Freespire Beta Is out

[rattlerviper]

Downloading the freespire beta right now via Bittorrent just to see what it is about. They are trying to "keep it to themselves" over there, but seeing how I am a part of the Ubuntu community here is the link.
http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Download_Freespire

It'll be intresting to see what they've come up with.

[rattlerviper]

Kudos to Freespire. Ran live cd and everything worked(just like Ubuntu ;) ) and booted up to a very nice looking (but cluttered) desktop. Beta is definantly worth the download if you have a high speed internet connection. On the other hand freespire has no synaptic package manager (at least not that I could find) so if you want easy software installs of the "free" software you will have to pay 20 bucks for CNR which doesn't seem to have as much software available as the Ubuntu repositories or the Debian repositories. I think this would be a great distrobution for those who are afraid of linux and want to ease in, that being said I don't think it's quite my flavor of Linux (that would be Ubuntu). Maybe with some changes (do I hear synaptic package manager???) I could be entertained enough by Freespire to install it dual boot with Ubuntu to have something "to play around with".:-k

[aysiu]

According to the Freespire website it:
# Provides free access to the entire Freespire open source application pool using apt-get.
# Offers optional use of the Linspire CNR (click and run) Service. The CNR Client is open source.

[rattlerviper]

Paste the commands in the Konsole(terminal). Click on the little black square in the bottom left hand corner to open it:) Pretty smooth looking isn't it.

[Adamant1988]

I'm excited, I want to see how it runs and all. I liked linspire when I used it (it was the only distro that let me turn off tapping in my synaptics touch pad)but I couldn't pay for CNR... granted I still would commercial apps and all your other aps all in one place with everything worked out already... sounds good to me.

[rattlerviper]

Yeah, it does seem as though CNR would make it VERY easy. Like I said I ran it Live from cd, and it was suprisigly fast once it was loaded...I would even go so far as to say the live cd ran faster than the live Dapper cd:confused: Maybe it just seems faster??? But it is pretty.

[Adamant1988]

Yeah, and I'm hoping this makes good things happen with Linspire. Linspire and Suse being the two biggie commercial companies... Suse seems to have the upper hand in that realm because it's had an open source thing similiar to freespire to help keep it up to date, so it's more bleeding edge. Also now that Suse and HP have that certification deal going on, I'm sure that SUSE sales will go up. I hope freespire means good things for Linspire though...

And as for CNR, it makes life SOOOO easy... the Aisles feature in itself is a wonderful thing.

You can create your own aisle for your installed software (all of it or section it off) and if you ever get a new computer you can install ALL of that software again with one click.

There might not be as many aps there unless you choose to pay $5 a month for the gold account (the regular account doesn't see as much) but I'm sure there's enough for the average user, like LEGAL DVD playback.

[rattlerviper]

Hmmm, I always thought the big commercial Linux company was Redhat? The next edition of Suse will be known as OpenSuse. Hadn't realized Linspire was a big competitor yet. I guess we learn something everyday, that's what makes Linux so great.

[Adamant1988]

it's not a 'big' competitor... I was referring to desktop commercial linux... sorry for the lack of clarification... I forgot to mention Xandros also, but I don't know where that lies in the desktop linux scheme of things...

[rattlerviper]

Xandros, tried the free one. 3.0 I think. I don't know where they stand either. I guess after I tried them I just wasn't all that intrested in Xandros anymore.

[K.Mandla]

I gave Freespire a whirl. Installation was more or less painless, and the only thing that went undetected was the onboard sound.

Still, there's something about distros that use KDE to look like Windows. I had the same problem with Xandros. I understand that it helps people migrate from Windows to Linux, but I don't like KDE anyway, and now I'm at a point where a default environment that looks like Windows is a bit of a turnoff.

So the verdict is ... worked well, installed well, but didn't really grab me. Back to Xubuntu! :D

[Lord Illidan]

Suse is not a company, Novell is. I am tempted to see this Freespire, but seeing as it is the same as Debian based distros, with optional CNR, I opt out...what is the difference?

[deanlinkous]

looks like freespire succesfully released....err...uuu...linspire?
j/k

[cleniri]

Just installed Freespire on my harddisk. I must say, it is a very slick looking OS with "out of the box" multi media support (including DVD playback, flash, java, mp3, the lot). Installation worked without a problem. In my opinion this will be the nr.1 distro for beginners, because of CNR and the multi media support. It's not a fast as Ubuntu and it doesn't have the eye candy of Ubuntu, but for first time Linux users its perfect.