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?

 

[riddlermarc]

How can they do this in a free distro?

A distro doesn't have to be fully open source, the whole open source ethos means you can't use GPL code and then charge for it. However, it is perfectly fine for you to go write you own proprietary code from scratch and distribute a set of drivers without releasing the source for it.. as long as you haven't used anyone else's code you are fine.

As stated in the freespire faq (http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php...2C_is_Freespire_open_source_or_proprietary.3F) you have the choice of the OSS or non-OSS version of the 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.

 

[afraser2k]

How can they get away with putting all that propriety codecs in without charging due to the license fees, as that was my understanding for most of the free distros not including them?

What's the loading time like on Freespire as I heard Linspire can take a while due to the amount of software it loads on boot?

 

[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.

 

[900I]

They have already licenced the proprietry stuff for Linspire, which is the commercial side of the business. They decided to include it in Freespire for free. Its upto you whether you want it or not.