Freespire, anyone. ?

Freespire.

Anyone have any experience of this. ?

Can it be installed as a dual boot with windows. ?

Any experiences of using it and opinions welcomed.

Thanks.

Hi Megalithic,

Sorry to disappoint you but sadly this is no longer supported/updated. It was a fork of Linspire. Sadly the guy that managed to beat M$ in court to the tune of $5-10 Milliion, Michael Roberts of 'Lindows' fame (which led to Microsoft suing and losing). He sold the business to Xandros. Yes you can dual boot with Windows - have done it with XP but could not guarantee in 7. It was probably the nearest to a Windows experience you could get. There are no security updates for it since Xandros bought Linspire. The CEO who forked it was equally bad trying to do deals with M$ on interoperability when it wasn't needed. A very nice distro with CNR (Click'N'Run) that installed software at the click of a button. Early versions of CNR were a bit ropey at times but think they were ironing this out when Xandros stepped in. It was based on Debian. I still have Freespire 1 and 2 floating somewhere in my CD Archive and Linspire Live off a cover CD. It was brilliant at recovering FAT32 corrupted memory sticks where Knoppix 5 failed. I don't think it was up to it in respect of Wireless drivers - always installed on my machine wired to router. If you want Xandros you have to pay $99 dollars for the download and it is not as polished as some of the 'free' ones but you do get 30 days of support and after that an annual subscription for updates - Xandros were the left overs of Corel/Word Perfect fame.

swarfendor43

Aww bugger.

I was asking about Freespire specifically as a while back a friend of mine installed it on a lappy to test the hard drive, it immediately picked up his wireless connection, and as you might know my biggest problem with Linux has been wireless connectivity.

Thanks for the detailed reply, i shall try and cast my net elsewhere in an attempt to move away from windows.

Just to point out an erratum in last posting, Michael Roberts should have read Michael Robertson, and the CEO off doing deals with Microsoft was Kevin Carmony whose only currently bothered about making his web dating service on i-Tunes and ongoing feud with Robertson! Quite bizarre as shortly before Robertson did a deal (breaking the State Law covering Sale of Companies and consulting shareholders - that didn't happen) they were selling PC's with it on at Sears in the states for a very reasonable price. I suspect your friend's laptop had an internal wifi chip that was compatible with Linspire. How are you wanting to connect and what is your setup? (Just as an aside, I think had it survived, Freespire/Linspire would have been the best way for Windows users to migrate to GNU/Linux). My main issue in terms of getting wireless to work has been with dongles but I have resolve this now - apart from the fact the machine I set it up on has died (hard drive failure - Ultimate Edition 2.7 on second drive, Windows XP/7 upgraded on drive that died also had GRUB on the MBR of the first drive so not got round to putting GRUB on second drive to boot into it. Oh Well! (Fleetwood Mac coming to mind in song association!)

swarfendor43

Hi megalithic,

Just remembered something else about Freespire (and possibly applied to Linspire too). There was a security issue in that when you installed it and put your name in, you would then be logged in as 'root'. Having read about this after installing version 1.013 I didn't make the same mistake with 2.0. You create a 'fictitious' person/different user name on installation then add yourself as a user after install.

swarfendor43

One of the reasons I settled on PCLinuxOS was due to the fact of it seeming to pick up more of of the hardware on my laptops than other distributions that I tried.

I'd suggest you just start downloading different distributions & trying them till you find one that picks up your wireless card. It's easier to try distributions that will run on live cd as you don't need to install it to your hard drive to try them.

One of the reasons I settled on PCLinuxOS was due to the fact of it seeming to pick up more of of the hardware on my laptops than other distributions that I tried.

 

I'd suggest you just start downloading different distributions & trying them till you find one that picks up your wireless card. It's easier to try distributions that will run on live cd as you don't need to install it to your hard drive to try them.

Just a note on personal experience of PCLinuxOS 2010 KDE - this seemed to work really well with the Netgear W111 v3 dongle purchased last year when running live. Unlike other distros that come with the en-GB locale, PCLinuxOS doesn't to keep the footprint down. I was impressed and installed on an old laptop with 256 Mb RAM - as soon as I installed the en-GB locale wireless stopped working!

swarfendor43

God Freespire! That's old! One of the first distros I actually installed and used effectively as an alternative to Windows, and the first one where my missus asked "why are we paying Bill Gates then?".

I used to love it, but was well aware of some political issues. Very upset when it went down, but by that point I was learning my way around Linux and distro hopping anyway. A great entry level Linux back in the day, much like Mint or PCLinuxOS is now.

Prior to Freespire I had tinkered with the community version of Lycoris 1.4 ('Amethyst') - a sort of GNU/Linux version of Windows 98 on steroids! (still got the disks knocking around somewhere. The official gamepak looked pretty awesome - particularly the driving game from the graphics - got swallowed up by Mandriva - the distro not the game.

swarfendor43

"Why resurrect an old thread?" I hear you ask! That's because it is back! GNU/Linux distribution Black Lab(rador) has bought the rights to Linspire (and Freespire) following it's demise in 2010 and sell off to the now defunct Xandros. Sadly only 64-bit versions are available. Their pricing seems a bit over the top but includes longer support than other distributions:

http://www.pc-opensystems.com/p/freespireos.html

[i was looking for a different post of mine when I re-discovered this thread]

I do love this forum sometimes.