, you can launch a live system, which is useful for newcom- Linspire is pushing a new non-commercial version called Freespire. We ers who want to try before they leap. The CD Start menu also lets you change took the Freespire beta for a test drive. BY MARTIN LOSCHWITZ the partitioning of your hard disk. The installation routine is tight, guid- ing the user through the system setup y the time the first version of ing for video or audio codecs in order to with a firm hand. After the welcome Linspire [1] finally hit the watch movies. In fact, Linspire has all splash, users can choose the keyboard Bshelves, this desktop distro had major commercial codecs. layout then opt to dedicate the whole already negotiated some major obsta- The Click’n’Run Warehouse (CNR) is disk to Freespire or launch a neat hard cles. Besides the fact that another major Linspire feature. Custom- disk partitioning tool (Figure 1). Unfor- wasn’t happy with the original name, ers can use the CNR front-end to down- tunately, the tool demonstrated a ten- “Lindows,” Linspire’s creators had to load and install software. However, you dency to crash in our lab, taking the In- admit that they were not going to be able need to register (for free) before you can staller down with it and forcing us to re- to achieve their original goal of recreat- use CNR. If you decide to update your boot and start the installation again from ing the look and feel of Windows. But CNR status to “Gold” for around US$ 50, scratch. Linspire survived this slow start and you are granted access to additional soft- After setting up the disk, users can continues to achieve success in its effort ware. enter the host name for the computer, to bring Linux to a mass market con- Linspire recently surprised the Linux their own names, their choice of user- sumer audience. world by announcing a new community name, and a matching password before Linspire, which focuses on ease of in- variant of their distribution under the clicking on Finish and Yes I’m sure in the stallation and ease of use for newcom- name Freespire. According to the press next dialog to launch into the file copy ers, provides commercial components releases, Freespire will be a community phase of the install. such as drivers for ATI or Nvidias graph- distribution comprised entirely of open After copying the files to disk (inciden- ics cards, as well as other commercial source software – with no commercial tally, while this is going on, users are software, removing the need for search- components. This tactic is reminiscent treated to “info” windows full of ads for

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The distribution has the usual collec- tion of applications for daily chores: be- sides OpenOffice, the fairly spartan KDE menu offers a Web Browser, which is a pseudonym for , a KMail client, and the instant messenger. LSongs [4] serves as a replacement for Amarok. Generally speaking, Freespire has most of the typical Linspire applica- tions including LPhoto [5]. The menu includes RealPlayer “Gold,” giving users the ability to launch web- hosted movies automatically. Freespire has no trouble with video formats: WMV and AVI files are supported, as are MP3 or WMA files. All of these formats re- quire non-free codecs, confirming my suspicion that Freespire has a very loose definition of “free.” I started asking myself how seriously Linspire is sticking to its claim of devel- Figure 1: The Freespire installer gives newcomers a handy tool for partitioning the hard disk. oping Freespire on the basis of free com- ponents only. The project defends the in- CNR Warehouse), setup prompts you for ing the Internet, and Freespire deserves clusion of non- by stating a few system configuration values. You criticism for this approach. that it wishes to give the user maximum can accept the default values in most freedom of choice, and that includes pro- cases. Free or Non-free prietary codecs, drivers, and applica- Finally, the routine displays an over- After logging in at the display manager, tions. This said, Linspire CEO Kevin Car- view window with the option to set up with a theme designed to reflect the mony has promised a Freespire variant an additional user account, although set- Freespire look (Figure 2), you are treated without a single proprietary component ting up a non-privileged user in addition to the kind of Linux system you have some time in the future. to the computer administrator is not grown to expect, and one that looks very mandatory. If you don’t set up another similar to the Linspire desktop. The most Downloading Software with user, the first user you set up automati- obvious difference is the start button, -get cally has root privileges (although sudo which sports a blue Freespire logo in- It is easy to see that Freespire is Debian- adds an abstraction layer). This setup stead of the green Linspire icon. Free- based; components such as , can be dangerous, especially when surf- spire uses version 3.5.3 of KDE. and apt-get are a dead give-away. Lin- spire advertises Freespire as supporting easy software downloading based on apt-get. You need to run apt-get update first to tell apt-get to download a new package list from the Freespire server. After doing so, it really is easy to install new software by giving the apt-get in- stall package command. The data takes its time crossing the wire, at speeds of just 140 Kbps – a speed hardly likely to make DSL break a sweat. It is difficult to

Table 1: Freespire Beta 2 Component Version Kernel 2.6.16.7 Glibc 2.4 GCC 4.1.1 X.org 7.1 KDE 3.5.3 OpenOffice 2.0.3

Figure 2: Logging in to Freespire Linux. Firefox 1.5.0.5

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help suspecting that the flashing icon is only there to get people to register with CNR. CNR also gives users the ability to in- stall additional software. A click will put the Adobe Reader on your disk, for ex- ample (Figure 3). However, CNR still ap- pears slightly disorganized; the program offers to install an older version of Firefox, although this program is already installed on your disk as the Web Browser. And, again, the download speed for software from CNR is anything but convincing. Conclusions Freespire Beta 2 left us with mixed impressions. The system is fairly usable, and current versions of most major pro- grams are provided. The installation is Figure 3: CNR Warehouse gives users the ability to install additional software by pointing and simple and unlikely to faze even new- clicking; special features are available for an extra charge. comers, and the Freespire desktop is intuitive. understand why Freespire doesn’t use Nvidia or ATI hardware have to miss We were left with the question of what mirrors. out. In fact, you can run apt-get at the Linspire is actually trying to achieve Packages downloaded by apt-get are console to download fglrx-installer, and with Freespire. After all, you can recre- not straight from the Debian reposito- los-kernel-extra (for ATI), or nvidia- ate the full Linspire feature set with ries, but have been specially modified driver-source, nvidia-driver-utils, and Freespire, and the look of the two sys- for Freespire. The distribution has a los-kernel-extra (for Nvidia). After doing tems is confusingly similar; Freespire good selection of packages; besides a so, it is quite simple to modify the X has not even ditched most of the propri- smattering of popular Linux favorites, configuration to use the new drivers, etary programs included with Linspire. these include Gnome and as alter- thus bringing accelerated graphics to In contrast to Debian and , native desktops. This would theoretically the X server. Follow the same approach Freespire gets on the user’s nerves with give users the ability to replace the de- to install drivers for various WLAN and its permanent ads for CNR. Other than fault KDE desktop with their preferred modem cards. With some effort, you can the icon for the CNR site and the default desktop. The ability to install software finally add support for hardware com- presence of the commercial drivers and via apt-get definitely makes Freespire ponents that Linspire supports out-of- codecs, our lab failed to discover a single more flexible than its commercial Lin- the-box. detail to disambiguate Freespire from spire counterpart. other Debian derivatives. It is possible to CNR Warehouse install these proprietary video codecs on Talking of Drivers Right after you log in for the first time, Debian or Ubuntu, and the same can be The commercial Linspire distribution you will probably notice the icon with a said of drivers for graphics adapters and will automatically install proprietary moving blue arrow in the KDE kicker. modems. drivers on PCs with Nvidia or ATI graph- This is the icon for the CNR Warehouse Overall, Freespire lacks a unique sell- ics adapters, and it will set up 3D accel- update module, which is telling you that ing point: if you have done without Lin- eration at the same time. Freespire does CNR has new software for you. spire thus far, there is no genuine reason not follow suit here: instead, it uses the Clicking the icon does not launch the for you to test Freespire. ■ Xorg drivers, nv and ati. Update Wizard as you might expect; in- This does not mean that users with stead, users are taken to the normal CNR INFO Warehouse front-end and prompted to [1] Linspire: http:// www. linspire. com Freespire RC1 log in. In fact, you need to register with [2] Freespire project: Linspire published Release Candidate 1 CNR (for free) before you can download http:// www. freespire. org of Freespire shortly before this issue any updates. went to press. The release does not add After registering and logging on, you [3] Freespire download: any major changes compared with the are in for another surprise: in our lab, http:// wiki. freespire. org/ index. php/ Beta 2 we looked at in this article, how- My Products below Available Updates Download_Freespire ever, it does remove a number of bugs didn’t contain a single update – and [4] Lsongs: http:// lsongs. com and improve stability, especially with re- the icon with the blue arrow disap- [5] Lphoto: http:// lphoto. com spect to CNR. peared when we got back. You can’t

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