Linspire's CNR Goes Multi-Distro

S3Indiana writes with news that Linspire is opening its Click 'N Run installation software to other Linux distributions. After 5 years of development on CNR, the new site cnr.com will be a single source repository for Linux users. Distributions to be supported initially during 2007 are (alphabetically): Debian, Fedora, Freespire, Linspire, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu; other distributions will follow. See the FAQ and the screenshots for more details.

Comments

Re:Repositories?

[rovingeyes]

Buy software. Look at the screenshots.

Re:Repositories?

[suckmysav]

Linked article? I thought this was slashdot? Who reads articles here?

Besides, if I read the article I would have no chance of attaining that most vaunted /. status symbol, the fristy posty.

Unfortunately I did fail at that, oh well.

Proprietary multimedia codecs

[rumith]

Here's what ESR has to say about it (http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/wo rld-domination-201.html):

Can Linspire save us? In late July 2006, one of us (Raymond) went public on a panel at at OSCON 2006 with the argument of the previous section. Just minutes later, he was contacted by Kevin Carmony, the CEO of Linux distributor Linspire. Mr. Carmony expressed stong support for our conclusions and a direct interest in addressing the problem. Linspire, as it turns out, is in a unique position. They are the only company with the legal right to ship Linux ports of Windows Media Format codecs, including QuickTime capability. They extracted this concession as part of the settlement of their successful trademark lawsuit against Microsoft. In August 2006, as a result of having shown a draft of this paper to Kevin Carmony, we were directly involved in the planning for a Linspire product with all the characteristics we have been describing. Linspire wants to be "Streaming Penguin" in the hopeful scenario we described above. They even adopted our proposed name for the product: the Codex. As a result, Eric Raymond joined the Freespire Advisery Board. Freespire is the community development project associated with the Linspire system; its relationship with Linspire is analogous to that between the Fedora project and Red Hat. Linspire may in fact be able to solve our multimedia problem. They deserve the community's support and encouragement for trying. That alone would be a huge step forward. And according to the CNR site, they ARE going to provide them.

Re:Enough CNR like things...

[AlXtreme]

Klik is more-or-less what you're asking for. I also suspect that it is one of the reasons why CNR is going multi-distro...

Re:Repositories?

[darkwind_2427]

You can get Linspire DVD Player which will *legally* allow you to watch encoded DVDs in linux.

Re:Why this is important:

[vga_init]

Actually, I've been reading up on news from the Fedora community, and a company called Fluendo is providing their distribution with properly licensed codecs and software. I looked at the prices on their site... kind of expensive for my taste, but at least it's out there.

Re:Linux is a failure

[TyreeJackson]

From the FAQ:

Is the CNR.com service free? Yes. There is no charge to use the basic CNR.com service to find and install free open source software.

dependencies and CNR

[falconwolf]

Does it solve any of the hard problems well, like conflicting dependencies on libraries, circular dependencies (that is, several packages must be upgraded together or not at all like a transaction), packages from other sources?

Yes, CNR checks for dependencies. If one is missing CNR will install it, and though I don't know how they do it CNR also checks for conflicts in dependencies.

Besides, they seem to easily ignore that most apps are installed with "apt-get install [name]" or similar one-click in a graphical package manager.

They even have an app that converts apt-get, Debwrap.

I understand that they're out to make money but they're making a mountain out of a molehill.

I think you're wrong. Linspire's purpose is to bring Linux to the masses, and CNR makes it a lot easier for new users of Linux to install software, basically you go through the warehouse looking for software you want to install and once you've made your selection you click one botton to install your choices. There's no worrying about dependencies, which hardly anyone knows about to begin with, and it's just another click to uninstall software. That's what the mass market wants.

Basicly what you're paying for is the hold-my-hand frontend and the privilidge of paying for commercial apps.

You don't have to pay to use CNR. The basic level is free and it allows you to install many FOSS packages. Now there is the paid service CNR Gold which offers discounts on commercial software like Crossover Linux, Win4Lin, and Cedega.

Their other promise requires debian to give up apt-get, red hat to give rpms and so on - when hell drops below absolute zero.

CNR has a utility that converts apt-get to the CNR install type, Debwrap. They also have several packages for rpms.

Falcon