[Malvern] Freespire

[Richard Forster]

Cheryl Phillips wrote:
> Never heard of this one before. Any opinions before I download it?
> Looks quite good and also has advanced wireless stuff in it which
> might help with my cable ban

Ah yes, the free version of Linspire. IIRC famed for its 'run as root' 
philosophy (at least for the early versions) and single letter naming 
difference from that OS by that big company in Redmond (before they had 
to rename to Linspire).

Note that the freely downloadable version doesn't contain any of the 
binary drivers that are specially licensed for the commercial version.
http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Download_Freespire

Lots of pretty screenshots on the website, if you go for that kind of thing.

Might be worth having a nose around the forums to see if your particular 
wireless USB gizmo works.
http://forum.freespire.org/forumdisplay.php?f=28
For example this seems promising
http://forum.freespire.org/showthread.php?t=940



Some more background history, from the distribution pages of Linux 
Weekly News (lwn.net)
http://lwn.net/Distributions/

27.  Linspire
http://www.linspire.com/
LinspireEspanol
Freespire
Linspire (once known as Lindows) was first announced in October 2001 as
LindowsOS. The distribution was renamed Linspire in April 2004 and the
company was renamed the following September. Linspire is a Debian-based
distribution targeted at non-technical Windows users and it comes in a
live CD version as well as a fully installable desktop. Version 4.5 was
released December 16, 2003. Linspire 4.5 supports English, Spanish,
French, Italian, German, and Portuguese. Linspire Five-0 was released
March 16, 2005. Linspire 5.0 V2 (5.1.427) was released April 21, 2006.
Freespire Linux OS 1.0 was released August 7, 2006.



Cheers

Rick