[Lancaster] Freespire impressions

[John Scott]

Hi Ken

Before you install Ubuntu again, give Mepis a try. I was pleasantly 
surprised at how user friendly and quick it is *Boot and run. Im running 
a P3 850 with 128MB Ram and it runs like a dream. Device support is 
great, the forum is active and the people very helpful and Im not moving 
away from it in the foreseeable future.

The single disk download is a live cd, with a Install Me link on the 
desktop. Even the Live CD worked quite quickly on my machine. This is 
the only small footprint Linux other than DSL that I have tried and It 
outweighs all other distro's I tried. I have also attempted Ubuntu 6.06 
and Suse 10.1 and was disappointed with performace in both instances.

Regards

John



Ken Walton wrote:
> 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.)
>