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First Impressions of Freespire 1.0

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tapping-a-market dept.

Nate writes "Freespire 1.0 was released a few days ago, taking the desktop-oriented Linspire distribution and making it freely available (as in beer) to the world. Linux Format has some first impressions of the release, focusing on its much-trumpeted media playback facilities thanks to codec licensing. Flash, Java, DVD and WMV support out-the-box — could this climb to the top of the desktop distro ladder?"

2 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Why are these things even an issue? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 5, Informative
    On a fresh Gentoo install:
    emerge mplayer kmplayer firefox kde netscape-flash blackdown-jre blackdown-jdk xine-ui vlc
    That should give you everything, free as in beer. It'll boot fast, too, if you tweak a couple of settings -- I know it supports running init scripts in parallel, a nice little feature of having init scripts state their dependencies, instead of a strict order.

    The downside is, of course, that you have to wait probably at least one full day for all of this stuff to compile from scratch.

    But seriously, Gentoo doesn't seem to have nearly the problems I hear of other distros having with licensing. Is there really such a legal difference between distributing ebuilds (which contain download URLs for the codecs) and distributing the codecs themselves in debs? Could debs include download URLs?
    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  2. Re:OK, just how GPL compliant is it??? by PurpleMonkeyKing · · Score: 5, Informative

    From their website, they seem to have a GPL compliant version and a free (as in beer) proprietary version, much like OpenSuse 10.0 was.

    Here's a list of the licensed proprietary compenents. Under nearly every one it says explicitly that you are not granted redistobution rights.

    Basically, I guess if you want to legally redistribute it you'd need get this one. Since it doesn't have the proprietary codecs, though, I think you'd be better off with Ubuntu.