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."
How helpful will a voice over be when Linux doesn't install your soundcard drivers properly?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
"The company, which was formerly known as Lindows, has gotted a lot of press for including their OS with pre-bundled computers."
After "gotted", I think that as I continue to read the review, I'm going to be looking for these little goodies more than actually taking in the content.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
When will people understand that Linux is for real men who honed their skillz by walking uphill both ways to the mainframe building in order to run their punch card programs? ::sigh::
Though I doubt that that a review of Linspire is going to get slashdotted late on a Friday afternoon.
Because we geeks are busy getting ready for one of those zillion parties we alway get invited to?
Linspire does not include GCC, and it is only available with a CNR subscription, unless you go back to using apt-get, which Linspire says may screw up your system. No gcc? can't install many apps..... Why should I pay for GPL'd software?
What's wrong with the review? I don't know. I couldn't bring myself to read through it. But from looking at the presentation and skimming the article, it sucks. Why?
"Awful review" was a great review of the Linspire review. The author plainly stated his opinion and then backed it up with a tightly prepared bullet-point synopsis of serveral points. I especially enjoyed the comments regarding the length of the article and the photographed screenshots. I couldn't agree more.
The only bad thing I could say about this review (of the review) was that it was anti-climatic. After an intense, bullet-driven analysis, the author leaves us with no conclusion, instead leaving us to ponder over the difficulty of disk partitioning rather than tying together the point he was trying to make.
4(/5)
I am very experienced with Linux and computers in general and I still can't get Windows Media video to work properly on this, and the only DVD playback I have is through MPlayer and I still can't get a GUI working on MPlayer.
What I had to go through to get this far: Download and compile MPlayer. Ok, that's no problem and it plays DVDs. Download and install the Windows codecs pack. Now MPlayer (still with no GUI) can play WMV. That's great. Xine (KDE's preferred video player) can't detect these Windows codecs, even though I put them in /usr/lib/win32, which is where they're supposed to be. So no integrated desktop playback; if I want to play a clip, I download it, save it, open up a console window, and point MPlayer at it. I tried to get MPlayer to compile with --gui-enabled so at least I could have a front-end for it. No luck; it can't find gtk2+ development libraries. I tried to install them and couldn't find them anywhere that MPlayer could find them. I also tried to install a dvddecss lib where Xine could find it so Xine could play encrypted (standard) movie DVDs. Again, nothing I could do worked.
Mind you, this is all with Suse 9.3, the latest and greatest. All of this stuff is supposed to be worked out by now. I can get it to just barely work, with no desktop integration and no GUI, and I'm an experienced and knowledgable user. What are other people supposed to do, just use their imagination?
Oh and the situation is even worse with Flash. In my previous Suse installations, Flash worked fine in Konqueror. Now with Suse 9.3, I get a crash when Konqueror tries to render a page with Flash, so I have to use Moz or Firefox to view it, and guess what, those have problems working with KDE's sound system so I might not get sound with my Flash.
I realize that there are legal problems with codecs and DVDs and whatever. Before Linux is ever going to get consumer-level acceptance, these problems need to be solved, or worked around. A solution would be to get a commercially-developed Linux media player that a) integrates with the desktop and b) works and c) package that with the distro. A work-around would be to make up a media player installer that you just click on, it downloads whatever it needs from non-US sites, and it does all the stuff, and it WORKS.
I'm happy to pay for Linux distros (I think I paid almost $100 for Suse 9.3 pro). If they have to tack on another $10 or $20 to include a solid, well-integrated working media player, they need to do it.
All the other apps are more than good enough right now. OOo is a good consumer-level (and biz level) replacement for MS Office. Firefox is better than IE. All that is lacking is multimedia playback.
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mobile search - coming soon
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 sorry, you said "skillz". Clearly, a violation of section 4.
You can turn in your punchcards on the way out.