The Freespire team has released the first release candidate of Freespire 1.0. More information is available in the release notes. Get this release from the Freespire download page. Linux.com offers a few first looks.
The Freespire team has released the first release candidate of Freespire 1.0. More information is available in the release notes. Get this release from the Freespire download page. Linux.com offers a few first looks.
I mean what the heck is this? http://wiki.freespire.org/images/c/cd/Desktop2.png
4 levels to get to OpenOffice? Even Debian’s own menu is better than this and for that matter most other distributions.
Please work on improving the usability from the vanilla version not making it worse!
I agree. Two levels would have been enough, instead of four.
Freespire will eventually replace Linspire I think. Paid Linux will disappear. Even Red Hat follows the pay-for-support model.
Actually you can not get Red Hat software though without paying upfront for the support. Which is no different then buying Linspire. Which is why free third party versions of Red Hats OS’s have gotten so popular like CentOS. Because without the paid subscription you can not download actual Red Hat products (Besides Fedora)
I think Linspire will stay around because Linspire is trying to user Freespie like Open Suse and Fedora. Have a community version, roll up the best changes and features to your stable product and then sell the stable product with long term support. Same model all the major companies are now using (Novell with open suse, Red Hat with Fedora, Ubuntu with their regular version and LTS versions.) Cause short term service and support comes with the default price of Linspire and then you pay for CNR gold and you get update and long term support and access to software in one place.
Your right about RedHat of course, but up until just a month or so ago you could sign up for a free 3 month trial and download any of the RHEL ISOs and get 3 moths of updates. Not sure what the reasoning was but I’m assuming that since there is CentOS, WhiteBox, StartCom, Tao, etc. it was no longer necessary.
My personal opinion of Lin/Freespire is that I like the model. i don’t mind paying for update services, however, some of their actions I find totally reprehensible, such as rebranding OSS software and not giving proper credit, as well as the “run as root” nonsense from their past versions.
Everyone on has done rebranding of some sort at some point. Like novell rebrands OpenOffice. The products that Linspire rebranded were products they ether added code to or made changes to for the Linspire OS. And that rebranding is allowed by the GPL. I had no problem with it as long as you could go into the credits area and see what it really was.
The whole root thing I think was blown way out of proportion. The only version of Linspire that was stuck with the whole root thing was 3. (Since they never actually came out with a version 1 or 2) Once 4 came out you always had an option to make more user at the first start up and when you first logged in for each user.
I think their big problem was that they started out as a for profit company with no open source roots (Even though Xandros did the same thing) and that lead to having a lack of open development and a lack of taking ideas from their community.
With Freespire all of this should change!
The one thing I give them respect for is the fact that they were the only company so far to make a real run at Apple and MS in the home market. No other Linux company has done that. Xandros and Ubuntu, Mandrake and Mepis etc all have “home” versions but none of them have made the home market their stated goal! Buy getting system builders etc on board and focusing on the home market.
Edited 2006-07-30 03:55
such as rebranding OSS software and not giving proper credit,
I don’t know about other products, but Linspire was *forced* to not use the name Firefox for its browser by the Mozilla org. The code changes Linspire does to Firefox were too great, and hence they are not allowed to use the Firefox name.
Same goes to Ubuntu. They are not allowed to use the firefox logo in Gnome (use a world logo instead), and they had to remove “Mozilla” from “Mozilla Firefox” everywhere in the browser because they did changes to Firefox’s source code.
I wasn’t actually referring to Firefox. Actually the reason for Firefox being rebranded has nothing to do with code changes. It’s licensing. If you compile Firefox yourself, rather than downloading from mozilla.org, the build system rebrands the end product all on it’s own. Debian’s firefox is rebranded as well and they make absolutely no code changes. It is possible to get a build officially “blessed” by Mozilla and keep the branding though. FreeBSD recently did this. The firefox built from ports used to get rebranded but after heavy inspection, Mozilla deemed it worthy of keeping the original Firefox logo.
What I was actually referring to were a load of other programs the Linspire rebranded and DID remove the original credits from. One example is Nvu. The first release of Nvu had almost no code changes. Linspire basically broke Mozilla Composer out of Mozilla Suite, slapped a purple logo on it and stripped out any mention of Mozilla or the developers that actually spent their time writing the software. This changed later after several embarrassing (for Linspire) articles that got posted around the net.
I don’t know about other products, but Linspire was *forced* to not use the name Firefox for its browser by the Mozilla org
Yep. Part of Mozilla’s trademark policy (http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html) requires that the software be distributed in unaltered form in order to be able to use the Mozilla Firefox branding and logo. For example, FreeBSD had to be approved to include the Mozilla name whenever the software is built from ports (http://people.freebsd.org/~ahze/firefox_thunderbird-approved.txt). Modifying the build, packaging the software with extensions, or even changing the default start page classifies the software as a “community edition,” and thus, the Mozilla name cannot be used.
4 levels to get to OpenOffice?
They are just cloning windows start menu.
It has nothing to do with usability.
They are the same product, one costs money and the other does not. They both have proprietary software, and both have CNR available.
I find it strange that the keyword they have been throwing around is ‘choice’ and yet they aren’t offering much of it.
I think they made a seperate project so they could change the way they do some things without admitting Linspire made some poor choices. They can now say “look we are doing it right with our new project” and they still keep the Linspire users and tell them how right Linspire still is about everything.
Sort of a chance to play both sides
Make a generic version and a ‘real’ version so they can collect CNR revenue from both, hopefully.
I can’t help it but this desktop is really, really ugly. Ok, I don’t particularly like KDE in general – but this desktop is even worse than standard KDE. Why the hell do I need Freespire for that???
I wouldn’t call this desktop “ugly”, but I agree that it’s not eye-candy at all. Colors weren’t chosen carefully I guess.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=709&slide=1…