Of note for laptop users, ndiswrapper comes pre-configured. Give the GUI-based networking setup panel your ESSID and WEP key and you're online.
It correctly configured my widescreen (1280x768) display, used the ATI driver, and enabled direct rendering.
The "CNR Warehouse" is still there. The good news is they've lowered the price to a palatable $20/year. The better news is that they've created freespire repos, and apt is configured to use them, so that you could install Synaptic, download software, and completely ignore CNR.
It uses an outdated version of KDE (v3.3.2), but the kernel (v2.6.14) and "lbrowser" (i.e. Firefox) (v1.5.0.4) are fairly up-to-date.
It uses JACK as the sound server in KDE. I know nothing about how it works (that's right, I don't know jack), and it couldn't find/use the laptop's AC97 chipset. Although configuring ALSA was successful, attempts to switch to ALSA from JACK were unsuccessful.
Most of the proprietary browser addons and codecs come preinstalled. However, they also offer an OSS-only edition.
Other than the wallpaper, the UI (fonts, icons, colors) is flat ugly.
My biggest criticism of Linspire was that it seemed too much of an attempt to clone Windows, including charging for it and for free software. By releasing Freespire, they've pretty much taken care of those criticisms.
kb0hae - 19.08.2006, 09:56 Uhr Titel: Freespire
Well, I just tried freespire. It is now gone from the test partition I had installed it to. I found it to be too crippled for me. No root login, and no file manager as superuser. I could use SU in a terminal window though. I also do not like the my computer icon. I would rather see my home folder. All in all, they are trying to make it too much like windows for me.
When I tried to reconfigure the sound to use OSS (jack didn't like the Intel AC97 sound chip) it locked up the box and I had to do a reset. As I had enabled the root account and not rebooted, ALL login passwords were screwed up, and I couldn't log in as a user, or root. If they had included some way to to use the file manager as superuser from my user account, I wouldn't have tried to enable root logins.
After that I decided to wipe freespire from my system instead of reinstall it. Maybe in 6 months or a year I'll try it again, but if I look at a live CD and the concerns above are not addressed frespire will not even make it on to a test partition. Besides, they make it sound like it it will play DVDs , but I found out (after I wiped it) that I needed to install several files. Not that I really want to play DVDs on my computer, I have a DVD player for that. Just wanted to try out the DVD-Rom drive that I got donated to me(it was installed in an old Gateway (PII 448Mhz) computer that was given to me because the machine had a bad video card).
Bottom line for me: freespire needs a lot of work and needs to stop trying to be a windows clone.