OT Freespire is worth a look

If you have a spare drive sitting around and like to fiddle with Linux, 
it's worth a look at Freespire 2.0. This is an alpha release, in the 
nightly build stage, but it will amaze you with the polish of the look 
and feel. I just installed last night's build, and it comes with such 
goodies as the latest version of Firefox 2.0.0.3 and the brand new 
Thunderbird 2.0.0.0, as well as the newest updates to OpenOffice. When 
they get this done (June is projected), this will be getting rave reviews.


http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Freespire_2_Nightly_Builds

Chris:

I'm tempted....  Their 'partnering' with Ubuntu may give a truly good 
newbie distro.

At the moment, I'm playing with Kubuntu 6.06.  I've been happy with 
Xandros over the last 5 years, but they seem to be concentrating more on 
their business products of late, and the home user like myself is kind 
of being ignored.  X4 has had its share of problems as well, and I'm 
still working with tech support now, trying to unsort the mess that SP1 
caused on my daughter's laptop.

Frank.

Frank B wrote:
> 
> Chris:
> 
> I'm tempted....  Their 'partnering' with Ubuntu may give a truly good 
> newbie distro.
> 
> At the moment, I'm playing with Kubuntu 6.06.  I've been happy with 
> Xandros over the last 5 years, but they seem to be concentrating more on 
> their business products of late, and the home user like myself is kind 
> of being ignored.  X4 has had its share of problems as well, and I'm 
> still working with tech support now, trying to unsort the mess that SP1 
> caused on my daughter's laptop.
> 
> Frank.
> 
The May issue of Linux Pro (the US/Canadian version of the British Linux 
Magazine) features a Xandros 4 DVD.  I don't know yet if this is the 30 
day limited free trial version you can download from Xandros, or if it 
includes the SP1.

I bought last month's Linux Pro to get the Knoppix 5.1.1 DVD.  I'm 
building a new system and intend to use Knoppix to test it for hardware 
compatibility.

-- 
Leon A. Goldstein

Powered by Libranet 2.8.1 Debian Linux
System G2

Leon:

 >I don't know yet if this is the 30 day limited free trial version you 
can download from Xandros, or if it includes the SP1.<

Most likely it is the 30 day version.  That one works very well.  It is 
SP1 and the 2.6.18 kernel that seems to have broken things.  There is no 
sound on my daughter's laptop since I did the upgrade (it worked just 
fine before).  The sound card is correctly detected, and the correct 
alsa drivers are loaded, but alsamixer does not see the device.

Xandros really dropped the ball on X4.

Frank.

Credit is given to Ubuntu (complete with the Ubuntu red-yellow-orange 
logo) during the opening load splash screen. But Freespire goes past 
Ubuntu (or rather Kubuntu as it's KDE based) in visual refinement. It 
just looks smart and cool. Some of the menus are better arranged and 
some better fonts are installed by default. One big advantage Freespire 
has is that it includes proprietary software when it is the only way to 
improve an open source shortcoming.

For sure this alpha release is not ready for anything serious. Some 
functionality has been suspended to aid testing. I certainly would not 
even install it dual boot with an important partition. As I suggested, 
install it on a spare drive that you don't mind wiping.

Kubuntu 7.04 is faster (and unfortunately buggier) than 6.06. Freespire 
is based on 7.04, and they are working to help Ubuntu squash the 
remaining known bugs.

Frank B wrote:
> 
> Chris:
> 
> I'm tempted....  Their 'partnering' with Ubuntu may give a truly good 
> newbie distro.
> 
> At the moment, I'm playing with Kubuntu 6.06.  I've been happy with 
> Xandros over the last 5 years, but they seem to be concentrating more on 
> their business products of late, and the home user like myself is kind 
> of being ignored.  X4 has had its share of problems as well, and I'm 
> still working with tech support now, trying to unsort the mess that SP1 
> caused on my daughter's laptop.
> 
> Frank.
>