Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Linspire Makes Click and Run Free

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the headed-in-the-right-direction dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After five years of charging an annual fee for their CNR (click and run) service, Linspire has dropped the annual fee, making the CNR service free. This combined with their previous announcement of open sourcing the CNR client, and the Freespire project, is all very big news. This means Freespire users can now have a free distro, using a free CNR service."

5 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Re:One question by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Informative
    How are they going to make money?


    1. OEM installations
    2. Commission from commercial software sold on CNR
    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  2. More important de free... by Beuno · · Score: 3, Informative
    I think that even more important then the service being free is this:
    (from TFA)
    Linspire will release a new open-source CNR client in December as part of Freespire 1.1, the next release of the company's free Linux distribution. This distribution also includes, at the user's option, proprietary software such as Adobe Acrobat and ATI Graphic drivers.
  3. Community-driven Freespire by intnsred · · Score: 3, Informative

    For those interested in this, the community-driven Freespire project will likely be of interest. From their web site:

    Freespire is a community-driven, Linux-based operating system that combines the best that free, open source software has to offer (community driven, freely distributed, open source code, etc.), but also provides users the choice of including proprietary codecs, drivers and applications as they see fit. With Freespire, the choice is yours as to what software is installed on your computer, with no limitations or restrictions placed on that choice. How you choose to maximize the performance of your computer is entirely up to you.

  4. CNR is great, but their customized apps suck! by ylikone · · Score: 3, Informative

    I had my mother-in-law running on Linspire 5.0, having switched from Windows 98. It was great as it eliminated the support I had to give every time Win98 crashed or something went wonky. I switched her to Linspire because I figured it has the easiest method of installation. You run CNR, browse the apps in the categories, see screenshots and descriptions, click to install, icon gets put on desktop. Excellent! But then the problems started. Many of Linspires default branded apps, suchs as Lphoto, just had too many bugs to be usuable. Even with a fully supported HP deskjet printer, Lphoto refused to print the way the preview windows showed. Thunderbird refused to print emails with anything other than a huge font. Simple programs that should perform simple just didn't work. I run ArchLinux and my software all works the way I expect it to... I don't know what Linpsire did to screw things up. Anyway, she sprung for paying for WinXP and I installed that for her. It seems that Linspire, while having the easiest install system, is not ready for grandma yet.

    --
    Meh.
  5. Re:Here comes the targeted scripts by horati0 · · Score: 2, Informative

    sudo with no password needed for the default user.

    Read some of the comments posted in that thread. Seems like running as root is No Big Deal, almost a badge of honor. These dipshits deserve whatever they get. And they will get it.

    --
    The neutrality of this sig is disputed.