One of the smaller features Windows users will appreciate is Linspire’s global spell checker. No matter what application you are using, you will find that suspected misspellings are underlined and suggested corrections are only a click away.
Linspire Puts a Friendly Face on Linux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Two minor gripes,
Comes with a launch button big enough for grandma to find it without her specs on..
Paying for Click and Run seems counter to the free software re-titled in the “warehouse”..
Upside is great MP3/media support and seems stable on my older p3 800 with 128 ram..
X
…let me remind you that a large portion of the profit Linspire makes goes to support Open Source projects like Nvu and ReiserFS. So they’re not as bad as many people make them look like.
For Winbloze users just fed up with M$, it’s a good distro to let them play with Linux. 🙂
Your’e paying for the access to the software, not for license fees.
I don’t think RMS knows how unfortunate the choice of words “Free Software” are. Makes it very easy to get the wrong idea.
Aside from that, I commend Linspire for trying to overcome their bad reputation with solid product and significant contributions to the community, even though Linspire is not my cup of tea.
And — at least until virus writers and hackers target Linux — it is a relatively safe operating system. When they do target it, however, Linux’s open-source nature may work against it.
I disagree. The open-source nature of Linux makes it more likely to be safe because insecure parts of the system will be obvious to everyone, which would lead to them being quickly patched or ripped out and replaced.
Outlook has been insecure for years. But because it is not open source no one can tell Microsoft to fix it or else deal with a secure fork of the project. What makes Outlook insecure is its integration with ActiveX and downloads enabled by default, some of them execute by default. Microsoft may have fixed some of these problems, but they would have been addressed much more quickly had Outlook been open source.
I don’t think RMS knows how unfortunate the choice of words “Free Software” are.
He probably thought the average person would be able to understand the difference between freedom and free stuff.
I guess it was obvious to all his coworkers and peer, so he never tried to explain it to the average person at the mall.
Boy was he surprised when they couldn’t even spell freedom, let alone read the GPL.
Outlook has been insecure for years. But because it is not open source no one can tell Microsoft to fix it or else deal with a secure fork of the project. What makes Outlook insecure is its integration with ActiveX and downloads enabled by default, some of them execute by default. Microsoft may have fixed some of these problems, but they would have been addressed much more quickly had Outlook been open source.
Microsoft fixed a lot of this a while back, the big problem is getting people to update. You’ll run into the same issue with Linux. Sure, it’s great that it’s open source and issues can be fixed fast, but when you have a user base like the current Windows users that don’t update their machines, you can fix the code all you want and it won’t help. I see machines all the time at friends houses with the Windows update icon in the task tray saying updates are available but they don’t update their machine. Wouldn’t be any different if they were running Fedora and the little Red Hat Network icon was blinking in the corner.
Plus, with Linux, since most of it is open source, all I gotta do is convince the user to download a piece of software from my repository, then I can simply inject whatever nastiness I want into an app since I have the source code. Screw trying to get trojans on machines with 3rd party apps, I’ll just compile it right into apps people are already using. Of course, there are md5sums and the like, but how the hell is Joe Sixpack going to know that?
Why is there all this griping about paying for CNR.
First off every APP in CNR is touched and checked to work with Linspire and most of them also are modified to keep the same look as the OS theme.
Paying covers the costs of all that work and also provides dedicated bandwidth. I consistently get 15Mbit on my fios when downloading patches and new software off their CNR repository. No free repository can claim that. All other repositories for Linux in many cases are best effort type deals. Look at Suse, for what you pay they cannot even provide you with dedicated servers.
Lastly CNR is proof positive that Linux users will pay for software. This (All software should be provided for free is a pile of crap) I believe in the Core Linux OS being free but would gladly have paid for Kde or Gnome window managers to run on top of Linux.
If Windows ran on top of Linux much like 3.11 ran on top of DOS I’d pay for it (Well maybe not with the security and lack of features which KDE and Gnome put Windows to shame.)
How many more shill pieces for Linspire are we going to have to filter through?
Hmm, global spell checker? Holy Macaroni, now where have I’ve apple’d that feature before.
This is a great idea. I had one similar last week about the concept of just selecting some text, lets say in this textbox on osnews, and select the spell check option from a popup menu and have correct your post right there. Or better yet have a translate option, just select and select the translation language from a popup menu and bam there’s a text window with the result. Keep up the inovation, keep up the competition, evolve!
Of course, there are md5sums and the like, but how the hell is Joe Sixpack going to know that?
It seems to me that Joe Sixpack would only download stuff from the official repository, since that’s the one that will have been setup for him during installation.
The other problem is that in order to catch people, you’ll have to have a semi-permanent web site for them to download for. All it would take would be for some cyber-investigator to pose as a Joe Sixpack, traceroute your server, identify you through your ISP and press criminal charges against you. E-mail viruses are so much easier…
But please don’t pass up on an opportunity to crap on Linux!
I’ll be sure to warn people off any business you start.
trade one master for another…. no thanks!
@corey – so EVERY app in CNR is tested and works perfectly huh? Strange i see a lot of posts in the linspire forums about broken proggys! So does CNR allow me to install programs for my old lindows4.0 version or must I pay yet again for my operating system?
and i love this line – “Lastly CNR is proof positive that Linux users will pay for software” – Now i though the big rant of CNR was that you ARENT paying for free software but for a service??? So which is it?
Oh, and the reason they are “paying” for software is because it is the only supportted way to install software on linspire so it isn’t quite that they are happily paying for software that can often be downloaded at another location for free but that they are paying again and again to use their OS.
Yeah, Linspire is definitely not my distribution of choice, but they play well with the community. Somehow a lot of anger is thrown at them, but the really bad guys are Xandros, who afaik don’t contribute back anything noteworthy and produce a a really sucky distribution (a C: and D: drive definitely doesn’t improve usability, on the contrary, there are many caveats in it).
IMO i dont feel that linspire contributes much of anything to the community… more harm than good i would say, with the pay pay pay and wait for the next release to solve all your problems ideaology
http://info.linspire.com/opensource/
>>with the pay pay pay and wait for the next release to solve all your problems ideaology
Bullshit. When you pay for Linspire once that’s the only time you’ll pay for the OS. As long as you’re a CNR member you’ll always be able to d/load freely the new version.
CNR subscription is even much cheaper than the other distro I like – Xandros which charges a hefty fee for every upgrade.
So if you’re going to make damning charges like that you’d better be fair by listing the others that do the same thing or worse.
If you want free as in beer then build Gentoo or LFS and compile all your apps.
If you don’t want to pay for CNR, use klik instead.
http://klik.atekon.de/
Is this spell checker a feature of Linspire only or is this the ordinary KDE one? In KDE nearly everything is spell checked for several releases.
How many Linspire articles do we need?
Article-1: Linspire review! Article-2: Linspire review! Article-3: Linspire review! Article-4: Linspire review! Article-5: Linspire has this feature! Article-6: Linspire has that feature! Article-7: Linspire has yet another feature!
At least as many as Ubuntu. That’s the standard set here, i guess.
Hating Linspire seems kind of trollish to me. Yes, you have to pay for the CNR repository. So what? You have to pay for Cooker or Legit Mandrake mirrors as well (at $130+ per year I might add-more expensive than XP if you as me), but noone bitches about that. Compared to that, Linspire is a positive bargain.
You don’t have to use it, any more than you have to use the proprietary repositories for any other debian based distro. You take your chances, of course, but the challenge is not insurmountable.
I did borrow a copy of Linspire, and it’s a nice all around desktop, very XP like, which is a compliment, I guess. All the hype about the installer, the look, the overall package selection is dead on.
Since lycoris seems to be down for the count, http://www.lycoris.com/
I’m wondering if instead of sniping at Linspire, we should be buying a copy to keep an easy-option available for grandma and the kids.
Oh okay so you only pay for CNR and you get the OS for free… until tommorrow when linspire decides otherwise. Still seems to me you pay and pay and pay. Heck, supposedly you can just skip buying the OS and pay for CNR and get the newest OS that way…. but once again it is only until the master decides otherwise!
I paid for 4.0 can I use it now? sure can, but if i want any apps then i have to subscribe to CNR and get the latest and pay pay pay…. no thanks! Or take a chance on installing thru apt or something but thanks to linspire tweaks it will surely break my OS! Sounds like i am locked in to a upgrade cycle to me where I pay over and over and never have a OS I can hang on to and use for a long time!
I bought mandrake 9.1 can I use it now, YES I CAN, and it doesnt require paying a single penny more, and i have all the disks of software and it is perfectly usable! Sweeeet! And that same thing can be said about practically all the other distros out there so I think it was fair and if it was damning then so be it
explain to grandma that she has to pay every year for CNR, explain to her that it isn’t like the mandrake 8.0 that she paid for ONCE years ago and is still usable today! explain to her that if linspire shuts down then she is left with nothing to CNR! grandma says “oh hogwash, what you youngins using this for then”
in the article it says
“Installation couldn’t be easier. The user is only required to respond to a couple of easy-to-understand prompts…”
Does the installer do partitioning now automagically?
The article left out some features like the constant nag-screen advertising and so forth…
Linux is all about choice and Linspire is too, just the only choice is seems to be what they give you… Why trade one master for another?
your post showed your complete ignorance of linux.
do you think the whole system is as insecure as windows…. and dont give your usual reply, that windows works fine for you as it is lock down etc etc…
you know that if malware gets onto a windows machine, then it is buggered, and so is every other windows machine that it links in with on the net
linux is not like this.. say you did manage to get something downloaded onto MY linux machine… and even manage to elevate it up to root user….. then what ?
sure you can screw up this machine.. but thats it… you cant even touch any other machine on this network, never mind get back out onto the net.
learn more about linux first before you try to crap on it
sure you can screw up this machine.. but thats it… you cant even touch any other machine on this network, never mind get back out onto the net.
Unless you’ve set things up to explicitly prevent it then ANY application launched by ANY user can open a port and act as server/client on the net. The OS has no way of knowing if you’re running a Quake server for a few friends or some malware is passing around data behind your back.
Moral of the story: Get your packages/source from trusted suppliers.
Why are you hating on Linspire? They do great work for the community, and give newbies a place to start in Linux. For $99 you can buy Suse 9.3 pro, and have to look for all the apps you want, download them all, and install them yourself, or you can pay 99 dollars(for the boxed version) or 89 dollars (for the dowload version)both of which includes CNR and have all the apps right there to download with one click, its simple economics. Plus almost if not all media formats are already installed when you get it booted (save for DVD playback). While I use Ubuntu and Mepis, yes I can see an advantage to having a Distro like this, very easy to set up and install, and you have almost all the apps yo will ever want. Who says you have to pay for CNR every year, why not just pay the fifty dollars for one year, download all your apps, and wait for the next version?