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Freespire Lives, Goes Back To Debian
nerdyH writes "Following Xandros's acquisition of Linspire, some feared for the future of Freespire, the free version of Linspire. However, Xandros today announced a new version of Freespire that will return the popular free Linux distro to its Debian-based roots."
Neither of these are particularly great distros. Xandros signed an evil patent-deal, and neither distro jumps out at me with any real advantages to use them.
Can someone please explain what these guys have to offer?
I'd certainly like to see fewer distros. I sincerely believe we'd see higher quality if people focused their efforts to improving a few major distros rather than forking them every few seconds.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Just how popular is it? I've personally used and seen a lot of people use a lot of distros (over a dozen), but I've never used or seen anyone use Linspire or Freespire.
WHO CARES!
My first troll :) .. but seriously.. meh
Evil distro 1 acquires lame distro 2 and proceeds to make it more like evil distro 3 (which it is based upon itself)
We, Open Blue Enterprises Inc., the makers of Blue Cat Enterprise Linux (recently merged with "Advanced Carrier Grade Enterprise Linux Business Solutions") announce that our next release will be based on Debian Lenny.
Debian will provide a robust base for our leading Linux enterprise distribution and allow us to concentrate on what we know best: wallpapers with cats providing a unique desktop experience.
It was going to the grave, but changed direction. Now they are going to their roots.
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The OEM Linspire PC has at least a minimal presence in big box retail.
It is close on to thirty years since the OEM system install became standard in the home market.
Linspire pioneered the "Click-N'Run" repository of free and non-free software for the user who will never give a damn about the ideology of free and open source.
What Linspire gave them was the comfort level of Download.com. Screen shots. Product reviews - from outside the geek community - reviews that could be etched in acid.
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Chile has a population of 17 million and a per capita income of $14,000 a year. Chile
In 2006 Chile had 1 million broadband users - not bad for a country that didn't have DSL or cable Internet service before the year 2000.
The "e-business" potential of the country looks quite good.A Wired Country
The GPL says nothing about what applications you can include on CD you sell. An expensive linux distro can ship with crossover and Microsoft Office if it wants to.
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I'm honestly not sure why CNR hasn't done better (which is to say, generate any noticeable use). It's free-as-in-beer, supports several major distros in a central location, offers social features such as reviews and ratings, allows grouping of apps into "aisles" for easy one-click installation and sharing, handles commercial software sales as well as free software installation compatibly and rather efficiently, and generally provides a rather nice experience.
Why has it wilted like a Friendster? Because it's not free-as-in-speech? Is Applications -> Add / Remove or Synaptic simply "good enough"? Do enough Linux users really object to their Microsoft deal and abstain on moral grounds?
Of course, I don't use it personally. And I'm not sure why. Would a FOSS version by a more credible member of the community generate more interest and enjoy some success?
Specifically, starting a bunch of unnecessary modules at boot just in case you may have that hardware may be OK for a system that "just works" but some of us prefer to optimize for faster bootup time and the reliability that comes from running fewer unknowns in kernel space.
(I'm not saying that Debian necessarily boots faster, as it will let you add all manner of services if you tell it to install the kitchen sink, but, well, you get the picture...)
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
Lighten up, Francis.
This is actually untrue. The DMCA states it's illegal to make, possess, or import something that circumvents an access control mechanism or a copy control mechanism. It does not tie the prohibition to copying.
There are no distros of any visibility in the US that bundle libdvdcss that haven't been licensed in some way. It is probably that the DVD CCA would take a pragmatic view and not sue at this point, largely because it's easy for an end user to circumvent the ban anyway and because while its damaging to other manufacturers of DVD players that they have to pay CSS license fees when unauthorized distributors of libdvdcss do not, it certainly isn't damaging to Hollywood that people be able to play DVDs on GNU/Linux based computers, and at this stage the law of diminishing returns would apply when trying to push a lawsuit. But I certainly wouldn't gamble a business's livelihood on the DVD CCA's likely liberalism.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If I'm sure I won't ever be needing a specific service and I disable it manually, I'm not exactly worried that it won't get upgraded, I'm probably just trying it temporarily and will soon get by to uninstalling it. But if I were worried about that and I disabled it due to a false dependency, then I would restore things to the way the installer left it, and then upgrade as normal.
There are various ways to do that. The quickest way is probably to keep a separate directory for initscripts you don't want, and move the junk to there. During an upgrade, you can move them all back (maybe keep a list), do the upgrade, and then promptly put them back in their holding area. It's a terrible hack - but it's easy and quick regardless of whether its debian or something else. Another way is to check the scripts into a source code revision system, edit them to comment out the start section and then backtrack the changes during an upgrade. Yet another way is to write a shell script that creates a K link for each S link for each init level and removes the S links, with a mirror script that does the reverse. I may be overlooking an even simpler way of doing this with unionfs, but I don't think of it as anything more than a convenient hack which isn't going to cause any problems I can't fix.
If all of the above sounds like much ado about nothing because it only represents a tiny fraction of system resources, you may understand my motivation a bit better by opening a command terminal in Ubuntu, sudo bash, then lsmod. If the last time you did this was before ACPI was fully implemented, this will open your eyes because that list used to fit on one screen. After ACPI and bluetooth, that list grew by leaps and bounds, and I see drivers loaded in memory for hardware I *know* I don't have... I also won't accept the fact that you can't simply rmmod ipv6 if you know you're not using it. Once you load that module it sinks its teeth into the kernel like some sort of memory leech and won't come out. [Insert some George Carlin-like expletives here]! Unused code sitting in memory is a problem waiting to happen, and the larger it is the bigger the potential security hole.
Each running service is also a potential problem. Don't use the "at" daemon? Nix it. Don't use NFS? Maybe you can do without RPC... Don't use samba? No need for samba daemon either. The dictionary program wants to run a server by default... *rolls eyes*. Some game wants its own sound server to start before anything else. Gone. A desktop system wants to start a sound server each time it utters a sound.... There's all this stuff that wants to be running all of the time that could just have been linked to a library or something. So, excuse me if I sometimes use a hack to route the trash elsewhere...
Now, if we are to keep Linux viable for running on embedded stuff like digital cameras and the like, it's going to have to become more systematic to get rid of this sort of excess. Maybe someday this sort of optimization will get easier. Case in point: Did you know that it's technically possible to boot Linux from flash in as little as .5 seconds? On a 200Mhz arm processor?
If someday my Linux systems boot in a sweet fraction of a second, I figure it will be because debian or something similar will be installed, not Ubuntu, and certainly not some hardware-treadmilled adware-laden commercial product. Ubuntu just doesn't seem headed in that philosophical direction, and if modules are going to be resisting their removal by the superuser then that's not a good omen for the way things could become. I mean, if a software monopoly wants to bloat its OS to the point of nonfunctionality then by all means, but they should keep the brain damage to themselves and not require all Linux users to standardize on the same philosophy just to keep hardware companies happy.
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.