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Linspire Announces Freespire Distribution
LinuxScribe writes "Is the world ready for another community Linux distro a là Fedora and openSUSE? We're about to find out, as Linspire used the Desktop Linux Summit to announce a community-driven version of Linspire, to be called Freespire. But here's the twist, Freespire will come in two flavors: a completely open source version and a version that includes all of the fully-licensed proprietary apps, drivers, and codecs in Linspire."
I'm curious if this will end up with a more Windows-replacement centric Linux system or just one that departs from the Free Software Foundation's picture of what the GPL should embrace.
Second, I always felt that a good Web browser at its core should just be a simple file viewer but it has departed pretty far from that - it would be nice to have my Linux partition able to use/open/view as many or nearly as many types of files that my Windows machine can.
And before anyone says anything about CNR (click and run), I will point you to klik - free open and wonderful, and not tied to any distro.
Enough said.
More distributions is better. I think that if every distro does one thing right, with a thousand distros, we're in great shape. Linus's Law of "With enough eyes, every bug is shallow" also works on features. If one distro does a feature really well, then everyone else can adopt it. That's the beauty of the GPL, LGPL, and BSD licenses, anyone else in OSS can copy it or re-do it. Therefore, adding another distro or two is good.
Confusion is not really an issue, because anyone looking at Linux will be getting a friend who has a favorite distro, or will have a computer vendor with only one or two choices, which will likely be a choice between Freespire and Linspire or Fedora and Red Hat
... but I'm actually fairly interested in this. Personally, I've wondered when I'd be able to use a both free and legal DVD player in the US.
Of course, the purpose is to get us talking about them again, since much of the buzz lately has been about Ubuntu and Fedora. And with simple scripts available to add proprietary codecs to Ubuntu, there are few to no reasons to pay for Linspire, and pay again for access to their library of OSS apps.
Freespire will come in two flavors: a completely open source version and a version that includes all of the fully-licensed proprietary apps, drivers, and codecs in Linspire
Well, maybe, but they're hardly the first to do that: Mandriva (Mandrake) has been doing it for a long time, with the commercial version including extra drivers as well as applications. Probably others have too.
What makes a community effort stand or fall is how well the outside people are integrated, and how much voice they have.
One reason I the distribution I do is that it attracts both seasoned programmers and newcomers, and there's a good chance I can show my laptop to people and say, here, this is what it's like, you can use the same as me. It's not clear that I'll be doing that with Linspire, nor that a community-based version that's not as good will in fact help me. Who will it help?
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
Freespire: A Linux Distro For When You Couldn't Care Less About Freedom (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060424 164142296)
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Stefano Spinucci
How can you not mod this one as completely hilarious!!! Plan 9 http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/&e=9797/ doesn't have a functional web browser. "The best way to get a fully supported web browser under plan9 is to use the vnc client to connect to a linux or Windows box. This performs very well if used over a fast network connection." The bunny logo is amazingly cute.
I so wish this had gone to trial, especially since the appeals court ruled that the jury would get to decide if "windows" was a generic term back when Microsoft first started using it. Killing the Windows trademark would be lots of fun.
:-)
Not that I'd want to see "Macrohard Windows", "Slack Windows", "Brown Dog Windows", "iWindows", "eWindows", "Turbo Windows", "IBM Windows", "Debian GNU/Windows", "Windows for Playgroups", "WindowsBSD", "ClearWindows", "Sunny Windows"...
Aw, yes I would.
The indications are that they have thought this through quite thoroughly. The initial announcement and the web site are quite well done, I think. Considering it is still four months until the first beta, they have a good FAQ (here) which is worth a read. I intend to at least give it a try when the time comes.
Plan 9 is a research operating system. I like Plan 9's architecture, file system, and many other ideas. Plan 9's goal is to further extend the notion of Unix's "everything is a file" idea. Everything, even the windowing system (rio), is a file. Plan 9 also vastly simplifies systems programming (compared to Unix). Plan 9 is a wonderful research operating system that I would love to tinker with and explore.
However, it isn't a desktop replacement for Windows/OS X users or even for Linux or BSD users. There is no office suites (or even a word processor unless you love text editors and TeX or troff), no browser on the scale of Firefox or Konqueror, no music/video players, nothing that 99% of the world uses with a computer. Besides, I'm pretty sure that users are more comfortable using this desktop, these desktops, or especially this desktop before they use this desktop. For even the most ardent *nix hackers or computer scientists, Plan 9 would be something they played with on the side (kind of like Minix or an operating system that they're working on), and Linux/BSD is their main OS.
I like Plan 9, but it isn't a desktop OS; it's a research OS. However, Plan 9 is a very innovative operating system; I wish that the major OS sellers (I'm talking to you, Apple and Microsoft) would be a bit more cutting-edge in the architecture of their OSes rather than just appearances (even though Apple has done very well since the bought NeXT; they have a hybrid kernel, for one). Plan 9, L4, the MIT exokernel project, and other projects look very interesting, and I would like to see them in use.
> What do you do about the w32codecs?
It is a total bitch. Realplayer helps a little, the Crossover plugin gets us a few others, including Quicktime. Since Fraunhaufer doesn't seem to be chasing decoders I took a chance and deployed a version of xmms with mp3 support enabled.
The problem is most of the interesting (to the kids in the labs anyway) content isn't in html, it is in flash, windows media and such. You either find ways to deal with a fair percentage of it or the calls to install Windows will grow out of control. We do offer patrons NFS mounted homedirectories and they really like that, which helps. I can explain that we could never afford the CALs to offer that sort of thing, plus many remember the horror of the lab we had for a while that the Gates Foundation setup. So locked down they can't even set a cookie, no floppy/cd/hdd access at all, etc. (And they still have the 'GLF model' in the neighboring parishes, one exposure and people stop complaining about a random java glitch/etc in our lab.) While everything might not work perfectly in ours, we have unlocked systems with Crossover Office installed so they can actually get a lot of stuff working. They idea that they can download and run programs is shocking to people who move into the area and see it for the first time.
Democrat delenda est
Well, the leaders at Ubuntu have taken a hard-line stance on both the GPL and not doing anything that would get them or any of their users in any sort of legal trouble (including DMCA and patents).
.iso), which can take over an hour for an install even on a fast cable connection.
And this is why Automatix was born. It works well and turns Ubuntu into something truly usable on a day-to-day basis.
I wish that Ubuntu was more pragmatic, and included the "Automatix" stuff on a 2nd optional CD. If you don't want the CD, then don't download it an burn it. But Automatix does essentially the same thing, and the worst problem is that all of the packages have to be downloaded (instad of being included on a single
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."