Freespire

[AJUK]

http://www.freespire.org/

Has anyone tried this distro, I am downloading it at the moment. Linspire was very dumbed down but good for noobs but wasn't free. However, it seems Freespire is free but more importantly does include proprietry drivers for video cards, mp3s, wmv and real etc.. How can they do this in a free distro?

 

[AJUK]

I shall be having the caffeinated version then with all codecs and drivers, makes life a little easier. It seems to be getting decent reviews so is worth a bash (if you pardon the pun)

 

[AJUK]

I have installed it tonight and so far it is very impressive indeed. I have a little IBM Thinkpad R50e that I use for testing and it found all the hardware straight away and was up and running in less than 10 minutes.

Getting it to use my secure wireless network was a little difficult but only took a few minutes of configuration. I think that is due to a couple of unsecured wireless networks within a couple of houses of me.

More importantly, multimedia and driver support is very good and I have yet to find a single thing that hasn't worked out of the box, including flash and embedded web page video.

On the downside, the standard KDE theme is a bit Fischer Price-like but that is easily changed. So far so good and I actually think this distro has the edge on the mighty Ubuntu, purely for the hardware support. eek: oh, the heresy!) I give it 9/10.

 

[AJUK]

Boot time is a little slow, maybe a couple of minutes but my lappy is not the worlds fastest. Overall performance is slightly slower than Ubuntu on the same machine but not to the point that it is noticable.