Slashdot Mirror
Review of Consumer-Friendly Linux Distro
miketronics writes "Linspire Five-O is a full-featured Linux operating system which is intended for desktop use, mainly as an alternative to Windows XP. XYZComputing has a review of the latest version. The company, which was formerly known as Lindows, has gotten a lot of press for including their OS with pre-bundled computers." From the article: "Once the installation is over with Five-O is ready to go. The first time the OS is used Linspire's tutorial program will activate. This is one of most accessible tutorials on any Linux distro and it should be a great help to new users. Though it does not go into extreme depth, it does give the user enough understanding of the OS to get started. Even if you are a Linux pro it will probably be helpful to check out the CNR section, as this system is unique to Linspire. The fact that the developers have the tutorial voice-narrated shows Linspire's commitment to user support -- this feature makes the otherwise boring tutorial watchable."
here . Though I doubt that that a review of Linspire is going to get slashdotted late on a Friday afternoon.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Guess it depends on definitions. Fedora isn't a retail desktop Linux distribution, is it? Fedora's counterpart, is an enterprise solution, and thus doesn't fit the "desktop" modifier.
In fact, offhand, the only other retail, desktop Linux distribution I can think of is SuSE, which is downloadable for free, but costs money if you want it on CDs. The full retail package of SuSE is around $90, but again, you're getting more than just a download.
I have seen Debian CDs for sale in retail stores, and they were less than $50 I believe, however I haven't seen this in awhile.
Truthfully, I'd like to know about all these other retail desktop LInux distributions....
Distrowatch has a page discussing the "freeness" (I know, not a word) of various linux distros:
http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=freedom/
Linspire is listed under "4".
Totem with gstreamer seems to handle most WMV files fine. Multimedia support is inconsistent in the open source community, but that doesn't mean that it's lacking. You need to know where to look.
Incidentally, I use Debian, which handled all sorts of multimedia playback right out of the box, so to speak. So in some cases, you don't even have to look at all.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
Why should you pay for GPL software? Simple. Because you don't want to compile it yourself. (No, I don't mean you personally, of course.) It's the same reason as I'd pay for plumbing. I don't want to be elbow-deep in sewage, and I wouldn't have a clue what to do anyway.
The software is free, but that doesn't prevent others from making a profit off services. The GPL specifically allows it. And the point of the CNR service is that it supplies working software to users who either can't or won't compile their own. Is that wrong?
By the way, Windows doesn't come with a compiler. OS X does, but you have to install the development tools specifically. Ubuntu doesn't have the development toolchain in the basic installation. It's not as unusual as you seem to think, at least for a regular-person-targeted OS.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
I'm running Slackware 10.1, but 10.0 also worked (didn't try to get Xine working with any earlier versions).
/usr/lib/win32
/usr/lib/win32, and it works with the default Xine package.
So:
1) Install Slackware
2) Grab the codecs off of the MPlayer webpage
3) Put them in
4) Play WMV files (and others)
5) ???
6) Profit!
Again, Xine works great under Slackware. All you have to do is grab the codecs off of the MPlayer site and drop them into
Pat's the man. He'd never purposely cripple a package. $25 for the subscription, $40 to just order the CDs as a oneshot. (And yes, I'm a complete Slackware fanboy.)
Jeff
...but Linspire sucks because you have to run as r00t.
(yeah, yeah, but I felt someone had to say it)
For the zen you need libnjb and gnomad. Gnomad works for me, sorta buggy though.
;), and loads of different types of library being hard coded into the apps isn't a good thing. Freedesktop media access would be good.
Linux needs a decent unified media device access library. Kio, gnome-vfs or the filesystem are "good enough" but they're not fantastic
My biggest problem are Sony media devices (netmd, network walkman).. I think only a very small few of them work.
I agree with your assessment. Multimedia on Linux is behind other platforms. Real, Linspire, Red Hat, Novell and others aggressively working to change this landscape. Specifically, we are now working on the Helix Player 2.0 https://player.helixcommunity.org/ which provides for support of Windows Media, MP3, RealVideo, RealAudio, Flash, etc as well as other great features like Ad-free radio and Automatic Bandwidth Detection.
I urge all interested to join us by joining the project mailing lists and letting us know if you encounter and bugs in the product.
Kevin Foreman,
GM, Helix
Kevin Foreman
I'm running Mandrake 10.2 on a PII 266. It's a little slow to boot, and doesn't compile stuff all that fast, but otherwise it's perfectly good for browsing the web, editing photos from my digicam, typing up documents, and most other day-to-day tasks. I don't understand why they would say 800 MHz is the minimum.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
doesn't totem just use xine-lib?
I'm lucky I didn't have to worry about multimedia support
I just emerged mplayer and win32codecs
and on my ubuntu box I just followed ubuntuguide.org's instructions.
No problems at all.
I can't say I've shared your experience, the only dodgy part was getting DVDs to play while I was still using Mandrake, the (well known) trick is to install libdvdread and decss, after that it works perfectly. I'm now using Gentoo, and multimedia is absolutely zero effort to get working. Portage has pulled in all of the codecs (win32 + others) for me automagically and I have yet to find a video I can't play, the same goes for DVDs.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Ubuntu has one CD and unlike with MS Windows you are mostly done after that one CD.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.