[Lancaster] Freespire impressions

[Ken Walton]

FreeSpire

I've been running Ubuntu for nearly a year now. Mostly I like it. But
it did take a while to set up multimedia. And some things I've still
not got sorted out. If I've been playing music in Rhythmbox, I have to
reboot before I get any sound for YouTube in my browser. I have to do
"killall esd" before I can record in Audacity.

And then there was last week's Big Mistake, when they managed to send
out an "update" of xorg which crashed the everybody's system. I had to
borrow a friend's computer to visit the Ubuntu website and find out
how to fix it. I lost an afternoon when I should have been working for
that one, and it affected most Ubuntu users, not just me.

But mostly, Ubuntu does what it's supposed to. It takes a little while
to set up all the media functions, like MP3s and playing DVDs, since
they don't come with the CD-ROM. Wifi support is much improved in
recent months. It's getting better, but it's not quite there yet.

So on to FreeSpire. It's a branch off the commercial Linspire, which
you have to pay money for. It's based on Debian. I had a bit of a go
with it when version 1.0 first came out. But I was put off by CNR -
"Click N Run" - which expected me to pay $20 a year to download
software which was available for free with Synaptic Package Manager in
Ubuntu. But it (somewhat controversially for the hardcore Linux
users!) mixes open source software with closed source and commercial
drivers. The idea is that you should be able to install FreeSpire, and
it will work, without further drivers. Except DVD – there's no legal
way of watching commercial DVDs without paying for the priviledge.

Before I go further, I have a confession. My desktop computer is
"slow". It's a Pentium III with an 800 Mhz chip and 512Mb RAM. It's
fine for what I want to do – word processing, web browsing, watching
DVDs, playing music. I'm not into games, or heavy duty graphics, so I
don't need anything better. I haven't noticed any speed problems with
Ubuntu, which runs significantly faster than Windows XP, and crashes
less.

Now, onto FreeSpire. Why am I going back there? you ask. Well, the CNR
service, which used to cost $20, is now free, unless you go for the
Gold service, which gives discounts on commercial software. You have
to register, but then you can download Linux software, complete with
screenshots, reviews, etc. Maybe a bit shiny for the old-school Linux
user, but attractive to anyone thinking of moving from Windows. And
stung by last week's Big Mistake in Ubuntu, I thought I'd give it
another go.

Now, it must be said, installation is slick. Disk partitioning uses an
easy graphical system. (Actually, Ubuntu uses the same graphical
system, but it doesn't tell you it's there. Unless you stumble across
it in the menu of the Live CD, you've no way of knowing it exists!)
Once you've done that (if you need to), everything's very quick, and
before you know where you are, you're booting into FreeSpire.

Now, about that booting. It's slooooow. Like, twice as long as Ubuntu.
You can boil a kettle and make a cup of coffee while it's booting. And
that's not just the first boot, that's every time.

The first time you boot, it asks you some questions to set up the
system. It all seems very easy. Being on my landlady's wifi network, I
went to set that up. And I was delighted! Due to the way the house
network is set up I have to use WEP key 2. That's not an option in the
graphical interface in Ubuntu, you have to edit the wifi setup file
directly, which was a major scary thing when I'd just moved from
Windows. But there it was in FreeSpire, easy!

Except... every time I set it to WEP key 2 and pressed the Accept
button, it went back to WEP key 1. Didn't seem to matter what I did,
it would not keep "2" in it's pretty little head.

Until I rebooted, at which point everything started working fine. It
was then that I remembered one little point – ndiswrapper, which uses
Windows drivers for wifi cards, needs a reboot before it works. Except
that there's been a Linux driver for my wifi card for at least 4
months, so someone's being a bit lazy somewhere.

But now it was working, and I could start using it. The first thing to
notice is that the interface is blue and shiny (as opposed to Ubuntu's
orange and shiny), and that it uses KDE rather than Gnome. It has to
be said, there are a lot more config options for the desktop in KDE. I
like that, personally.

I fiddled about a bit. I downloaded some software from the CNR service
– it did seem to work very well. I cheated and installed the "illegal"
DVD decocer libdvdcss from an "unofficial" repository, following
instructions on the FreeSpire forum.  I installed Xine, since the
bundled media player won't do DVD menus. (I could pay $40 for the
official Linspire DVD player and decoder, but why?)

Then I loaded OpenOffice. It took forever. Where's the Quickstarter,
which speeds things up in Windows and Ubuntu? As far as I can tell,
not available. And we come to spelling checks. And there's no UK
dictionary. In fact, there's no UK dictionary in the OS at all. You
have to download it from the CNR. But that still doesn't give you a UK
spelling checker in OpenOffice.

So, it comes down to this. They've provided all the commercial and
closed source drivers for media things such as MP3s, Windows Media
files, RealPlayer, etc. But they haven't provided a spell-checker for
the word processor in the language you chose when installing. This
seems to me to be a bit wrong somewhere. As of now, I've not got the
problem solved. I could probably do it via the OpenOffice website, but
I entertain the fond hope that it should be solvable within the OS
itself. I've asked on the forum and await an answer.

I also await an answer about why, whenever I boot the system, Firefox
loads. This doesn't seem right to me!

And speed. We've already mentioned the boot time. And how long it
takes to load OpenOffice. But I've also noticed that the inbuilt music
player, Lsongs, while very pretty and all, can't cope with playing a
CD while I'm scrolling a page in Firefox! I mean, come on. I know my
computer's "only" 800 Mhz, but we're not talking the latest computer
game here. We're talking playing a tune and moving a page at the same
time.

Also, YouTube videos play in 5 second bursts, with little pauses in
between. This is not a fast OS, folks.

On the whole, I would have to say that this is another version of
Linux that aims to lure in the Windows user and falls at the first
hurdle. Probably, on a more modern machine, it runs fast enough. But
if something as basic as the spelling checker in the word processor
doesn't work without jumping though hoops, you're not going to make
any friends.

Me, I'm back to Ubuntu again. Hoping they learn from their Big Mistake.

(PS – I just discovered that OpenOffice is set to save files as MS
Word by default. Grrr.)

-- 
Ken Walton